The Lyons roars

If I had my druthers, I'd probably link to Gene Lyons' column just about every week, but this week's offering is really exceptional:

Polls show anger about illegal aliens running strongest where Mexican Americans are fewest. Irrational factors are clearly at work. Basically, they’re the same parts of the South and Midwest where the 19 th century Know-Nothing movement and the Ku Klux Klan flourished. Then immigrant Catholics and Jews threatened national solidarity.

Some have even persuaded themselves that the so-called Reconquista movement poses a conspiratorial threat to recapture states “stolen” from Mexico. Frankly, I’d gladly say good riddance to Texas. In the meantime, maybe we should rename places like Las Vegas, San Francisco, Santa Fe and Colorado lest the Meskins get any ideas.

He points to Glenn Greenwald's piece discussing how the nativist right is using the immigration debate to elide a discussion of the way the administration has abused the power of the executive branch, and concludes:

Only last week, U. S. intelligence "czar" John Negroponte said the government was "absolutely not" monitoring domestic calls. Two days later, USA Today learned that NSA has secretly compiled databases of hundreds of millions of domestic phone calls and uses computer algorithms to scrutinize them for suspicious patterns. How do you know they're up to no good? Because when Qwest refused to hand over customer data without a FISA court ruling, the government dropped the effort. The administration wanted not only Americans to be kept in the dark, but the U. S. government's own secret courts. That's probably because a 1986 federal law made it illegal for communications companies to divulge "a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber or customer... to any government entity." (My emphasis ) ABC News has since confirmed that the FBI is scrutinizing its reporters' phone records as well as those of The New York Times and The Washington Post as part of a CIA "leaks" investigation. Leaks, that is, about torture, secret prisons and, yes, legally suspect domestic "intelligence" efforts—basically anything the government calls classified for reasons of political convenience. Possibly you recall the First Amendment, which reads in part, "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." But hey, look over there: Some stocky little brown guys are digging a ditch.

Man, I wish I'd said that.

Good reads

Reading through Kevin Phillips' analysis of the criticism directed his way from the Rubin wing of the Democratic Party, I happened to note his observations about Jacob Weisberg of Slate. Yeah, that Jacob Weisberg.

Best one-stop shopping for refuting your right-wing anti-immgrant friends' bullshit talking points? Try the ImmigrationProfs' blog.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has an excellent examination of Bush's border program that covers all the bases.

Still, for my money, Digby (who else?) has the most insightful take on the immigration debate, though he/she touches on a point (regarding white privilege) I'll be expanding on soon. Meanwhile, be sure to read Glenn Greenwald, who ties it all in with the surveillance scandals.

Meanwhile, Press the News has an excellent analysis of the Bush domestic-spying program.

Eric at Correspondent X has an excellent takedown of that Shelby Steele's recent book, with a follow-up post to boot. Be sure to check out his blog, which is excellent.

And following up on some other previous posts, Echidne chimes in on Ann Coulter.

And ThinkingMeat does the honors in dealing with Dan Paden. When guys like Paden come along, you think, "Gawd, where do I start?" But then you realize that life is too short. Anyway, thanks, meatguy.

Wanker

Once upon a time I admired Paul Watson, not least for his iconoclasm.

Then, when I got to watch him in person, I began to realize that he's kind of a dick.

Now I know he is.

'Invasion': Repeating history

It's fascinating how quickly right-wing talking points become incorporated in the mainstream. Maybe it's because they're in our system, imbued by our history.

The most recent entails calling the current wave of immigration from Mexico an "invasion." I hear it a lot, especially hanging out with the Minuteman crowd. I'm even getting comments from ostensible "longtime Democrats" calling it that.

This charge, of course, originates with the white-supremacist American Patrol, which has been making this charge for years. I think its crossover into the mainstream, however, occurred back in 2001, when Phyllis Schlafly asked:

The question we should ask our Mexican immigrant friends is, are you assimilating or invading?

The charge picked up more steam with Michelle Malkin's book on immigration titled Invasion, which was picked up and trumpeted by the folks at VDare -- another SPLC-designated hate group. In recent months, though, Malkin has taken up the claim full-time, calling it "Reconquista."

The past year or so, you've also been hearing it in mainstream media, especially on Fox News, such as David Asman's outburst in March:

"Well, if he's actually encouraging an invasion of our borders, I mean, that's grounds for warfare! Are you suggesting we actually go to war with Mexico?! We haven't done that in about a hundred and fifty years."

And of course, the wingnuts at places like NewsMax are now going full-bore with it:

The United States is being invaded by Mexico, and President Bush is allowing it to happen. Mexico will one day take over the United States, through voting, if nothing is done to stop the invasion by Mexican illegals.

Over at Townhall, someone named "Seaspook" explains:

We have no leverage with an aggressive, belligerent, emerging superpower and we are being occupied by Mexico. These 12 million Mexicans are not immigrants, they are aliens. Most have no intention of becoming Americans, owe no allegiance to the US, and some in fact believe parts of the US belong to Mexico. This is exactly how Mexico lost Texas.

The funny thing about all this is how closely it parallels the xenophobic hysteria that was raised almost exactly a century ago, during the initial wave of Japanese immigration. It was called the "Yellow Peril."

Prejudice against Asian immigrants had a long history, particularly against the Chinese. During the successful drive to exclude them -- culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 -- popular prejudices of the nativist variety came into full play, such as a labor organizer's screed warning of "China's Menace to the World":

MEN FROM CHINA come here to do LAUNDRY WORK. The Chinese Empire contains 600,000,000 (six hundred millions) inhabitants.

The supply of these men is inexhaustible.

Every one doing this work takes BREAD from the mouths of OUR WOMEN.

So many have come of late, that to keep at work, they are obliged to cut prices.

And now, we appeal to the public, asking them will they be partners to a deal which is only one of their many onward marches in CRUSHING OUT THE INDUSTRIES OF OUR COUNTRY from our people by grasping them themselves. Will you oblige the AMERICAN LAUNDRIES to CUT THE WAGES OF THEIR PEOPLE by giving your patronage to the CHINAMEN?

... This is the one unvarying story everywhere. Let white men, in competition with Chinese, mark down wages and profits as they may, extend the hours of labor or re duce the food standard as they may, the Chinese, without seeming effort or privation, can at once get below them and work them out.

It took on a special life, however, when Japanese began emigrating in the mid-1890s, and especially after Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, an event that shocked the reigning white-supremacist worldview. Suddenly Japanese immigration was not just racially distasteful, but a perceived threat.

An article at Densho explains it clearly:

In the West, Japan's victory over Russia sparked fears of Asian world domination. Shortly after the Russo-Japanese War, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst adopted "yellow peril" notions and widely disseminated them through his newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner. In 1907, a two-part Sunday supplement entitled "Japan May Seize the Pacific Coast" noted that, "the Yellow Peril is here." Notions of the "yellow peril," however, were not confined to the pages of newspapers. Popular literature, too, contained similar motifs. Homer Lea's Valor of Ignorance, for example, published in 1909, prophesied a great war between the United States and Japan. These themes continued to be explored throughout the entire period leading up to Pearl Harbor.

As I explain in Strawberry Days, the "Yellow Peril" was essentially

a conspiracy theory which posited that the Japanese emperor intended to invade the Pacific Coast, and that he was sending these immigrants to American shores as shock troops to prepare the way for just such a military action, and lay the groundwork for acts of sabotage and espionage when the signal was given. As ... James Phelan put it in 1907, the Japanese immigrants represented an "enemy within our gates."

Phelan -- who served a single term in the U.S. Senate and was the mayor of San Francisco -- was probably the single most prominent figure in California on the issue of Japanese immigration.

In 1906, Phelan said:

"They now occupy valleys in California by lease or purchase of land to the exclusion of not only whites but Chinese, and if this silent invasion is permitted by the federal government, they would at the rate at which they are coming, a thousand a month, soon convert the fairest state in the union into a Japanese colony. If they were naturalized they would outvote us.

"But California is white man's country, and the two races cannot live side by side in peace, and inasmuch as we discovered the country first and occupied it, we propose to hold it against either a peaceful or a warlike invasion."

