The Foot on the Other Hand

You remember the line from the movie. It’s Ted Striker – “No dice, Chicago. I’m giving the orders and we’re coming in. I guess the foot’s on the other hand now, isn’t it Kramer?”

 

Yeah, well – whatever. The whole movie was about people taking themselves far too seriously and getting things wrong, which is what makes them absurd. It’s pretty much the basis of all comedy. David and Jerry Zucker just hit the sweet spot with this one – the movie made a lot of money, and many spoof movies followed. Mel Brooks probably started it all with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. There has always been a market for irreverence.

 

That may not be true right now. In hard times there is not much of that going around. The folks on the right have their Rage Machine – O’Reilly, Hannity and Beck on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh on the radio – and rage precludes anything like light-heartedness. And the left has turned into the Land of Smug – the thoughtful, precise and effective young black fellow is president, and seems to be doing well. And this sort of thing doesn’t help – “Three months into his presidency, Barack Obama stands out as perhaps the most trusted figure in American politics.” It seems that two-thirds of the respondents say they trust the president “to identify the right solutions to the problems we face as a nation.” The levels of smug and rage rise when such things happen.

 

And small things can infuriate those who have been conditioned to be perpetually angry, and those whose livelihood depends on nurturing and feeding that anger. Sometimes a smug comment can set them off – Bill O’Reilly is outraged each time the superbly smug Keith Olbermann makes fun of O’Reilly for getting his facts wrong or losing whatever sense of coherence O’Reilly still has. O’Reilly will rant about MSNBC and its parent company GE, and mock them mercilessly, without any sense at all that hardly anyone on the right is following him in that charge against the enemy. If you chat with your friends on the right about it they’ll shrug. O’Reilly can be strange, and they know it. But everyone has something that will get their goat. These things happen.

 

Of course those on the left – now smug – had their years of rage. It was that infuriatingly dense frat-boy Bush and the nasty Dick Cheney – but not so much the personalities. It was the wrong war for the wrong reasons, and blathering about compassionate conservatism and then pretty much writing off New Orleans and all the dead there after Hurricane Katrina, and endorsing torture as national policy, and writing off habeas corpus as dangerous foolishness, along with fourth amendment protections against random snooping on citizens, and the unregulated free-market policies that crashed the economy, and the tax policies that shifted the benefits of anything good happening in the economy to the very wealthy alone, the contempt of science, and so on and so forth. Still the small things would set off those on the left – some really boneheaded gaffe from Bush like “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”

 

Now, as we all know, in the great scheme of things, verb agreement doesn’t matter much at all. But it got their goat. And then they were mocked as elitists with their fancy college degrees, who didn’t understand the real America – a land of hyper-successful Southern evangelicals, rural eighth-grade dropouts who were the ones who really knew how things worked in this world. Those who worried about verb agreement were probably from New York or some other east coast city, or worse yet, Vermont. That was the twist of the knife, along with suggesting that everyone on the left was just jealous of Bush’s manliness and authenticity (and manliness was indeed a very big thing back in the day).

 

Of course the years from Gore’s concession speech to the present were not a time for light-hearted joshing. Everyone took themselves far too seriously. Obama seems to be working on loosening up everyone, with little success.

 

And now this:

 

The Department of Homeland Security is warning law enforcement officials about a rise in “rightwing extremist activity,” saying the economic recession, the election of America’s first black president and the return of a few disgruntled war veterans could swell the ranks of white-power militias. …

 

The nine-page document was sent to police and sheriff’s departments across the United States on April 7 under the headline, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.”

 

It says the federal government “will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months” to gather information on “rightwing extremist activity in the United States.”

 

Now the DHS document (PDF format) is rather innocuous – it concerns radical groups who operate and organize inside the United States. Think Tim McVeigh blowing up the federal office building in Oklahoma City – what with all the talk of armed revolution from the congresswoman from Minnesota and Glenn Beck at Fox News, and the spike in gun sales and people wanting to form militias, and with hard times, and a small number of quite unhinged young men coming back from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea is to keep an eye on things. You don’t want things getting out of hand.

 

Steve Benen comments:

 

DHS is not talking about those who enjoy the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Rather, officials are concerned about extremists – some of whom planned “threatening activities” against Barack Obama last year – who might want to commit acts of violence. Homeland Security spokeswoman Sara Kuban said, “The purpose of the report is to identify risk. This is nothing unusual.” She added that the goal is “to prevent another Tim McVeigh from ever happening again,” and that similar reports have also been published on left-wing radicalization.

