What does conservative mean in the context of these radical right wingers? Are they just drawing out the latent anti-democratic logic of such elitists as William F. Buckley and other ‘conservative’ founders? Are they counting on a violent overthrow of the duly elected government? Do they want a Latin American style coup and consequent dictatorship? I don’t see any other point to what they are doing all the time, every day… As Friedman wrote, they are trying to delegitimize a president who won by a wide margin, so that the wealthy elites can continue to rule and enjoy at the expense of the people.

I just have this to ask, if Obama is Hitler, why did he select Rahm Emmanuel as his COS?

(Sounds like a line from a SNL skit)

The word ‘conservative’ is these days mostly meaningless beyond “partisan Republican.” It stands for nothing for the GOP base. According to Erick Erickson, Ron Paul — who’s a tax hawk, deficit hawk, pro-life, pro-limited government, isn’t “conservative.” I assume the reason is he’s opposed to interventionist wars, which used to be favored by the left.

But there are a few principled conservatives, Paul included, who really are “conservative” in the true sense of the word.

You are so right. The word ‘conservative’ means nothing any more. The loonies have taken over and it will be the end of the Repubs. They could have been opposed to everything we stand for and still been logical and reasonable. Instead they went nuts and will be reaping the results.

Not to worry about Mr. Moran. Now that he’s passed through the membrane and into the reality-based community, he will quickly join Little Green Footballs on the list of Wingnut Excommunicatees.

We can welcome him, compliment him on coming to his senses, and buy him a bag of popcorn.

You mean Uberman?

Like the answer to the question of “What would have happened if Kal-el had landed in Germany instead of Kansas?“

I’m old enough to remember having watched that sketch the first time.

This seems as much a slight against progressives as anything else said about “similar extremists” on the right.

George H.W.Bush, in 1992:

…when George [H.W.] Bush was asked publicly, this is in the June 1992 issue of Sarah McClendon’s newsletter The McClendon Report — old Sarah, and of course she stayed on George consistently about Iran-Contra stuff in every presidential news conference; she’d press him about it. You know, they just used to answer her, or say something just out of courtesy because Sarah has been there for a hundred years. But Sarah says to George, “What is this New World Order, people want to know. Everyone seems to have a different interpretation of it.”

And George said publicly, which she printed, that, very simply, the New World Order was “the continuous consolidation of money and power into higher, tighter, and ‘righter’ hands.” And that is a great synopsis of what it means: world order. And George went on to say about Iran-Contra, he said, “You know, Sarah,” and this is a direct quote from her newsletter, “if the American people ever knew what we have done to them, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched.” But he knew he was safe in saying that because he knew that quote would never make it beyond the thirty thousand subscribers of The McClendon newsletter.

It was conventional wisdom that to use Hitler or the Nazis in making a political comparison and/or analogy was absolute poison. That their inclusion, because of the extreme evil they represented, would overwhelm the comparison and/or analogy and destroy whatever political point you were trying to make.

So far, this conventional wisdom is not holding when it comes to Obama. I hope it kicks in soon!

This almost makes me want to stop spelling moron, moran. Almost.

Almost but not quite.

Indeed.

o/t

fellow firedog Tom Wells has made it to the top of the Rec List at Big Orange – just in case you want to go over and show him some firelove :D

The problem with the left being marginalized in the Democratic party is that anyone demanding health care as a right has to watch as the people who already have health care as a right deny it to the rest of us; we have to be satisfied with a black man as president who is just as much of a war criminal as his predecessor but, hey, he’s black so he MUST have good intentions; we sit here making phone calls, going down to the UN to protest the Iranian president’s presence all the while knowing that this president is trying to gin up a reason to attack another sovereign nation with little or no proof; and finally we are still left in the dark about the extent of the crimes of the Bush administration aside from knowing that torture and human experimentation took place in our name. We had our very own Unit 731, and we still have our own gulags strewn throughout the world.