Phelan was of course part of a much larger movement, embodied in such groups as the Asiatic Exclusion League, which in its May 1905 newsletter, pronounced the following:

"As long as California is white man's country, it will remain one of the grandest and best states in the union, but the moment the Golden State is subjected to an unlimited Asiatic coolie invasion there will be no more California."

This political agitation was further spurred by a Bay Area newspaper war between the Hearst-owned Examiner and the Chronicle, the latter of which began running headlines like the following:

THE YELLOW PERIL—HOW JAPANESE CROWD OUT THE WHITE RACE
JAPANESE A MENACE TO AMERICAN WOMEN
BROWN ARTISANS STEAL BRAINS OF WHITES

Eventually, this agitation led to the passage of Alien Land Laws forbidding "aliens ineligible for citizenship" (Asians were precluded from naturalization then) that outlawed ownership of land for Japanese farmers.

The same wave of immigrant-bashing reached high water in Washington in 1919-21, when the presence of Japanese farmers was blamed for the inability of returning veterans to obtain work. This was kicked off by a campaign by a fellow named Miller Freeman, president of the Anti-Japanese League of Washington and a wealthy publisher, who had been agitating about a possible Japanese invasion of the Pacific Coast since 1907. Freeman was chair of the state Veterans Commission in 1919.



As I describe in Strawberry Days:

Beneath the lead-in was a small portrait of Miller Freeman, with a caption: "Sees Menace in Japanese Here." The first paragraph laid out Freeman's case:

That by getting control of 47 per cent of Seattle’s hotels, and by leasing land when forbidden to own it, Japanese violate the spirit of the "gentleman's agreement" between the United States and Japan, was the charge made Friday by Miller Freeman, secretary of the veterans' welfare commission.

The story went on to detail how the Japanese "controlled" 218 of the hotels in Seattle (it would later turn out that "control" included mere managerial status, not necessarily ownership), and worse yet, were taking over all the state's prime farmland: "Practically all the best farming lands in the vicinity of Seattle are in the hands of the Japanese -- a condition true of nearly all of the farming land adjacent to all the cities of the Pacific Coast.

"The law forbade foreigners to own land, and the spirit of the law is to prevent them from realizing the profits of our agricultural acreage. Yet these Japanese come here, lease the land, cultivate it, and take the cream. And the spirit of the law and the 'gentleman's agreement' is violated."

As a result of this travesty, Freeman claimed, World War I veterans returning home from Europe were being shut out of the labor market: "By gaining control of business, the Japanese is crowding our returning veterans out of a chance to get a new start." And if the trend continued, he warned, the result would be inevitable: "In the face of the flow of Japanese to the Pacific Coast, white people are ceasing to move here from the East. Eventually the whites will be forced to go elsewhere to make a living. ... Thus, the Japanese will eventually hold the balance of power in politics on the Pacific Coast. They will vote solid, and will control political affairs. Japan retains control of her people everywhere, notwithstanding that they may be accepted as citizens by the countries of their adoption."

Of course, very little of Freeman's tirade was true, but that last assertion was flagrantly deceptive; thanks to the 1790 Immigration Act restricting citizenship to
"free white persons," naturalization was not an option available to the Japanese. The only means by which a person of Japanese ancestry could obtain citizenship was by being born on American soil; but then, as Freeman would make clear on numerous other occasions, even those American-born Japanese were not racial equals and could never mix with white society. They were Japanese through and through, and thus their citizenship was of dubious nature at best.

Despite his later contentions that he had no prejudice against the Japanese, this racial separatism was a cornerstone of Freeman’s argument as he presented it in the pages of the Star. He voiced it largely by sprinkling his writing and speeches (including his remarks to the Star) with popular aphorisms: "The Japanese cannot be assimilated. Once a Japanese, always a Japanese. Our mixed marriages—failures all—prove this. 'East is East, and West is West, and ne'er the twain shall meet.' Oil and water do not mix."

And his conclusion became a political benchmark: "It is my personal view, as a citizen, that the time has arrived for plain speech on this question. I am for a white man's Pacific coast. I am for the Japanese on their own side of the fence. I not only favor stopping all further immigration, but believe this government should approach Japan with the view to working out a gradual system of deportation of old Japanese now here."

... [T]he notion of a statewide prohibition [against Japanese land ownership] appealed immensely to Freeman, who founded the Anti-Japanese League of Washington in 1916 and began campaigning for an alien land law in the state. His early attempts at pushing the legislation met with little success, but in 1919, the plight of returning veterans gave him the opening he sought.

Freeman was appointed by Governor Louis F. Hart in early 1919 to the state’s Veteran Welfare Commission, which was charged with reemploying returning veterans of the Great War. Though some economists noted at the time that the problem was a complex (but probably short-lived) one caused by slow-acting market forces, for Freeman it became abundantly clear that there was a singular cause: the Japanese, once again.

His opening salvo was a July speech before a group of 170 grocery, laundry and retail store owners that he titled, "This is a White Man's Country." In it, Freeman decried the steady stream of picture brides into the region since 1907, declaring that Japanese mothers bore five times as many children as white women. If the trend were not forestalled, he warned, the entire Pacific Coast would soon be overrun completely with Japanese. And, he said, they now owned and controlled large amounts of property in the state.

Freeman had plenty of support, including the staffs of the local papers:



One editorial in the Star read:

Miller Freeman's proposal in The Star of Saturday to deport the Japanese from the Pacific Coast and to put up the bars against future immigration from Japan has aroused a storm and it has brought Seattle up-standing—face to face with a problem that cannot be settled secretly and cannot be put off much longer.

The Japs are here. They are rapidly gaining control of the best farming land near Seattle. They are in control of the Seattle markets.

... Multiplying five times as rapidly as the whites, the Japs must some day—unless the problem is met now—absolutely control this coast. Just as Hawaii and the Sacramento Valley have been Japanized, so will the state of Washington.

Another, headlined "Japanized!", described all the vast holdings in the Seattle area of the Japanese.

There were also national bestsellers that supported these sentiments, such as Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916:

We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America 'an asylum for the oppressed,' are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control, and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all 'distinctions of race, creed, or color,' the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo.

Or Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, which concluded:

"Finally perish!" That is the exact alternative which confronts the white race. For white civilization is to-day conterminous with the white race. The civilizations of the past were local. They were confined to a particular people or group of peoples. If they failed, there were always some unspoiled, well-endowed barbarians to step forward and "carry on." But today there are no more white barbarians. The earth has grown small, and men are everywhere in close touch. If white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption. What has taken place in Central Asia, once a white and now a brown or yellow land, will take place in Australasia, Europe, and America. Not to-day, nor yet to-morrow; perhaps not for generations; but surely in the end. If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. Unless we set our house in order, the doom will sooner or later overtake us all.

If it all sounds too familiar, it should. Just turn on your TV.

This may be why these memes are so successful: We're hard-wired for it by sheer virtue of our history.

A history, it seems, we're doomed to repeat, because we keep forgetting it, all too conveniently.

[For more on the Yellow Peril, see here.]

The 'Christianist' coinage

Andrew Sullivan is suggesting we try a new word:

So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist.

Perhaps we should point out that Tristero first coined the term three years ago:

In an analogy to Islamism, I would propose the term "Christianism" to describe a political ideology inspired by Christianity that advocates the replacement of a secular government with one that is profoundly informed by a self-styled "literal" interpretation of the Bible. By this definition, Rudolph is perhaps best described as a radical "Christianist," a man inspired by Christianity to effect social change through violence.

"Christianism" is without a doubt an ugly neologism. However, it is a mistake to describe as "Christian" people and groups like Robertson, Falwell, Christian Identity, and those who are even more radical in their mission to transform the US into an explicitly fundamentalist "christian" state. This confuses Christianity, a religious belief, with a purely secular agenda. Furtheremore, it is highly misleading to ignore the hijacking of Christianity and its symbols by the Rudolphs of the world simply by repressing any reference to their Christian inspirations and calling them "anti-abortion terrorists" or some similar name.