 

Now, I’m sympathetic to concerns about “big government” monitoring law-abiding Americans, and was offended when some law-enforcement agencies started monitoring peace groups who protested the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq. There is, in other words, room for abuse here.

 

But let’s recognize this for what it is. If the available evidence is accurate, the law-enforcement efforts aren’t about tapping Bill O’Reilly’s phone; it’s about monitoring the organizing efforts of right-wing militias who are bragging about stockpiling weapons and ammunition.

 

Benen says criminalizing conservative beliefs would be insane, “as would considering a conservative suspect based on nothing but his or her ideology.” That’s not what this is about. But he notes that conservative bloggers, the very ones “who used to argue the government should have practically unlimited surveillance powers to prevent possible terrorism on US soil, are outraged by this new effort.” See this array:

 

Apparently, some Republican bloggers believe their rhetoric about “revolution” against the U.S. government might be considered controversial by law-enforcement officials. As Andrew Sullivan asks, “Why, one wonders, would Michelle Malkin read a DHS report on fringe, far-right extremism that could lead to violence or Oklahoma-style domestic terrorism and think … they’re talking about her?”

 

That might remind you of another line from another famous film – “You talking to me?”

 

But the outrage is there. See William Teach at Stop the ACLU – Hell Of A Job With North Korea, President Neophyte. We are now North Korea, or something.

 

Charlie Johnson, of Little Green Footballs, says his buddies on the right are “hyperventilating” over the Department of Homeland Security report on extremists, somehow tying it to all conservatives, and tying it to the April 15 Tea Parties, such as they are. That’s counterfactual:

 

First, this DHS assessment was begun more than a year ago, before Barack Obama was even nominated. It has absolutely nothing to do with “tea parties,” and it was not done at the behest of the Obama administration.

 

Michelle Malkin is not so sure. See Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real – they’re coming to lock us up for our views. And see this video clip – Fox News host wonders if Obama administration will send “spies” to tea parties.

 

And the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait is puzzled that conservatives seem so happy to lump themselves with the “murderous lunatics” – which makes no sense. “I kind of figured conservatives would try to define potential domestic terrorists as the fringe right, but there’s Michelle Malkin calling potential terrorists ‘conservatives.'”

 

Go figure. But at the Washington Independent, David Weigel simply points out that “if they want to use this rhetoric, they can’t really be too angry when the government frets about a rising tide of violent government overthrow rhetoric.” That would be that Congresswomen advocating that people be “armed and dangerous” to the Obama Administration (Michelle Bachman) and the new star at Fox News predicting armed revolution (Glenn Beck). What do you expect?

 

Dave Neiwert has his new book on the whole matter of how we got here. That would be The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right:

 

Not only has the village lunatic gained permission to continue wandering the town square poking everyone he dislikes in the eye with a sharp stick, but he gets to claim victimhood when the victims respond angrily. Unfortunately, in the process, the whole village is transformed, and not for the better.

 

That’s the sum and substance of it, but this offers context:

 

For most of my life, even into the 1990s, it was fairly easy to distinguish eliminationists from mainstream conservatives. Conservatives were people who welcomed the advances of science and education, were generally civil in their dealings with political opponents, shunned conspiracism and outrageous paranoia, and were not constantly sounding the alarm about the impending end of civilization. Religious beliefs always played a role in traditional conservatism, but the old consensus held by both liberals and conservatives–that religious freedom meant the freedom of every citizen to choose their creed without coercion–still held sway for the most part.

 

That began to change, though, in the mid-1990s. And by the first few years of the 21st century, the differences between the mainstream Right and its fanatical fringe became thin indeed.

 

Now the differences have disappeared. They gleefully erased them themselves.

 

Tim F. at Balloon Juice offers this:

 

A rightwing “patriot” blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 Americans. Another rightwing activist committed a series of bombings that killed two people and injured at least 150 others. A heavy FOX News consumer shot up a Unitarian church in Knoxville for reasons that he plainly described as politically eliminationist. Last week a white supremacist shot three police officers in cold blood after posting a string of online commentary that echoed hysterical rightwing radio rants almost word-for-word. The shooter admitted that he would have killed more if he could.

