You can not parody these people

By Brian Hurt | Published: February 20, 2010

So the right’s newest hero? Someone who flew a plane into a building. Apparently this is only a bad thing if you’re brown.

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  • http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/author/candide/ Robert Fischer

    This turn of events is something I just can’t understand. It’s really made me lose any kind of hope in this country’s ability to right itself—we have a two-party system, and one party does shit like that.

    Fox News can attempt to distance itself, but they’ve caused this by inciting people to revolution (“Tea Party”, anyone?), praising people for upping threats of violence (by, y’know, carrying around assault weapons), and declaring the legitimate, democratic government illegitimate and dangerous. The monster they nursed with fear has finally taken on a life of its own, and I’m not sure what it will take to stop it.

  • Chuck

    Two of this guy’s big gripes were that we don’t have nationalized healthcare and that the government doesn’t interfere nearly enough with big business — hardly a far-right stance. I think people on both the right and the left will find areas where they agree with him.

    Of course, it’s more comfortable if we classify all the evil in the world as belonging to those guys over there.

    • http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/author/candide/ Robert Fischer

      It’s not about whether this guy agrees with the right or left — it’s that the right is lionizing a US citizen who intentionally committed an act of war upon our own government.

  • http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/author/bhurt-aw/ Brian Hurt

    Required reading on this subject is this Glen Greenwald post. Actually, Glen Greenwald is pretty much required reading across the board.

    The paranoid right has always been with us- from the John Birch society to the Know Nothings. And may I just make the side comment that it’s humorous how many of the main nativist voices today are descended from the people the nativists of 150 years ago hated- the Irish. Think Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly. It makes one wonder if a hundred years from now the nativist movement won’t be lead by people with names like Miguel or Gonzales. “Our forefathers swam the Rio Grande, picked lettuce in the fields for sixteen hours a day, cleaned toilettes, so we could be proud Americans. These immigrants don’t share our culture, language, they’re just lazy bums looking for a handout…”

    What is different about today is that the wrong people- specifically the corporatists- have figured out that these people are highly manipulable and are manipulating them. A changing world has made them even more malleable than they are normally (normally they are too squirrelly to be much use politically). That and corporate control of the media- it’s no accident these people thought he might be, at least, a real American Hero. He certainly isn’t a terrorists- come on, even the “uber-liberal” (yeah, right) media like Newsweak isn’t willing to call him a terrorist. And he struck a blow against the hated government. And these people aren’t the best with the whole facts and logic thing (if they were, we wouldn’t be having a debate over evolution or global warming)- they’re running on pure “like me good, not like me bad” emotive (lizard-brain) reasoning.

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