I'm not sure if I can claim co-coinage, but my recollection was that Tristero and I had discussed the terms we could use to describe the current political-religious phenomenon on the right, and this one seemed fairly obvious. I noted Tristero's post at the time as an important contribution to the discussion.

We also discussed it here a few months later, thanks to Kynn Bartlett's now-vanished post on "Christianism" that I discussed here:

Christianism is a theocratic form of Christianity which is anti-pluralistic, designed to impose conservative Christian beliefs on American society (and eventually the world) through the use of the political system (or sometimes outright force). Christianism is a domestic crusade designed to change the country from the inside into one in which (nominally) Christian beliefs are the guiding societal force.

This is the "culture wars" which we are engaged in. It is often presented as "secular vs. Christian," but that's patently false. The fundamentalists have managed to distort the public debate to the point that fundamentalist beliefs are identified in the media as "Christian" -- ignoring entirely the fact that there are large numbers of Christians who don't believe the same way as the conservatives.

I had some reservations about the term, particularly because it seemed ripe for mau-mauing from right-wing pundits -- say, Rush Limbaugh or Hugh Hewitt -- who would almost certainly twist it into an attack on "ordinary Christians." I didn't necessarily think it was an inaccurate coinage, but it was one that lent itself to misinterpretation in the wrong hands.

Tristero has continued to use it, as he did recently at Digby's place, and I think his analysis is largely correct. However, I think an anonymous commenter had it about right when he urged the use of "Dominionism" instead of "Theocracy" or "Christianism":

First of all Theocrat implies the rule by a leader who is also the head of the state religion. The Religious Right has learned that approach will not work after Pat Robertson's disastrous run for the GOP nomination in 1988. Besides the United State does not have a history of a state religion or a single dominate religious sect. A straight up Theocratic approach by the Religious Right would have hardline Catholics, Mormons, assorted Calvinists, Baptists, Pentecostalists..... all at each other's throats.

Second, I have met Fundamentalists who believe their bible is the word of God who none the less absolutely believe in the separation of church and state. They would not have it any other way less they might someday be the persecuted ones. They reject and abhor a Judge Ray Moore's idolatry and politicizing of the the Ten Commandments.

Last, a word like Christianist preferred by the likes of the insufferable, mercurial and self-styled "conservative" Andrew Sullivan is just too cute and potentially confusing. It does not differentiate somebody who might sincerely wish to use the moral philosophy of Jesus Christ as a basis for a political or legal philosophy from a true Dominionist. One may be from the old school where calling somebody a good Christian could have been done to describe Mahatma Gandhi's quest for Indian independence or Saladin's refusal to slaughter the Crusaders in reprisal for their atrocities against Muslims after recapturing Jerusalem. Both are examples of historical men of different religions who yet were influenced by their knowledge of the new testament gospels and the teachings of Jesus.

No, I think using the words Dominionist/Dominionism are very important because they precisely describe the heretical legal and political philosophy of those who wish surreptitiously to rewrite the history of our country and the founding of its constitution along the lines of their own strict fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. Dominionism is the very word it adherents use to describe their political goal to repudiate the the First Amendment's Establish Clause separating Church and State as a first step towards completely redefining 200 plus years of legal precedence in interpreting the US constitution. In that regard their goals are as Un-American as Communism, Nazism, Fascism.....

One last thing about the word Dominionist, besides its precision. While it has the problem of being a new word that the majority of the public is as yet unaware as to its meaning. I see that as an advantage because everytime somebody hears it they will ask what it means. And now it will be necessary to provide the public with its definition until it is commonplace in the political language. And guess what?? Everytime somebody outside of the koolaid drinking Dominionist orc army hears what it means they will react by saying, "But that is crazy, that is unconstitutional and Un-American". That being exactly the response we should be looking for.

Sure enough, like clockwork, Hugh Hewitt weighed in with a remarkably lightweight response to Sullivan:

Most pundits have rejected "Christianist" because it obviously tries to link Islamists and those evangelicals Mr. Sullivan loathes. He is attempting to dress up hate speech as simple precision, but given the vast spectrum of political opinions among believers on the center-right, "Christianist" is a howler.

Clearly, Hewitt is twisting the term, predictably, to include all evangelicals. At his blog, he expounded a bit further:

There are zero evangelical Christians with any public profile who practice or endorse violence. There are also no major figures within American evangelical circles who endorse any sort of theocracy. Sullivan objects to the political positions of many evangelicals, but given the widespread support for these positions -- opposition to the judicial imposition of same sex marriage for example -- Sullivan refuses to engage their positions on a case by case basis, and instead invents a new description in an attempt to deligitimize them.

Hewitt should probably avail himself of a copy of Michelle Goldberg's new book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, which thoroughly documents how widespread this kind of theocratic belief system is, how it's especially spreading at the grassroots level, and how it does indeed feature some prominent religious and political leaders.

Instead of Dominionism, Goldberg instead describes "Christian nationalism," but likewise distinguishes it from garden-variety fundamentalism, and often uses it interchangably with Dominionism. See this Salon excerpt, which points out, among other things, its genuinely eand disturbingly extremist aspects:

Still, it's worth noting that thousands of Americans nationwide have flocked to rallies at which military men don uniforms and pledge to seize the reins of power in America on behalf of Christianity. In many places, local religious leaders and politicians lend their support to AVIDD's cause. And at least some of the people at these rallies speak with seething resentment about the tyranny of Jews over America's Christian majority.

"People who call themselves Jews represent maybe 2 or 3 percent of our people," Cabaniss told me after a January 2005 rally in Austin. "Christians represent a huge percent, and we don't believe that a small percentage should destroy the values of the larger percentage."

I asked Cabaniss, a thin, white-haired man who wore a suit with a red, white, and blue tie and a U.S. Army baseball cap, whether he was saying that American Jews have too much power. "It appears that way," he replied. "They're a driving force behind trying to take everything to do with Christianity out of our system. That's the part that makes us very upset."

Most of the Dominionist groundswell isn't taking place in a national limelight. It's growing up like kudzu around our feet instead. A generation of homeschooled kids are gearing up to take over within the next generation, and they have a decidedly militant view of their faith.

But Hewitt's prevarications notwithstanding, it's also taking place at a high level. Among the prominent Dominionists is an author whose works are celebrated on the Christian right:

Tim LaHaye, who is most famous for putting a Tom Clancy gloss on premillennialist theology in the Left Behind thrillers that he co-writes with Jerry Jenkins, was heavily influenced by Schaeffer, to whom he dedicated his book "The Battle for the Mind." That book married Schaeffer's theories to a conspiratorial view of history and politics, arguing, "Most people today do not realize what humanism really is and how it is destroying our culture, families, country -- and, one day, the entire world. Most of the evils in the world today can be traced to humanism, which has taken over our government, the UN, education, TV, and most of the other influential things of life.

"We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders," LaHaye wrote.

LaHaye, of course, also founded Council for National Policy, a Dominionist "umbrella group" whose membership list reads like a Who's Who of the American Religious Right.

And, as Goldberg describes, there's a real continuum between this faction and a whole host of mainstream figures, including the just-departed House Majority Leader:

Those who don't have a year to spare can attend one of more than a dozen Worldview Weekend conferences held every year in churches nationwide. Popular speakers include the revisionist Christian nationalist historian David Barton, David Limbaugh (Rush's born-again brother), and evangelical former sitcom star Kirk Cameron. In 2003, Tom DeLay was a featured speaker at a Worldview Weekend at Rick Scarborough's former church in Pearland, Texas. He told the crowd, "Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation. Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world. Only Christianity."

Another name that pops up here is David Barton, in no small part because the Bush campaign hired him as a consultant in the 2004 election. This is the same fellow who, back in the early 1990s, was pitching his "myth of church-state separation" tale to all kinds of extremists, including the racist Christian Identity sect.