Obama has not nullified Bush’s executive orders, at least not the ones that give the executive sweeping powers which can be implemented at the drop of a hat (or the precipitous drop of a market index perhaps?). There is still a movement within the government to stoke the fears of people concerning a mutant zoonosis so as to let pharma produce huge amounts of vaccine for which the manufacturers will not have the slightest liability, basically establishing de facto human trials WITHOUT informed consent in violation of Nuremberg Principles but what the hell, after our illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq Nuremberg is just a quaint town in Germany just like Geneva is a nice little town overlooking a beautiful lake in Switzerland.

And the wimpy weak-ass Democrats are going to entertain a GOP motion to censure a Democratic congressman for telling the truth? Geez, I didn’t notice any motions to censure whoever it was who decided to use a room in our capitol building for the coronation of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, or a move to censure James Sensenbrenner when he unplugged the mikes when Democrats were in the middle of talking, or the GOP chairperson who forced Democratic members of congress to hold meetings in broom closets when the Rethugs were in the majority.

Keep rolling over, Dems. You’ll be forgotten like the Whigs.

Oh scribe, thankfully someone understood me!

That’s fascinating, I hadn’t heard that before.

That conventional isn’t going to ever kick in for these folks.

Think of it this way. Remember when some left “kooks” for years tried to claim Bush was behind 9/11?? It didn’t take those on the right to shout it down, it was shouted down repeatedly and loudly by none other than the last D President himself, Clinton. He used to forcefully address these people when he saw them and called them basically nuts.

They were “marginalized” and the conventional wisdom worked because they were marginalized, thus their shouts of true evil did them more harm then it did Bush.

Not so here. Their kooks aren’t marginilized, they’re embraced by the powers that be. Embraced and encouraged, like when that Republican Congressman responded to the guy in his town hall meeting to the quote “I’m a proud right wing terrorist.” Did that Congressman scold him for such language? Nope. Called him a “great American hero.”

What do you think the reaction would’ve been had someone stood up in 2007 at a Howard Dean rally and proclaimed “I’m a proud left wing terrorist”?

I’m telling you the difference would’ve been night and day.

These folks (the right wing and their politicians) don’t have to play by any rules because their supporters don’t hold them to any rules. Joe Wilson breaks hundreds of years of tradition on the House floor by shouting at the President of the United States and it just rallies his supporters. They can do and say ANYTHING. Therefore they will. And are.

Wow.

Excellent post man.

The wingnuts do whatever they want to right now but the one thing they cannot do is stop time. Whether they like it or not we move forward and the young of today are not going to put up with this drivel. We see how the young have entirely different ideas about race, sexual orientation, etc. We are moving into a very different era and the loonies are doomed. We are going to take many hits before we get to our goal but we will get there. That is, America will get there. It may be after we are all gone.

I don’t know much about this Moran guy, but on this issue he is displaying one of the 1st tenets of true patriotism: the capacity to criticize your OWN side when you believe it is representing a danger to the country.

Moran finally got a brain!

-G

It already has.

That’s whistling past the graveyard. This crazy shit is a permanent feature of the political landscape. I’ve had several face to face encounters with these people and each time my dread has increased with the understanding that all the power and money is on their side.

Well said, man, well said.

My point was, it’s destroyed the GOP.

I gave Mr. Moran props and wished him well – the whole article is excellent. Hope the RW-o-verse doesn’t roast him over an open flame. But they probably will. They NEVEr like anyone to critize their crazy – it’s homegrown and therefore good.

Now if we could just get the jobbies on the teevee machine to Tone It Down….

I wholly concur … all the crazies are doing is making the ‘10 an even bigger rout for the Dems. Now, if only the Dems can stop pissing off their base and implement a robust PO, we could get a huge majority and ram some truly progressive ideas through Congress.

Wow! Thanks for that citation, of which I was unaware. But I still don’t understand the ‘vision thing’ involved in this hyperconsolidation of wealth. It’s a pure fantasy, in the long run, of having it all at the expense of others, a very egocentric notion, to say the least. But what kind of a ‘world’ is left under such an order?

