Over the years, we've written a lot at this site about Lee Atwater, the erstwhile godfather of Republican dog-whistle attack politics -- Amato in particular has often discussed Atwater's central role in transforming the GOP into the Party of the Old South it has become today.

In our book Over the Cliff,, we cited an infamous interview with Atwater in which he explained how the Southern Strategy worked:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

However, a number of conservatives have over the years disputed the veracity of that interview and that quote, or have claimed it wasn't really Atwater. You know, the denial thing.

Now James Carter IV -- the same researcher who dug up Mitt Romney's "47 percent" remarks on video has unearthed the entire 42-minute interview. Rick Perlstein has the entire thing over at The Nation:

In the lead-up to the infamous remarks, it is fascinating to witness the confidence with which Atwater believes himself to be establishing the racial innocence of latter-day Republican campaigning: “My generation,” he insists, “will be the first generation of Southerners that won’t be prejudiced.” He proceeds to develop the argument that by dropping talk about civil rights gains like the Voting Rights Act and sticking to the now-mainstream tropes of fiscal conservatism and national defense, consultants like him were proving “people in the South are just like any people in the history of the world.”

It is only upon Professor Lamis’s gently Socratic follow-ups, and those of a co-interviewer named “Saul” (Carter hasn't been able to confirm his identity, but suspects it was the late White House correspondent Saul Friedman), that Atwater begins to loosen up—prefacing his reflections, with a plainly guilty conscience, “Now, y’all aren't quoting me on this?” (Apparently , this is the reason why Atwater’s name wasn’t published in 1984 but was in 1999, after his death).

He then utters his infamous words. The interlocutors go on to kibitz about Huey Long and barbecue. Then Atwater, apparently satisfied that he'd absolved the Southern Republican Party of racism once and for all, follows up with a prediction based on a study he claims demonstrates that Strom Thurmond won 38 percent of South Carolina’s middle-class black vote in his 1978 Senate campaign (run by Atwater).

“That voter, in my judgment,” he claims, “will be more likely to vote his economic interests than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think through a fairly slow but very steady process, will go Republican.” Because race no longer matters: “In my judgment Karl Marx [is right]... the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues.” He continues, in words that uncannily echo the “47 percent tape” (nothing new under the wingnut sun), that “statistically, as the number of non-producers in the system moves toward fifty percent,” the conservative coalition cannot but expand. Voila: a new Republican majority. Racism won't have anything to do with it.

So they claim, to this very day.

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You can always count on Tom Tancredo to say all kinds of insane things, but sometimes it's hard to tell if he just says them to get attention, which he obviously craves, or if he really believes the things he says.

Well, the other day at a campaign event for his pal, Republican Senate candidate and renowned Tea Partier Ken Buck (a favorite of Erick Erickson, too), Tancredo seemed quite aware of this confusion, and did his best to clear it up for us all:

Tancredo: What could be more important for you to do, really, if you think about this? Everything is at stake here. Everything.

I firmly believe with all my heart, you guys, although we have had many threats to our nation -- and we have gone through a whole lot of things, and survived many things. We -- I always say, you know, we survived the Civil War, we survived the Depression, we went through all -- we survived Bill Clinton, for heaven's sake!

But nothing -- I do not believe -- not the Soviet Union, when we were in, you know, that thirty-five year period leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union, thanks to Ronald Reagan, God bless him. [Applause]

...

But we had that threat, we survived it. Later, we found out we had another threat to our way of life, and that was Al Qaeda, and we found that out on 9/11.

But I firmly believe this -- it's not just, you know, some dramatic statement a person would make to get press or something or ink. I believe this with all my heart -- that the greatest threat to the United States today, the greatest threat to our liberty, the greatest threat to the Constitution of the United States, the greatest threat to our way of life, everything we believe in, the greatest threat to the country that was put together by the Founding Fathers, is the guy that is in the White House today.

It's actually a bit scarier to realize that people like Tancredo (and Beck, and Limbaugh, and Weiner Savage, and Palin, et al et al) really believe the things that come out of their mouths.

And you'll notice that everyone applauded.

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Glenn Beck had another one of those moments yesterday on his Fox News show, talking about the G20 Summit in Toronto:

BECK: Anyway, President Obama was there, and, um, he said something that kind of tripped my Marxism alarms. Here he is.

Mind you, Beck's "Marxism alarm" goes off all the time, with increasing shrillness and volume. It's kind of like the guy who sets his car alarm to such a sensitivity that it shrieks and squonks if you so much as walk within twenty feet of it.

Especially when you see what set it off this time:

Obama: A strong and durable recovery also requires countries not having an undue advantage. I think we all have the same interest -- and that is, the United States can compete with anybody -- as long as we've got an even playing field.