I think Goldberg explained the larger problem well recently at Talk2Action:

Christian nationalists believe in a revisionist history, which holds that the founders were devout Christians who never intended to create a secular republic; separation of church and state, according to this history, is a fraud perpetrated by God-hating subversives. One of the foremost Christian revisionist historians is David Barton, who , in addition to running an organization called Wallbuilders that disseminates Christian nationalist books, tracts and videos, is also the vice-chairman of the Texas Republican Party. The goal of Christian nationalist politics is the restoration of the imagined Christian nation. As George Grant, former executive director of D. James Kennedy's influential Coral Ridge Ministries, wrote in his book "The Changing of the Guard:"

"Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.

But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.

It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.

It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.

It is dominion we are after.

World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish.

... The iconography of Christian nationalism conflates the cross and the flag. As I write in "Kingdom Coming," it "claims supernatural sanction for its campaign of national renewal and speaks rapturously about vanquishing the millions of Americans who would stand in its way." At one rally at the statehouse in Austin, Texas, a banner pictured a fierce eagle perched upon a bloody cross. For a liberal, such imagery smacks of fascist agitprop. But plenty of deeply committed Christians also object to it as a form of blasphemy. It's important, I think, to separate their faith from the authoritarian impulses of the Christian nationalist movement. Christianity is a religion. Christian nationalism is a political program, and there is nothing sacred about it.

I'm not sure how important our terminology is, though thinking about it can be useful. What matters most is recognizing it exists and contemplating how to confront it. Mendacious denials notwithstanding.

Examining the Minutemen

A young reporter named Joe Killian has been writing about the Minutemen for the News-Record of Greensboro, North Carolina, in the wake of the group's recent aborted appearance there.

As Killian notes in his more detailed report at his blog, the important underlying debate raised by the Minutemen was obscured by the outrageous rhetoric and behavior that was being employed on both sides.

And unfortunately, that means the Minutemen win, because they prosper in an atmosphere of distrust and disinformation. That's probably why they use these tactics, knowing the other side will respond in kind.

Killian began digging well beneath the surface of the matter, though, and his subsequent report is well worth reading in its entirety.

Unsurprisingly, he finds that, despite their claims to the contrary, the Minutemen's ranks are indeed riddled with a broad range of garden-variety racists and extremists, including a Hammerskin admirer named Jenny:

But, strangely, Jenny's case isn't singular or even extraordinary. The corners of the net where white supremacists gather are crawling with photos of people who claim to be both Minutemen and members of organized white supremacist groups. And they’re not shy about it. They post pictures of themselves giving Nazii salutes at Minuteman rallies to their MySpace profiles. They blog about it. If you know where to look you can find literally dozens and dozens of examples of people who are clearly members of violent, organized racist groups who are are also acting as Minutemen. The examples I found are the tip of the iceberg.

When confronted about the evidence, Minutemen organizers hung up on him.

The upshot:

None of this is a blanket indictment of the Minuteman Project, its sister and splinter groups and all of those who support them as racists. My personal experience is that there are many among the group and its supporters whose motivations are not racial. But I think this little bit of actual reporting by an unbiased reporter in his off-hours does pretty clearly diffuse the argument that accusations of the group and its members being either racially motivated or very tolerant of radical, organized racists within the group are ridiculous, have no basis in fact, are exaggerated or may just be an attempt by the left to distract people from the Minutemen's real work.

Later, in his comments, someone defends the Minutemen by claiming, among other things, that the Minutemen "are the only ones we can see that are trying to keep murderers, rapists, and diseases out of our country."

Killian responds on point:

The stated goal of the Minutemen is not to keep rapists, criminals and diseased people out of a healthy country. Jim Gilchrist told me in the interview I had with him this isn't their goal. They want to prevent all people from any country from getting into the country illegally. Some of the Minutemen I interviewed who were clearly not racists mentioned specifically that they don't like it when people imply that all illegal aliens are diseased or criminals or both.

I think that sort of talk may lead people outside the organization to think that even those Minutemen and their supporters who are not organized racists have racist or xenophobic reasons for getting involved with the group.

There are all sorts of reasons why people get involved with this group. But I think those who have reasonable concerns about border security and illegal immigration that have nothing to do with race are a little tired of those who think brown people are going to poison our culture, hurt us, make us dirty and diseased.

Well said. And perhaps more to the point, the resurgence of this kind of bigotry strikes many of us as a much deeper problem than illegal immigration itself.

Shorter Joe Klein

Those festering black congressmen just pulse in their seats, emanating raw hatred.

That 'immigration emergency'

There were a lot of things wrong with tonight's TV address on immigration from President Bush, not the least of which is the lingering question:

Why, if post-9/11 border security is such a suddenly serious concern, aren't we sending the Guard to the Canadian border? -- It is, after all our longest and most porous border, and its many open spots do not entail dangerous and potentially lethal desert crossings. Perhaps more to the point, the one terrorist who did try to sneak into the USA with explosives as part of a plot to attack a major metropolitan area was caught on the Canadian border.

Ah well. We're not accustomed to logic from this president anyway, especially when it's a twofer: a good photo op and rescuing your poll standings with the base are all in the offing. Especially if you can do it with military troops in the picture. Too bad about those cuts in the Border Patrol staffing last year.

But the one really disconcerting note was kind of slipped into the address as an afterthought or footnote:

For many years, the government did not have enough space in our detention facilities to hold them while the legal process unfolded. So most were released back into our society and asked to return for a court date. When the date arrived, the vast majority did not show up. This practice, called "catch and release," is unacceptable -- and we will end it.

We are taking several important steps to meet this goal. We have expanded the number of beds in our detention facilities, and we will continue to add more."

It's more than likely that the Halliburton contract to build new detention facilities for a potential "immigration emergency" is going to come in terribly handy here.

Concern over these centers is no longer simply a matter of wearing the tinfoil hats.

Here are the kind of scenes America seems about to re-enact:





Sure puts Vox Day's eliminationist fantasy about ridding the nation of illegal immigrants -- by comparing their potential handling to Hitler's liquidation camps -- in perspective, doesn't it?

Not to mention Michelle Malkin's fraudulent but popular defense of internment camps. And all along we wondered if she had Muslims in mind. I guess we should have noticed that her previous book was about the Latino "invasion".

[Hat tip to teh l4m3.]

President Pants-On-Fire

Big Brother is watching -- but just you journalists:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

President Bush on Saturday:

"The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address. "The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval. We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."

No, just the personal lives of the people whose job it is to give the public oversight of your activities. The people you consider your political enemies.

Are we too late? Are we are now officially a Banana Republican state?

The McVeigh Finishing School

Everyone should go read the Hartford Courant series on how the Pentagon has been deploying mentally ill soldiers. Especially striking was this:

The Courant's investigation found that at least 11 service members who committed suicide in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite exhibiting signs of significant psychological distress. In at least seven of the cases, superiors were aware of the problems, military investigative records and interviews with families indicate.

Among the troops who plunged through the gaps in the mental health system was Army Spec. Jeffrey Henthorn, a young father and third-generation soldier, whose death last year is still being mourned by his native Choctaw, Okla.

What his hometown does not know is that Henthorn, 25, had been sent back to Iraq for a second tour, even though his superiors knew he was unstable and had threatened suicide at least twice, according to Army investigative reports and interviews. When he finally succeeded in killing himself on Feb. 8, 2005, at Camp Anaconda in Balad, Iraq, an Army report says, the work of the M-16 rifle was so thorough that fragments of his skull pierced the barracks ceiling.

One thing the story only briefly addresses is that veterans damaged psychologically like this also bring their scars home. And when the violence that results is not inwardly directed, it can also be directed outward.

Paul deArmond pointed this out three years ago, as we began this invasion:

Here's an unsettling thought. The last go-round in the Gulf produced at least three spectacular domestic terrorists: Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols (Oklahoma City) and John Mohammed (DC sniper killings). Both McVeigh and Mohammed were reported to be unbalanced by their experience during the Gulf War.

... The levels of stress on our troops is quite high and several sources report that the training and conditioning of troops for agressive behavior is more severe than in the past. Combine this with the continuing spread of anti-government ideologies through terrorism-related conspiracy theories and the encouraging (or at least failure to suppress) of activities like vigilante border partrols which combine racism with xenophobia.

