One of the most hopeful things about the Obama administration is a renewed commitment to the arts, and particularly renewed support for the National Endowment for the Arts. It is all the more imperative, then, that the White House not take its personnel cues for the NEA from screaming right-wing cable TV idiots like Glenn Beck. Apparently Beck has brought about the demotion of NEA communications director Yosi Sergant — Darcy has the story.
Sergant tried to, you know, communicate about, and organize government support for, the arts. In other words, his job.
For Glenn Beck, this sort of thing is reminiscent of Nazi Germany. In fact, it seems that for Beck, government taking any kind of initiative on any public policy question is akin to totalitarianism.
Nazi totalitarianism, for anyone out there dimwitted enough to swallow Beck’s line, resulted in millions of Jews all across Europe being systematically hounded and stripped of their civil and political rights and property, herded into ghettos and then concentration camps to be worked and gassed to death.
To suggest that brainstorming about government arts initiatives via conference call is like Nazism — this is an appalling affront to the mass of humanity wiped out in the Holocaust and every person victimized in innumerable ways by Hitler’s regime.
That I even needed to write the above paragraph is a sad, scary commentary on the state of the “conservative” movement in this country, and the creeping mainstream influence of the lunatic fringe right.
A brief comment on yesterday’s presidential back-to-school speech, and yet another “controversy” ginned up by right-wing activists and eagerly blown out of proportion by the media. Yes, it was absurd for the wingnuts to oppose a speech about doing well in school, but I’d go most liberal commentators one better and say this: It is Obama’s prerogative to articulate his political vision to the nation’s students. Not impose it, but articulate it. His reference to fighting poverty and homelessness and discrimination was therefore superb and well within bounds. Liberal? Yes. The president is a liberal and has every right to address the nation as a liberal. Electoral landslide, remember? It’s called the marketplace of ideas, and may the best ideas win.
To the best of my knowledge, Dick Cheney has never personally interrogated a terror suspect. Nor have former California congressman Duncan Hunter or most other right-wing pro-torture pundits. But Ali Soufan has. He makes the case against torture based on direct experience that very few people will ever know.
Re the blizzard of torture-related documents in the news in the last few days, Andrew Sullivan offers the essential commentary (even while on leave):
Understanding the current right’s embrace of total state power against the individual takes time to absorb. But liberal democracy has no more dangerous enemies than these.
And I’d add that the same people ranting and raving lately about President Obama’s supposed Hitlerism — his unquenchable desire to oppress ordinary Americans with evil health care! — are the very ones who will defend to the nth degree our government’s right to torture at will and with impunity. The mind reels.
Which is to say, mainstream Republican politics. Let me explain.
About that now-famous Barney Frank clip, in which a maniac health-reform opponent accused the (Jewish) congressman of supporting “a Nazi policy” and was rebuked and humiliated by Frank in turn:
It turns out that this woman is a Lyndon LaRouche cultist. And so now, right-wing pundits like Michelle Malkin are feigning innocence and shifting blame by arguing that LaRouche is a man of the left. Nice try.
LaRouche abandoned Marxism decades ago and has long been known as an antisemitic agitator and far-right conspiracy theorist. Yes, he happens to oppose neoconservatism and globalization and war, but also environmentalism (he believes Al Gore is bent on population-control genocide). In other words, LaRouche’s views are a hodgepodge, nicely illustrating how the kookiest fringes of the left and right basically converge in the end. (In the ’90s, Alexander Cockburn, editor of the lunatic-left webzine Counterpunch, openly declared himself an ally of the far-right militia movement. Now these types, people with actual ties to the Viper Militia of Arizona, are out in force brandishing guns outside the health care town halls. Anyway…)
The point is this: Malkin can try to walk the GOP away from the LaRouchies, but the fact is that GOP rhetoric on health care is all but indistinguishable from that of the LaRouchies. The “death panels” lie was first propagated not by some fringe nobody, but by Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican candidate for vice president. RNC chairman Michael Steele, given the chance to disavow the “death panels” canard, has declined to do so. So this is mainstream Republican politics. It’s the equivalent of, say, Cynthia McKinney taking over the Democratic Party, rather than leaving it.
It’s also telling, as Keith Olbermann observed last night, that the reaction from Rush Limbaugh, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade to the Barney Frank incident was to bash Frank and express sympathy for the crackpot. That’s where their ideological gut led them, before they knew about her LaRouche ties.
A final note: Here on the Upper West Side, during the apex of the Bush-Cheney years, you’d see LaRouchies setting up information tables and handing out literature on Broadway all the time. Down with Bush, stop the war: that was an easy sell. Funny, you don’t see them around here now with their Obama=Hitler posters.
There’s nothing about the current healthcare reform “debate” I could say that hasn’t already been said, and said brilliantly, by Rachel Maddow and other liberal commentators. But I will say this about reform opponents showing up to Obama town halls with guns, including assault rifles, in recent days:
Right-wing ideologues, including members of Congress, can mouth all the platitudes they want about the Second Amendment. Before it is too late, we ought to call these armed displays exactly what they are: threats of violence against the President of the United States, and part of a long history of extremist agitation — much of it racially tinged — against progressive change.
A right-wing commenter objects to my remark (here) on Melanie Phillips’s piece describing President Obama as a “fifth columnist.” I’ll make this quick.
Gee, I thought dissent was patriotic? I guess that doesn’t extend to commentators you disagree with.
Melanie Phillips has an absolute and unlimited right to print whatever she wants in her columns. I and others have an equal right to deplore her comments.
I remember when the Democrat governor of Kentucky Steve Beshear and the Democrat State Comptroller of New York joked about literally killing Pres. Bush. I trust your outrage was even greater in those instances, right?
I have always staunchly opposed the shrill Bush=Hitler wing of the left; this is well-known. (I also support “Democrat” politicians who insist that Bush was an inept president who authorized war crimes.)
Frankly, this post scares me. It seems to be a deliberate attempt to demonize those you who do not share your political views.
Phillips demonizes Obama and yet I’m supposedly the one engaging in demonization.
What Phillips did was to suggest Obama harbors actual ill will toward the United States and actual sympathy for Islamist extremists. If she means it, let her stand by it. But it’s not only an appalling insult and affront to the patriotism of hundreds of millions of Obama supporters; it is also red meat for wackos and would-be assassins, the reason Obama is driven around in a street-tank.
And yet it’s my post that scares this commenter.
More:
It also suggests Ms. Phillips is largely accurate in her analysis, since decline [sic] to engage with the substance of her arguments.
No, it is my respondent who declines to engage with the substance of Phillips’s arguments. Phillips holds that Obama is a fifth columnist for Islamism. So the question is whether the commenter believes this is “largely accurate.” If so, there’s nothing further to discuss and there’s certainly no substance to be engaged.
I would argue that this, aside from being pure drivel from beginning to end, comes close to advocating violence against the President of the United States.
