cold-dead-hands.thumbnail.JPGToday’s AP story about the NRA spy who infiltrated Ceasefire NJ, a major gun-control organization, was perfectly in line with classic right-wing gun-nut behavior.

One of the ways that the paranoid mindset endemic to the American right plays out is that they always wind up doing the very things they like to suspect the rest of us of — like playing dirty tricks and infiltrating them. It’s because they start out fearful, and then move on to imagining what those they fear might be doing to harm them, and those imaginings inevitably are built out of what they themselves might do in reversed positions … all of which becomes a self-fulfilling rationale for doing it entirely on their own.

This is especially true of the gun culture. I grew up in it. I know.

Their integrity and honor — you know, the kind of values they like proudly announce they’re all about — is showing, too, in the NRA’s tight-lipped refusal to comment on the story. A press release on the purity of the essence of our bodily fluids is forthcoming, no doubt.

I think the comment from one of the spy’s supposed friends said it all:

Bryan Miller, executive director of Ceasefire NJ, said he feels betrayed by McFate. Miller’s brother, an FBI agent, was shot to death in 1994.

"To have somebody that I consider a friend, have been with dozens of times, shared meals with, treated as a friend, to have her be an employee, a subcontracted spy for the NRA, is just mind-boggling. It’s so venal," Miller said. "In the battle of ideas with the gun lobby, we’re at a constant disadvantage because we’re honest."

Heaven help us if we become as paranoid as they are. And the funny thing is, they keep proving that we ought to be.