Even if the war ends with Bush's tenure in 2008, I'm afraid we're going to have a real long-term mess on our hands. Messed-up soldiers cost us in so many ways -- in therapy, in the damage they inflict, but most of all in the theft of their promise.

Heroic foresight

Last night at Firedoglake, Pachacutec asked readers to name their heroes. I chimed in, noting that my great hero was my granddad, and that my writing heroes are Norman Maclean and Raymond Carver.


But my political hero was my home state's senior senator, Frank Church, whose final campaign I covered in 1980. I was raised a Republican and worked on Republican campaigns as a teenager, but always respected Church politically and even campaigned briefly for him in 1976, when he ran for the presidency. I first met him outside of campaign appearances in 1978, when we had gone fishing on Lake Pend Oreille with my then-boss, Pete Thompson. I was very young at the time -- all of 21 -- and Church was kind enough to give me considerable access and time, including personal interviews and the like, when I needed them.

I've written previously about the keenness of Church's insights, particularly what he saw coming down the road for America. I strongly believe that much of what he warned about back then is coming true today, and much of what he stood for then remains relevant today as well.

The Firedoglake discussion spurred some keen memories for me, especially his early and principled opposition to the Vietnam War. Church had served with honor in World War II, but his critics, like John Kerry's today, still impugned his patriotism and his service. Moreover, Church had voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, but had enough courage to reverse course within the year -- something today's Democrats could stand to learn from.

Church is best remembered for his investigations into the CIA. The resulting reforms brought the intelligence arm of the executive branch under public control for the first time -- reforms that are now being undone by the Bush administration.

It was in his role of chair of the intelligence committee that Church turned his sights on the NSA, and was appalled by what he found regarding its power of surveillance:

"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."

He added that if a dictator ever took over, the NSA "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."

His warning, I think, was a real clarion call for those of us now confronting the NSA's sweeping powers under the Bush administration:

"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge," Senator Church said. "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

I recall that, at the time, Church -- who was a thoughtful man -- was derided for engaging in hysterical hyperbole.

Now, as with so many other of his warnings, he looks to be a real prophet.

The question of character

Remember how, when George W. Bush was running against Al Gore back in 2000, we kept hearing about his superior "character" -- emphasized constantly by references to his supposed religiosity -- as such a refreshing contrast from the Bill Clinton years?

Well, now the worm has turned:

In a new poll comparing President Bush's job performance with that of his predecessor, a strong majority of respondents said President Clinton outperformed Bush on a host of issues.

... Respondents favored Clinton by greater than 2-to-1 margins when asked who did a better job at handling the economy (63 percent Clinton, 26 percent Bush) and solving the problems of ordinary Americans (62 percent Clinton, 25 percent Bush).

On foreign affairs, the margin was 56 percent to 32 percent in Clinton's favor; on taxes, it was 51 percent to 35 percent for Clinton; and on handling natural disasters, it was 51 percent to 30 percent, also favoring Clinton.

Moreover, 59 percent said Bush has done more to divide the country, while only 27 percent said Clinton had.

When asked which man was more honest as president, poll respondents were more evenly divided, with the numbers -- 46 percent Clinton to 41 percent Bush -- falling within the poll's margin of error.

It's too bad it's cost us the well-being of the nation and a growing mountain of bodies to discover that, perhaps, Bush's character wasn't all it was quacked up to be.

Especially since that was clear even before he was elected. And it has been manifest since the day he assumed office.

Back then, Gail Sheehy provided an insight that seems rather prophetic:

Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him. "If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15," says [Doug] Hannah, now a Dallas insurance executive. "If he wasn't winning, he would quit. He would just walk off.... It's what we called Bush Effort: If I don't like the game, I take my ball and go home. Very few people can get away with that."

The chief problem, as I observed at the time, is that no one in the press was willing to point out that the emperor had no character:

What has become painfully clear is that for no one in the Washington press corps do George W. Bush's absolute ruthlessness and his unwillingness to win or lose by the rules of the game raise a character question. Instead, they look at the guy, Al Gore, who has made abundantly clear his willingness to abide by the rules, to play fairly and squarely at every turn, and deride him for his wimpiness in comparison.

Then there was the "trifecta" joke, in which all of Bush's character flaws came rushing to the fore:

Most economists peg the source of these nagging deficits on Bush's tax-cut plan, the deepest portions of which loom ahead. The administration sternly denies this. Yet it's clear that while Sept. 11 may have deepened and broadened the budget-deficit problem, the administration was faced with chronic budget deficits no matter what.

And that gets to the heart of the "trifecta" joke, whose entire purpose clearly is to blame the deficit on Sept. 11 and its aftermath. Thus it lets Bush escape any serious questions about either his failure to balance the budget or, particularly, his campaign pledge to use the Social Security Trust Fund to pay down the national debt. The national tragedy gave him unparalleled political cover for his administration's failures -- and Bush, to no one's surprise, has displayed no hesitation whatsoever about using it. Indeed, it has become his favorite joke.

Never mind that it is perhaps the most tasteless and insensitive joke in the annals of the presidency, nor that it is ultimately a falsehood. What's really noteworthy about Tale of the Trifecta is that the in-your-face political opportunism it represents is not out of the ordinary for this administration.

Since Sept. 11, Bush and his Republican colleagues have at every turn used the threat of terrorist attacks as cover for the administration's difficulties:

-- Attorney General John Ashcroft attacked critics of his anti-terrorism measures in December by telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that opponents of the administration "only aid terrorists" and "give ammunition to America’s enemies."

-- When Democratic leaders in the Senate -- particularly Majority Leader Tom Daschle -- questioned Bush’s handling of the war on terrorism, they drew accusations of "aiding and abetting the enemy" and dark suggestions about the critics' patriotism.

-- When questions emerged in early May about what Bush and his advisers knew about terrorist threats before Sept. 11 and Democrats began pushing for an independent investigation, a series of warnings of yet more imminent terrorist attacks were issued from the administration. The criticism largely subsided.

-- Four days after proposing, amid skepticism, a Cabinet-level Homeland Security department, the administration announced the arrest of a man suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda agents to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb" in an American city. As it happens, the actual arrest had occurred a month before.

There have been other, less clear incidents suggesting a willingness to use Sept. 11 and its aftermath as not just a political shield, but a weapon. This probably should not be a surprise: after all, one need only recall Karl Rove’s instructions to the Republican National Committee last January to make the war on terrorism a political issue.

And, lest we forget, the question of Bush's character came clearly to the surface with his military-records questions, which raised red flags about his character both as a young man and as president:

[T]he gross character flaw that the AWOL matter reveals is also very much part of what we have gotten from this presidency. There is no sense of accountability to the public anywhere in this administration; if something goes wrong [Can you say, "Weapons of mass destruction?" I knew you could.] it places the blame elsewhere. It falsifies budget figures and misleads the public about the grotesque debt load its deficits are placing on future generations. And it distorts intelligence estimates so that it can convince the public to participate in a war it had planned even before winning election. It bullies its opponents, and traffics in the most transparent way in keeping the public in line by fanning its fears of terrorist attack.

This is a presidency sold to the public on the phony image of Bush as a man of superior character -- a straight shooter, a veteran, a man who understands and respects duty and honor. (This was meant to contrast with Bill Clinton and, by extension, Al Gore.) But as we have explored at length previously, Bush's family connections are not any source of superior character; and as the AWOL episode demonstrates rather starkly, his personal history gives no evidence of having developed it either.

This personal character of Bush's has been a cornerstone of his entire governing style. Should we go to war? Trust Bush -- he's a "good man." Economy's in the dumpster? "He's working hard to make things better." Wrecking the environment? "How can you impugn our motives?" Valerie Plame? "That's just politics."

This style gives way to the kind of arrogance that can dress Bush up in a flight suit and send him jetting out to the deck of an aircraft carrier, in way specifically designed to emphasize his own phonied-up service record, for the sake of a photo op prematurely announcing "Mission Accomplished." It's what lets Bush get away with posing for all the world as a veteran "war president" with a real respect for the suffering of average soldiers. And it's what lets him and his minions get away with impugning the motives and patriotism of the people who question his leadership.