I recall being a teenage girl visiting Spain under Franco just after Kennedy was assassinated. I was so completely shocked by the horrendous disparity in wealth that even as a naive youth I could see that this was a terrible route for any society, let alone the ‘world’ to take. For what? To ’save’ those little gods who walk the earth with Coe Christianity’s Jesus? [I believe Bush the First was affiliated with ‘the Family’].

So what we’ve got as an economic order today is what these weirdos planned all along?

As a “leftie” kook myself, I resent being tossed in and discarded along with those rightie whackos who support Palin and Bachmann politics. I may be strong in my feelings and actions, but I’m not nuts. I didn’t walk around a political gathering with a loaded assault weapon. I haven’t shot a doctor in church or anywhere else. I didn’t strangle a census worker.

When the right gets caught with its pants down and we can all see that the base is comprised of nuts bordering on being criminals, they expect to excuse themselves by appealing to our sense of fairness. “Well, we both have kooky fringes!”

Well, I say, “If them dogs are sleeping on your porch, they are YOUR dogs! They are your problem.”

My dogs are house broken, thank you.

As a “leftie” kook myself, I resent being tossed in and discarded along with those rightie whackos who support Palin and Bachmann politics.

Who has done that, and where?

“Bingo. And that’s the big difference between the right and left today. Both side have their kooks, but the kooks on the right are embraced by the party establishment.”

And, I hear it too often from GOP friends excusing the crazies…TOO OFTEN!

Yes, there are leftist kooks. Not sure why this is a controversial point.

You used the phrase, “Both side have their kooks.” I often object to people saying this because it implies that “our kooks” balance “their kooks.”

When I ask who the Right folks are talking about, who fits into the “my kooks” side of things, it’s Michael Moore, Gov. John Dean, Rev Wright, to name a few. None of these people called out, “You lie!” to the president. None shot a doctor. None carried a gun to a political rally. None called the president a racist. None said in public that the president’s bill proposes death panels. None strangled a census worker. None called for nullification and succession.

I don’t think our “kooks” measure up to the heinous actions of the right and THEREFORE I object to the “gimmee,” “throw away,” “even things up” phrase, “Both side have their kooks.”

To be fair to Rick Moran, he has been pretty vocal against the whack-a-doodles for a few years now. And yes . . . the whack-a-doodles go ballistic every time he does it. But he’ll post a “Liberals are teh moar stoopid” post in a few days, and the nutters will love him again.

@32

Gov. John Dean??

Help me out with my memory, because the only John Dean I’m recalling was a Republican in the Nixon administration. (or at least I think there was John Dean mixed up in that mess known as Watergate, although that was a long time ago and I might be misremembering that too).

Anyways, help me out. Who is Gov. John Dean?

You used the phrase, “Both side have their kooks.” I often object to people saying this because it implies that “our kooks” balance “their kooks.”

Uh, I don’t know what “balance” means, but there are certainly nutty, violent leftists who do really stupid shit. Acknowledging the existence of those extremists is not making a statement about their relative strength or numbers.

The key point I made, however, is that the right’s kooks are embraced, not shunned, by the establishment, giving them a great deal more power on their side of the fence.

Excuse me. I meant HOWARD Dean, the former chair of the DEm Party and former Gov of VT. That Dean.

I acknowledge both your points.

Ahh, Howard Dean. Ok, thanks, gotcha.

Wow, he’s considered a kook????

Because of the “scream”???

Jesus, no wonder the right can’t be taken seriously. If they want to equate Howard Dean with Michele Batshitcrazy Bachman (or whatever the hell that woman’s name from Minnesota is) then they have no sense of proportion at all.

Need to mobilize Dems in Republican-represented districts to call their Congressperson and ask them to denounce the craziness! Tweet it, use all of the social networks and membership lists to get the word out. Flood their phone systems, e-mail servers and mail rooms!