Wednesday, March 08, 2006

More Happy Talk from David Neiwert

From this column. Oh, he also calls Bushites deranged cultists, a meme that I look upon with favour.

The money quote:

Conservatives, in order to maintain the bubble, have even begun constructing an agenda predicated on the mythology that there is no legitimacy to liberal or centrist criticism of Bush because it is constituted solely of "unhinged" Bush hatred -- even if the actual evidence for this charge is scant. So, of course, they drum up outlier incidents like the Colorado high-school teacher who ranted a lot of anti-Bush nonsense before his classroom, as though it represented the mainstream of opposition to the Bush agenda.

Perhaps even more ominously, the "Bush hater" dismissals are coming with a lot of expressions of elimination talk, suggesting that the people who are now being blamed for the dismal failure in Iraq need to "dealt with." This isn't relegated just to the fringes and radio ranters, but is even coming from leading elected Republicans.

Consider, for instance, what Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham recently told Attorney General Alberto Gonzales during the latter's Senate testimony regarding the NSA surveillance program:
During the time of war, the administration has the inherent power, in my opinion, to surveil the enemy and to map the battlefield electronically - not just physical, but to electronically map what the enemy is up to by seizing information and putting that puzzle together. And the administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue fifth column movements. And let me tell folks who are watching what a fifth column movement is. It is a movement known to every war where American citizens will sympathize with the enemy and collaborate with the enemy. And it's happened in every war.
It would not be much of a step, judging from what we are now reading from the Bush defenders, to conclude that Bush's left-wing critics comprise just such a "Fifth Column." After all, the underlying logic of the meme is that criticism of Bush has been motivated purely by a desire to harm Bush which ignores the consequent harm to the nation. If they're harming us, well, what's the harm of a little surveillance? Or, for that matter, a few mass roundups?

Yeah. Good times. And people called me paranoid when I started talking fascism, and wandered off confused when my response was, "God, I hope so."

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