In the intervening months years, the same flaw comes up time and again: Fumbling the Katrina disaster; flouting both the Geneva Conventions and American law by claiming the power to ignore them both at will; allowing oil and energy companies to run roughshod over consumers; handing out huge tax breaks to the wealthy while the budget deficits pile up; and most of all, invading a nation on false pretenses and then incompetently failing to either conceive or carry out an adequate occupation or withdrawal.

So it should be clear that character does indeed count. But it should also be clear that neither the mavens of the media nor the movement-conservative propagandists who sold the nation on Mr. Bush are any judges of it.

Deciderata

Go smugly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in stonewalling.
As far as possible, leave no chance of surrender
and be on superior terms to all other persons.
Speak your truthiness loudly and garbled;
and never listen to others,
especially not the wise and the well-informed;
they can all just go to hell.

Seek out loud and aggressive persons,
they are a vexation to your critics.
Constantly compare yourself with others,
so that you remain vain and bitter;
for you always must be assured there are lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements, even if they only consist of catching large perch, as well as your plans, even if they go to shit.

Keep covering the tracks of your own failed and calamitous career;
because if anyone ever clues in to your incompetence, your fortunes will change in time.
Abandon caution in your business and political affairs;
for the world is full of trickery, but no one is better than you.
But let this not blind you to what use in virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of suckers.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign intelligence.
Always be cynical about war;
for in the face of all effeminite sensitivity
it is as eternal as blood.

Take blindly the counsel of the years,
grasping desperately the things of youth.
Nurture the strength of your liquid spirits to cushion you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings; they are for wealkings.
Many fears are born of care and thoughtfulness, which is beyond your ken.
In your weekly discipline session,
tell her to be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the Bizarro Universe,
no more brains than God gave a rock;
you have no business being what you are.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is crumbling around you as it should.

Therefore be at war with the Enemy,
whatever you conceive him to be,
and use those labors and aspirations
to justify warrantless surveillance on your nation.

With all its Hannities, Drudges, and Fox Networks,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be oblivious.
Strive to be happy.
29 percent approval ratings notwitshtanding.

With apologies to Max Ehrman. Sorta.

Coulter and the onset of fascism

Did you notice how everyone on the right tut-tutted when Ann Coulter called for retaliation against "ragheads" -- but still, she continues to appear on college campuses and cable-TV programs apace. So much for that phony right-wing "outrage" over "extremists in their own ranks."

In reality, Coulter has long been leading the race of right-wing nutcases to move the demarcation line for "beyond the pale," and this week she demonstrated again that there are really no such limits for the right. Every week, they move the line farther to the right, until before you know it, you're staring outright fascism in the face.

Media Matters directs us to the latest Coulter emission, wherein she shrieks like a harpy about conservatives' lack of "manliness":

Democrats have declared war against Republicans, and Republicans are wandering around like a bunch of ninny Neville Chamberlains, congratulating themselves on their excellent behavior. They'll have some terrific stories about their Gandhi-like passivity to share while sitting in cells at Guantanamo after Hillary is elected.

[...]

Patriotic Americans don't have to become dangerous psychotics like liberals, but they could at least act like men.

Why hasn't the former spokesman for the Taliban matriculating at Yale been beaten even more senseless than he already is? According to Hollywood, this nation is a cauldron of ethnic hatreds positively brimming with violent skinheads. Where are the skinheads when you need them? What does a girl have to do to get an angry, club- and torch-wielding mob on its feet?

Let's be clear here: Coulter is not "joking." She is seriously calling for "manly" conservatives to inflict violence on a college student who is in the United States legally. Moreover, she is calling for a similar kind of violence as an appropriate response to "unhinged" and "violent" liberals.

This is, of course, the logical outcome of this whole argument, gaining greater circulation even among ostensible liberals, that the left is becoming dangerously unstable -- because, naturally, the "sensible" response calls for even greater doses of "manly" violence.

Coulter first tested this new variation on an old meme during a college-campus appearance last month in Chicago, as Lauren Patrizi reported:

Ann addressed her supporters in the crowd with this statement. "You're men. You're heterosexuals. Take 'em out." She chided them further when they did not rise. Before you knew it there was about 25 students marching to the balcony to supposedly "take out" the protestors above. I saw a priest holding students back and deans and security warning the students to go back to their seats. Chaos erupted. Ann left after taking one question.

Coulter's vaguely jocular reference in her column to employing skinheads on the right's behalf is also significant, because it is a nod and a wink -- and, combined with insults about one's manhood, a nudge -- in the direction of a historical reality regarding fascists: street thugs, in the early stages of fascism, were an essential element of their rise to power. The SA Brownshirts -- as well, in Italy, of Mussolini's black-shirted squadristi -- were used by supposedly mainstream conservatives as shock troops who could intimidate socialists, communists, and Jews; this was the key factor in the Thyssen-Nazi alliance. Similarly, right-wing thugs like the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s served to intimidate labor organizers and various leftists. (This was also an important subtext of Coulter's quip that her "only regret with Tim McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.")

The tide of right-wing eliminationism has been rising steadily in recent years, led in large part by Coulter and her sycophants. It has now topped the brim and is on the verge of bubbling over into action.

I warned a little while back that one of the real differences between movement conservatism and fascism is that the former "does not yet rely on physical violence and campaigns of gross intimidation to obtain power and suppress opposition."

If Ann Coulter -- who has a predilection for seeing her "outrageous" remarks become standard right-wing talking points -- has her way, that difference will soon disappear. All that will be necessary is for those young, heterosexual, "manly" conservatives to start following her advice, and proving their "manhood" in the only way they know how.

But then, that's what those fellows down in Jamul were doing, isn't it?

Don't worry, though: Coulter could sing the Horst Wessel Song in English and call for a Final Solution to liberalsim, and her friends on the right would smirk and assure us that she's just joking. Oh, and get a sense of humor too, you unhinged, violent moonbats, wouldja?

Then they'd book her for another round of cable talk shows.

Let's empower extremists

That rocket scientist Hindrocket has some advice for President Bush:

So, discussion about long-term approaches to immigration will continue. But in the meantime, your priority will be securing the borders and enforcing the laws currently on the books. Which means that the crackdown on employers of illegals will be expanded. Announce some specific measures to begin securing the Mexican border, preferably including some kind of fence.

This simple act will cause your approval ratings to begin rebounding, re-energize Republicans, and assure that the party keeps its Congressional majorities in November. If you really want to get the conservative base back in your corner, go and meet with the Minutemen--on camera--and tell them you appreciate what they're doing.

Sure, that sounds like a swell idea. Let the president shake hands with right-wing extremists whose chief mission in life entails demonizing Latino immigrants and dreaming up bizarre conspiracy theories.

For the latest version of the latter, see Ed Cone:

[Minuteman founder Jim] Gilchrist "said he believes there is a criminal conspiracy involving President Bush, his father, and political strategist Karl Rove to open America's borders to cheap labor for big business."

Perhaps next time out, Hindrocket will suggest that Bush meet with Fred Phelps to help secure the conservative-Christian vote.

After all, what harm can it do? It's not as if extremists don't already have enough power in this administration.

[Hat tip to Jane.]

Signs of the times

Down in Jamul, California, a restaurant is set ablaze...

Lailanie Ontiveros looked in disbelief at the smoke-covered broken glass, the charred wood and the profane ethnic insult spray-painted on the door to her restaurant.

Sheriff's officials said the fire and anti-Mexican graffiti at Mariachi's Mexican Bar and Grill late Monday was arson and a hate crime, but Ontiveros couldn't understand why anyone would hate her family.

... The fire caused about $10,000 in damage to the restaurant, on Campo Road near Aurora Vista Drive. The obscenities were spray-painted in red on the front door, on a poster advertising NASCAR events and on the side wall of the restaurant.

Ontiveros, her mother and brother have owned the Jamul restaurant for two years. A mural depicting her mother's hometown of Durango, Mexico, fills one wall. The ceiling, painted with puffy clouds, is now darkened by smoke.