Somehow, to Beck, this sounded vaguely Marxist. But in fact, what Obama was saying was classic American capitalism. Because he was talking about the disadvantage at which currency restrictions force us to play:

"A strong and durable recovery also requires countries not having an undue advantage. So we also discussed the need for currencies that are market-driven," Obama said. "As I told President Hu yesterday, the United States welcomes China's decision to allow its currency to appreciate in response to market forces."

In fact, American presidents have advocated a "level playing field" within the world's markets for decades. Bush pushed it. So did Ronald Reagan.

What, does Beck think the USA should compete at a disadvantage? Or does this mean he thinks that free-market capitalism operates on an uneven playing field, and that capitalism and fair competition cannot coexist?

Because that, you know, is actually a classic Marxist position.

John's already pointed out the recent inclusion of our book, Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane in a summer roundup of political books titled "Flame-throwing political books from the right and the left".

Naturally, we're grateful for the attention from the post. Books editor Stephen Levingston, who wrote the piece, was also kind enough to invite us to contribute an op-ed in support of the book, "10 fictitious Tea Party beliefs", a little while back. (Notably, Levingston also contributed one of the more notable nuggets of information we included in the book last year when examining the correlation of racist attitudes to anti-health-care activism.)

But I was frankly taken aback by the way it was all framed, notably this:

Yes, it could be a long, hot summer. But when does a swat from the left cancel out a snipe from the right? When do we reach a state of political imbecility where only the noise exists -- and all thought and reason have drained away? You judge. Here are the titles.

We're grateful that ours was the first title that followed. And the list included some other interesting contributions to the debate, including Markos Moulitsas' forthcoming American Taliban. But I was even more struck by the right-wing titles to which, apparently, we were being held up as the right-wing equivalent of the "flame-throwing" season:

THE BLUEPRINT: Obama's Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency

THE NEXT AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite

THE POST-AMERICAN PRESIDENCY: The Obama Administration's War on America

TO SAVE AMERICA: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine

THE MANCHURIAN PRESIDENT: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists

Excuse me, am I imagining things, or is the serious, factual, fully documented and completely transparent effort that we put into this book being equated, journalistically speaking, with a pile of conspiracist lunacy?

Maybe it's just me, but the entire right-wing list seems actually to prove the point of our title: these people are nuts, plain and simple.

They not only push beliefs that are provably untrue, they are clearly indulging in the kind of insurrectionist extremism that ultimately produces the kind of violent acts Over the Cliff details in abundance.

Instead of hand-wringing about whether both sides are just getting too extreme, it might be worth pointing out that it's actually only one side of the debate that's throwing flames and engaging in real extremism -- and the other side is being painted as extreme for simply pointing out that fact.

I don't know if this kind of false equivalency is actually Levingston's sentiments or just those of his editors, but it has become an all-too-common feature of the WaPo's approach to news: treat people who tell lies and people who tell the truth as merely opposing sides of an opinionated debate.

It's the fake culture of centrism that exists in newsrooms around the country. It's a product of a classic logical fallacy that is commonly adopted by journalists eager to escape accusations of "liberal media bias" -- namely, the argumentum ad temperantiam:

a logical fallacy which asserts that any given compromise between two positions must be correct.

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Are you ready for a flame-thrower? The Washington Post gives Over The Cliff a quick hit and review:

Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane

By John Amato and David Neiwert

PoliPoint. 284 pp. Paperback, $16.95

The gist: In November 2008, the right wing lost its mind and has yet to recover: Extremists prowl the land, fill the airwaves, preaching that America is doomed under Barack Obama.

In its own words: "The American Right's descent into madness, embodied in its takeover by right-wing populists, was more than a problem just for serious conservatives who understood that it would ultimately prove to be their destruction. The very nature of the insanity that was being unleashed posed a larger problem for the nation at large -- namely, the implicit threat of violence and extremist unrest, represented most vividly by the revival of the militia movement.

After we wrote our book there were many other violent outbursts that we obviously didn't cover. You know, like a pesky Mosque bombing or the father and son act of Jerry and Joe Kane. There are many more issues we take up in the book, but at least he got some of it right.

We're selling this book mostly through the prism of our online brothers and sisters. So far it's going very well. David and I didn't write this book because we hoped to cash in on it. Seriously, that was the last thing we thought about and it won't happen; but we thought it was important to document what we have all just witnessed and have a public record all gathered in one place.

We were interviewed last week by Mike Panantonio of Ring Of Fire, and he marveled that when he read everything in the book -- some of which he knew, some of which he did not -- it brought a new appreciation to the severity of the problem and what has unfolded before our eyes and he thanked us.

Please support your liberal authors. You can grab a copy here.

You can find it in other formats and book stores here.