Saturday, September 5, 2009

2009: A Right-Wing Odyssey Of Spaced-Out Idiocy

By Manifesto Joe

The right wing seems to have gone completely into orbit this year, outdoing itself at every turn. The galaxy of Goonville stars is lit up with names old and new.

Pat Buchanan: This mainstay of the kook right is often good for laughs, albeit pretty dark-hued ones. I have to confess that in 1996, with Clinton up for re-election and nothing interesting going on in the Texas Democratic Party, I actually held my nose and cast a disingenuous protest vote for Patsy in hopes that a good showing from him would help shake things up in The Party of Satan. ("I'm going to vote NAZI this time!" I exclaimed gleefully to one of my very few Republican friends. That comment didn't make us any friendlier.)

I was doing the same thing, in reverse, that a lot of nasty little Republicans have been doing here in Texas for many decades. If there's no pressing reason for them to vote in their own primary, they cross over and pollute the waters in ours. The idea is to vote for the candidates you figure are the most likely losers in the pack, or who would cause the most organizational trouble.

By the way, I gave up on that kind of subversive cross-voting, in large part because of all the Republican junk mail I would get in the ensuing months. (You know, polls from the local Congressfool that feature questions like: "Do you think that baby-murdering Supreme Court justices should be impeached? Yes/No)

I had to hold my nose to vote for Patsy, but I admit that I was actually (and pleasantly) shocked when I read parts of his book The Great Betrayal. Although the motives behind his economic nationalism were suspect back then, I was astounded by the opening chapter. It read like it could have been written by Jesse Jackson.

Unfortunately, Patsy didn't really, truly change his stripes. He's still a 1940 edition America Firster. He's not a neocon, because he's not even that evolved. He's a neolith.

The newest hardback offering from Patsy is a Nazi apologist treatise that was explained in shorter form in a recent column. Here's an Air America review of all this. I always smelled 1930s anti-Semitism behind Patsy's "thinking," sort of like the notion that the problem with World War II was that "we fought the wrong people." I actually heard a ranking editor at a newspaper I once worked for say exactly that. He noticed that I was looking at him funny, and he explained that "Hitler was the more pressing problem, but" look at all the horrors and atrocities of Stalinist Russia and other communist regimes.

This is not to minimize the enormities committed by the likes of Stalin, Pol Pot, and from all evidence, Mao Tse-tung as well. But to slough off the clearly murderous and insane Adolf Hitler as merely "the more pressing problem" is itself insanity. And, tragically, there are millions of Americans who would agree with that assessment.

Michele Bachmann: It will be a curiosity for the ages as to how a person this imbecilic ever got elected to Congress, and especially in a state like Minnesota that has produced the likes of Hubert Humphrey, the Farmer-Labor Party, Paul Wellstone and Al Franken. One thing I have noticed about Minnesotans is that there aren't many moderates from there, at least none that I've met. I love and admire the progressives from there (even you, Jack Jodell!); but, in contrast, one of the most demented and intractable religious-right fanatics I've ever known was from the Minneapolis area. And this is a state that actually elected Jesse Ventura governor. It's a place given to some extremes.

Onward to Michelle: She has repeatedly argued that while diversity sounds like a good thing, not all cultures are created equal. Some are apparently anointed by God His Own Self, and others just aren't. Here's one of her statements. And then, here's a link to the World of Health Care According to Michele, again courtesy of Air America.

The odyssey continues. The idiocy, too. Stay tuned.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

6 comments:

Jack Jodell said...

Thanks for the nice mention, Manifesto Joe! I love progressive-minded Texans like you, too, brother! I, too, am amazed that Michele Bachmann ever got elected in Minnesota, too. Of course, it was GOP gerrymandering which made it all possible. Her district used to include two heavily Democratic northern Minneapolis suburbs, but that was all changed. The woman is clearly insane, myopic, and frozen-hearted nonetheless.

Glenn Beck (Fatty Arbuckle?) has also completely lost his mind, but now so too has CNN's Lou Dobbs. Sure, he SAYS he's a populist who cares about working people, but he slams every progressive or liberal idea or politician he can at every opportunity, and far stronger and more frequently than he does the far-right wackos. He's a birther, too, and just your average tight-fisted conservative Republican masquerading as a friend of the poor and working people. I guess that's why one of his favorite targets to slam is the Southern Poverty Law Center...

Anonymous said...

I always get a bit uneasy with the idea of calling Stalin an outright monster with no redeeming qualities. After all, there are still many people in Russia who admire Stalin, including a lot of older people who lived through his era. Are these people all wrong? Are they all deluded?

I've always believed that the real world is a series of grays, rather than black and white.

But if the world is indeed divided into starkly and clearly identifiable black and white, then how about the U.S. since World War II?

We Americans talk about Stalin's "murdering" of millions, but how many millions has the U.S. killed in the past 60 years, everywhere from Vietnam to Korea to Central America to Iraq? The total is millions of men, women and children.

And yet the vast majority of Americans would vehemently deny that we've "murdered" anybody. (These are the same people who then turn around and attack Stalin for "murdering" millions).

Bottom line: Stalin may well have been a murdering monster. But we Americans need to face up to our own crimes before we condemn other nations. Until we do this, we will continue to see horrors like Vietnam and Iraq.

A final point: I strongly support a worker's revolution---and I believe it will be coming one of these days, as late-period capitalism disintegrates.

And let's face it, a worker's revolution in America will by definition be a bloody affair. There are too many wealthy leeches in our society who will have everything to lose in a worker's revolution. These people will not go quietly into the night.

I hope that such a revolution can be carried out peacefully. But by God, if the ruling class gets violent, then I will fully prepared to fight fire with fire.

People like me, who've seen poverty first-hand and who know what hunger feels like, and have struggled most of our lives, really don't have anything to lose.

"You poor take courage. You rich take care. This earth was made a common treasury, for everyone to share"
----Billy Bragg, "The World Turned Upside Down."

Marc McDonald said...

By the way, the previous comment was by me. I somehow mistakenly posted it anonymously.

Manifesto Joe said...

You Bolshevik!

Jack Jodell said...

Right on, Marc! We are far from lily-white, and the time has definitely come for a workers' revolution! Any society that consistently places profit and greed before human needs, and who butchers and exploits other peoples of the world (and even its own) so that it can live well and secure is undeniably in need of a major shakeup.

Marc McDonald said...

re:
>>>You Bolshevik!

Not really.
All I want is for our government to stop stealing from the working class and the middle class and giving to the rich. As far as I can see, that's the ONLY real purpose of the U.S. government these days.
The U.S. government does things every single day that, in a place like France, would cause massive street protests by hundreds of thousands of people.