The fire came a day after a massive march in downtown San Diego seeking rights for Latino immigrants, but sheriff's officials and Ontiveros didn't cite any connection between the protest rally and the arson.

Of course not. It's just another minor crime. Add it to the list.

Likewise, no one connects little acts like these to rhetoric like this, this, or this.

It's just much easier that way.

Channeling the Minutemen

There's always been a kind of Bizarro World quality to Fox News -- you know, up is down, right is wrong, true is false -- which no doubt contributes to its role as a font of Newspeak.

But on a recent Fox News Watch broadcast, James Pinkerton raised the art to a new zenith as he painted a picture of poor, put-upon Minutemen being negatively portrayed by the media:

PINKERTON: The media like brown people, but they like black people more. And so, therefore, the -- when Jesse Jackson and his -- some of these people are starting to worry about immigrants cutting away jobs from African Americans, that's one thing. But what they really dislike, of course, is white people. And so --

HALL: Oh, Jim. Oh, please. Please.

PINKERTON: -- in that sense, the -- the racial typology -- brown, black, white -- was visible there, and I think --

[crosstalk]

PINKERTON: I stand by it completely, in terms of the way the Minutemen were covered on this coverage. And anybody can watch --

GABLER: The Minutemen got a favorable article on the front page of The New York Times.

PINKERTON: The Minutemen get slammed --

[crosstalk]

Well, it's hard to tell what Pinkerton meant by "this coverage" exactly. But if he was talking about Fox News' coverage of the Minutemen, then he appears to be ingesting powering hallucinogens before watching. Maybe Ibogaine, or something like that.

Because really, Fox News' handling of the Minutemen has been so pronouncedly biased in their favor that it's nearly impossible to find any negative coverage there.

The most obvious case in this regard is the coverage provided by Sean Hannity, including a recent segment touting their fence-building project. Past coverage included a fawning interview with Minuteman leader Chris Simcox and a visit from Hannity on the "front lines" in Arizona.

Then there's Bill O'Reilly, who likewise promotes the Minutemen as a group of sincere citizens. And in general, the coverage on Fox uniformly is indistinguishable from Minuteman propaganda.

It's not, however, simply on Fox that this is the case. CNN, particularly under the leadership of Lou Dobbs -- who openly avowed his explicit support -- has done perhaps as much as Fox to promote the notion of Minutemen.

Then there's MSNBC, which has been not quite so ardent but certainly as largely favorable in their coverage of the Minutemen. Tucker Carlson has been their most fervent defender, calling them people "who have taken up arms for the land they love," and had a softball interview with cofounder Jim Gilchrist. Joe Scarborough hosted Simcox for an interview that did bring up the issues of extremism and racism in the Minutemen's ranks, but largely took Simcox's denials at face value. And on Hardball with Norah O'Donnell, a Minuteman spokesman appeared as a "conservative" talking head and was never asked about anything in the way of extremism.

And that's just on cable TV. Likewise, the general coverage of the Minutemen in the press has been neutral to positive, with warm write-ups in various organs.

In contrast, it seems that the only coverage of the Minutemen's footsie games with white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and their infiltration by same, as well as the proliferation of bigots with violent attitudes within their ranks, can be found at the SPLC Intelligence Report or in a handful of obscure news accounts. Certainly, you heard or saw little about it on Fox.

Maybe he was watching Bizarro Fox.

Righteous anger

Richard Cohen, via Atrios, waxing wankeriffic like the Nobel Prize winner he is:

But the message in this case truly is the medium. The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. This spells trouble -- not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before -- back in the Vietnam War era. That's when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.

The hatred is back. I know it's only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations.

Oh please. Just take me out and shoot me. We've been hearing this whine, incessantly, for the past four years, and it's enough.

These morons -- the conservatives who can dish it out but can't take it, and their Beltway liberal enablers who can neither dish it out nor take it -- had barely finished their eight-year spree trashing the country and the presidency in order to prove their moral superiority (and, along the way, pave the way for a complete right-wing takeover) before they began mewling this gibbering pap. Now they've swallowed the Michelle Malkin "unhinged liberal moonbat" meme whole.

No doubt some of Cohen's mail was vile, though before I take his word for it, I'd rather look at the evidence (which he of course cannot provide), particularly regarding the extent of it. And note how weirdly inconsistent the tone of the column is; at some points he seems to be suggesting that nearly all of it was awful, though he admits he didn't even come close to reading it all; at others, he admits that some of it was respectful and even supportive. It's just flat-out incoherent.

The underlying incoherency, though, is in Cohen's pearl-clutching claim that what poured out of his screen was unadulterated "hatred." Considering the life-and-death issues at stake here, and the blitheness of pundits like himself in treating these issues as mild embarrassments or inconveniences, it's clear that what Cohen is actually having to face is people's anger -- their righteous, well-tended anger.

As I wrote two years ago:

All of the hand-wringing currently circulating among the pundit class about the rising tide of "Bush hatred" misunderstands the nature of what really is happening. They mistake anger for hatred -- though in the case of conservatives, it's fair to say that the confusion is intentional.

Anger, for the most part, is a righteous and largely rational thing -- it arises from genuine grievances, and is typically a response to outrages of some form or another. Hatred, on the other hand, is an irrational thing; it comes from deep in the soul, and is usually an expression of some deep-seated imbalance on the part of the hater. Naturally, if anger is allowed to fester unaddressed long enough, it can easily mutate into hatred. But they are distinctive in nature.

We can all recall the Clinton hatred of the 1990s: wild accusations that he planned to enslave America in a "New World Order," that he'd had Vince Foster murdered, that he ran drugs out of the Mena airport, that he had fathered a black "love child," and on and on and on. As Bob Somerby recently observed on the topic, this wasn't just emanating from the fringe elements of the right, though it certainly had a significant audience there; this was coming from supposedly mainstream conservatives inside the Beltway, and it was broadcast throughout mainstream media. This hatred was grotesquely irrational, especially considering that Clinton was a political moderate by any lights whose policies on many fronts (international trade, welfare reform, balancing the budget) presented victories for conservative ideals.

Of course, the same conservatives who engaged in this lunacy -- projectionists that they are -- have a habit of accusing liberals of the very behavior in which they themselves avidly participate and foment. Thus they have now invented the "Bush hatred" meme, suggesting that liberals who attack Bush are the moral equivalents of themselves. ("I know you are, but what am I?" is the essence of these charges.)

But, as I have argued at length previously, the majority of this "hatred" is predicated on real policies and real actions by both Bush and his administration. This is not hatred: it is anger -- real, righteous and well-grounded anger.

Anger can be a healthy thing, especially if it is based on solid reasons and real grievances. Anger over real injustices motivated the American Revolution, the anti-slavery and civil-rights movements, and women's suffrage. History is replete with righteous anger.

Anger only becomes unhealthy hatred if it festers. And one of the ways it can fester is if the grievances underlying them are dismissed out of hand as irrational -- not just by the perpetrators of the injustices, but by the supposed allies of the victims.

Oh, but Cohen even recognizes that perhaps there might be some good reason for the anger:

I can appreciate some of it. Institution after institution failed America -- the presidency, Congress and the press. They all endorsed a war to rid Iraq of what it did not have. Now, though, that gullibility is being matched by war critics who are so hyped on their own sanctimony that they will obliterate distinctions, punishing their friends for apostasy and, by so doing, aiding their enemies. If that's going to be the case, then Iraq is a war its critics will lose twice -- once because they couldn't stop it and once more at the polls.

Only if people like Richard Cohen and the similarly execrable Joe Klein are allowed to pose as "liberals." Because the reality that is consistently overlooked by these "voices of moderation" is that the vast majority of Americans are now "Iraq war critics."

Cohen has a long history of this kind of crap. His claims notwithstanding, I'm not sorry to look elsewhere for someone who is a "friend" of liberal causes. With "friends" like that, who needs enemies?

The real Minutemen

Reporters who bother to spend time with the Minutemen and dig a little deeper are finding that the organization isn't as forthright as it seems.

