Ratcheting Up Teh Crazy

by Armadillo Joe

Following up on my last post "The Mighty Wurlitzer," I'd like to highlight something I read today from David Neiwert (who has made a career the last decade or more tracking right-wing militia insanity at Orcinus and other sites -- he also wrote a book titled 'The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right') over at C&L, a post entitled "As their power spirals downward, the Right's rhetoric gets nuttier and nastier":

[...]

Deja vu from 1994, when I was regularly attending militia meetings, all over again: The president-bashing. The gun fetishizing. The paranoia. The unstated old bigotry. And sometimes, all of them would come together at once.

[...]

This time, they're not just getting whipped into a paranoid frenzy by their fellow paranoids, which was generally the case in the 1990s, with a few exceptions -- namely Rush Limbaugh. In their latest immanation, the old Patriot movement is getting stoked by a whole slew of ostensibly mainstream conservatives broadcasting daily and constantly on mainstream news media.

He also quotes Eric Boehlert, as he dismantles the hapless but frighteningly popular Glenn Beck and other rabblerousers as they spew hatred and sow seeds of popular disorder on FOX News:

Beck's sure "[d]epression and revolution" are what await America under Obama, and fears moving "towards a totalitarian state." The country today sometimes reminds Beck of "the early days of Adolf Hitler." Beck thinks that Obama, who has "surrounded himself by Marxists his whole life," is now "addicting this country to heroin -- the heroin that is government slavery."

And it's not just Beck. Appearing on Fox News, Dick Morris recently made a wildly irresponsible comment that looks even worse in light of the Pittsburgh law-enforcement slayings: "Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the UN's going to take over' -- well, they're beginning to have a case."

And it's not just Fox News. Radio nut Michael Savage recently claimed that "we have a naked Marxist for president." And high-profile conservative blogger Erick Erickson contemplated the beating of politicians: "At what point do [people] get off the couch, march down to their state legislator's house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?"

Of course, the right-wingers at Free Republic are way ahead of Erickson as they fantasize about Obama's assassination: "And let's face it: all the speculation about Obama being the actual Antichrist will either be confirmed or denied if someone gets off a lucky shot at the SOB."

Again, all of this shit scares me mostly because these people have been steeped in violent eliminationist rhetoric for decades, they are armed and their ancestors are the original domestic terrorist group, the KKK, proving they have quite a record of doing as they say. Now that America is led by a black president with a mooz-luhm' sounding name, all their worst nightmares have come true and we not yet even begun to feel the Wrath of Teh Crazy.