In Washington state, for instance, Minuteman organizers insist they're only concerned about border security. But that doesn't explain why one of their supporters is running an initiative that would strip illegal immigrants of the ability to obtain government benefits, including welfare and health care.

Down in Phoenix, an investigative TV crew from KPHO went undercover and discovered that, when the cameras go off, the Minutemen are talking a much different ball game than their preferred public image of upstanding, concerned citizens:

These are anti-immigration vigilantes, taking action, mobilizing in the Arizona desert, driven by a conviction.

Pineapple 6 says, "These f___ing Mexicans. They will kill you. They don't give a f__k."

That Mexican immigrants are public enemy number one.

Fred Puckett says, "And once you shoot a couple of these son of a b@#$%es, they'll think twice."

Even worse are the spinoff groups that piggyback off the Minuteman propaganda and then draw the more radical actors into their ranks:

Another vigilante group - expelled from this operation - was operating nearby.

Pineapple 6 says, "They're carrying automatic weapons and they're chasing guys down and tracking them.. then they tie them up."

The next day, we set out to find the so-called "Rogue Minutemen."

Fred Puckett says, "Hi guys. I'm Fred Puckett.. Minuteman of One."

Puckett calls his group "Minuteman of One."

Puckett says, "We don't have no by-laws.. we don't have nothin'. We go out in two-man teams and we hit them like we did 40-years ago in Vietnam."

Members of Minuteman of One have a controversial M-O. They carry assault rifles when they're out on patrol, they don't hesitate to follow migrants or smugglers and they've been known to "confiscate" food, water and the luggage they come across.

Puckett says, "We believe our country is being destroyed from the inside. Anything south of I-10 is a third world nation."

The KPHO team last year did the same thing and found similar results.

Of course, this is standard M.O. for all of the far right's attemps to mainstream itself. In the 1990s, when I attended militia-organizing meetings, the leaders were adamant that all they were interested in was civic-minded protection of citizens' rights, and that they were nothing more than a neighborhood watch group.

Two years later, I watched in a federal courtroom as those same men were revealed on FBI videotape building pipe bombs and talking about blowing up various targets, including a local railroad tunnel and the home of a local reporter.

Fortunately, not every TV reporter these days is content to just let them blow smoke, though most are (see, e.g., Lou Dobbs). They're fewer and farther between, but the KPHO team deserves a big round of applause.

Global hate

Well, if it will make you feel any better, the United States isn't the only place seeing a resurgence of right-wing extremism and white supremacism under the banner of anti-immigrant sentiment.

In fact, if you include Australia, you could say it's becoming largely a global phenomenon.

This weekend brought us the news that the proto-fascist British National Party made some noteworthy gains in the just-finished elections:

The British National Party, which wants non-white immigrants to leave the U.K., made its biggest gains to date in local elections, capitalizing on economic pressures and ethnic tension in some of England's poorest districts.

The BNP won 11 of the 13 seats it contested in the east London borough of Barking and Dagenham, as well as adding seats on other councils mainly in eastern England and the Midlands, according to tallies compiled by the British Broadcasting Corp.

The gains more than doubled the number of municipal lawmakers the party has to 46 across England. Lawmakers from mainstream parties have expressed concern about the rise of the BNP. Parties with an anti-immigration agenda have failed to build national support in Britain in the past, in contrast to other European countries such as France.

Even before the election, as many as 25 percent of British voters indicated they might consider voting for the BNP. Not a good sign.

A statement from Searchlight explored this further, and added a caveat:

Any BNP victory should be a cause of concern. Its presence raises tensions and divides communities, and its lies, which are central to its campaigning tactics, incite fear and racial violence.

While the media focused on the success in East London, BNP fortunes elsewhere were more mixed. Although the BNP took three seats in Stoke-on-Trent, Epping Forest and Sandwell, there were other areas where it failed to make its expected breakthrough. There were no BNP successes in Oldham, Dudley, Blackburn and Thurrock. The BNP fell back in Calderdale, where it was defending two seats but only succeeded in one. Kirklees was another top target and the two councillors elected there were fewer than expected.

Meanwhile, in Italy, the leading anti-immigrant party began handing out cudgels as vote-winning gadgets:

The leader of the 'Stop Immigration' political group running in upcoming local elections in Turin will be distributing clubs as an electoral gadget in the multi-ethnic San Salvario neighbourhood of the northern city. Turin-daily La Stampa reported on Friday that Max Loda will hand out for free some 1,000 clubs -- with 'Stop immigration' engraved on them -- to win support for the party's candidate for mayor Denis Martucci at the 28 May election.

Martucci, who is backed by a number of lists including a 'Forza Toro' group of fans of the Torino soccer team, is one of nine candidates for Turin mayor.

Loda said the initiative will be promoted in the neighbourhood with the highest number of immigrant residents as well as in the rest of the city because "Turin risks to become a stronghold of illegald immigrants from over the world."

He claimed the clubs "only represent a cry of alarm, to say: dear citizens of Turin, dear Italians, we must defend ourselves from criminal ethnic gangs."

An estimated 2.8 million of Italy's 60 million inhabitants are non-EU foreigners, according to a survey by Catholic relief agency Caritas. Immigrants in Turin mainly live in the San Salvario and Porta Palazzo neighbourhoods.

Loda, previously unknown on the national political scene, made headlines in Turin in 2000 with a member of the anti-immigration Northern League Party, European MP Mario Borghezio, when a bridge in Turin was set on fire at the end of a demonstration against foreigners he was co-sponsoring.

Meanwhile, in Poland, a fellow named Roman Giertych, who heads up an extreme-right party called the League of Polish Families, was just named the nation's Minister of Education.

This would be akin to having Fred Phelps named Education Secretary. Giertych, whose grandfather was a notorious anti-Semite who advocated, in the 1930s, expelling all of Poland's Jews, made a name for himself primarily by advocating for laws against homosexuals, including "a bill in parliament that would penalize, through fine or even imprisonment, those who publicly promote the change of the 'traditional' definition of marriage".

He also thinks highly of the press:

"They call themselves moral authorities, but in fact they're just scum."

The Polish anti-fascist group Never Again spoke out against Giertych's rise:

Roman Giertych, the leader of the extreme-right political party League of Polish Families (LPR) and of the nationalist youth organisation All-Polish Youth (MW), was nominated to the post of Minister of Education today.
 
"It is a disgrace! Our worst worries are coming true" -- comments Marcin Kornak, the chairman of the anti-fascist 'Never Again' Association. "The lack of reaction from the politicians to the growing wave of chauvinism in Poland has led to an extreme nationalist being nominated to the ministry of education post. We protest against it!"
 
The newly appointed minister of education is the leader of the All-Polish Youth and he is going to promote its educational patterns in Polish schools. The All-Polish Youth draws from the darkest traditions tainted with extreme nationalism and antisemitism. For years it has recruited its members from among skinheads. It promotes xenophobia and a violent rejection of everything that does not match its criteria of "true Polishness". The All-Polish Youth has been repeatedly accused of being fascist and the media have published photos of its members (today MPs for the LPR) raising hands in the Hitler-salute.

Meanwhile, back in the USA ....

... at the University of Texas-Arlington, the renowned white supremacist Jared Taylor was recently presented as the "conservative" side in a debate sponsored by College Republicans.

Taylor said Mexican immigration is bad for the United States and cited statistics detailing high crime and school dropout rates among Hispanics. Gutierrez said those statistics are an ugly reality because whites have been in charge and have discriminated so harshly against Hispanics.

Taylor said even though Hispanics are in charge of everything south of America's borders, residents are fleeing those failed societies. He said he hopes a wall is built along the border to keep illegal Hispanic immigrants out.

Gutierrez said walls separating people have always failed. He argued that Mexicans have a right to move throughout the Americas because they were here before white settlers and because much of their land was "stolen" from them in the Mexican-American war.

Taylor pointed to that sentiment as deep disloyalty to the United States.

"Mexicans in particular are the worst candidates for U.S. citizenship," he said. "They don't respect our sovereignty."

You see? Sure they may be racist, but they come off so reasonable, so patriotic, so ... authoritative.

Round and round and round it goes, and where it stops ...