 

Here is a suggestion if Michelle still needs a shoulder to cry on. Go find a cop. There’s no need to come to southwestern PA; I saw squad cars from Michigan, Massachusetts and Canada at Thursday’s funeral. Tell him or her how completely unfair it feels to have the government keeping an eye on paranoid gun fetishists. She can explain to her new friend how the government was never meant to use unrestrained police powers on her kind of American.

 

But he then widens the argument:

 

At least now I can stop wondering whether rightwing torture-and-wiretap freaks ever understood that putting ‘Islamic’ or ‘terrorist’ in the title of a law is not a great way to limit its scope to people they consider Islamic terrorists. If the meaningful part of a law has no penalty for using supposed ‘antiterrorist’ powers on anyone that a law enforcement agency damn well pleases, then that is what it will do.

 

Andrew Sullivan puts that a bit more elegantly:

 

At several points in the last few years, as I gamely tried to convince conservatives that they should be concerned about the scale and scope of the Bush-Cheney surveillance state, the torture program, the claimed presidential right to seize, detain and torture anyone deemed an “enemy combatant,” the avoidance of the FISA law, the suspension of habeas corpus, I was ridiculed as an hysteric. When forced to defend basic civil liberties against a presidency claiming unprecedented war powers within the boundaries of the US and potentially against American citizens, I found only one argument got through. What if Hillary Clinton got this kind of power? And the pathological partisanship of the right briefly faltered for just a little before the full-bore Bush-backing denialism kicked back in.

 

But now that’s happened, sort of:

 

I understand the need to keep an eye on potential violence after Oklahoma City and the rhetoric now out there. But I share the general unease about this kind of surveillance. Sadly, this belated concern on the right is the problem with a polity as deeply polarized as ours.

 

Sullivan cites Glenn Greenwald being precise:

 

When you cheer on a Surveillance State you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, it’s going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity. That’s its nature.

 

Sullivan then rubs it in:

 

But, hey – no hard feelings. Glad to have you back on the side of liberty.

 

One small question, though: Where the fuck have you been these past seven years?

 

They’ve been defending torture. In the Spectator (UK) see Alex Massie here:

 

I tend to take the view that a panicked reaction in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 is one thing (and in fact entirely reasonable) but actions taken months and years after it quite another and it is distressing how many people and pundits on the American right fail to understand that Guantanamo is, for many people, a more grievous stain than anything else done in the Bush years.

 

Sullivan comments:

 

There is, I think, a great difficulty for some in accepting that the torture program was ramped up long after the initial scare happened, that it became Cheney’s central front in the war, that the entire Gitmo/Bagram paradigm was devised to enable torture as a critical font of intelligence, and that all of it was plainly illegal – and made possible only by a truly radical understanding of a dictatorial presidency in foreign affairs. What staggers me, of course, is that this is also true after Abu Ghraib, after any claim to ignorance or self-deception was possible. And yet Abu Ghraib showed lesser forms of abuse and torture than that directly authorized by Bush and Cheney. Think about that: they had seen Abu Ghraib, determined it was shocking, and then secretly authorized much worse.

 

This cannot be viewed as denial. They knew exactly what they were doing and had no compunction in doing it. Even now, they champion it, and if there is another major attack, will insist that torture be returned to the center of the American system. This is why we have to get all the facts on the table – what was done and what it revealed; and this is why, in the end, these people must be prosecuted.

 

Then there is a natural resistance, especially on the neocon right, to question the benevolence of America’s actions. It is as if neoconservatism came to believe that American exceptionalism also means that America, by virtue of its unique virtue, is uniquely empowered to commit evil and somehow thereby render it good. This is how religious fundamentalism in Bush’s mind came to demand the use and routinization of an absolute evil. …

 

But sometimes committing bad deeds comes back to haunt you, unless you’re very clear about what is right and wrong. In High Clearing, see this:

 

On another forum I’ve tried to argue with people who want to split some legal hairs and it just doesn’t work for me. There’s a place where “Well, I respectfully dissent from your view, while appreciating the spirited and intelligent manner in which you offer it” ends and “Fuck you, this shit is just plain wrong” begins. We can argue over where that exact point is, but once you’re beating somebody according to a KGB manual, it’s safe to say that that bad point has been reached.

 

They should have known better, and as for domestic surveillance, they also should have known better.

 

How did it come to this? One of Sullivan’s readers offers this:

 

…it’s true that in the 1980s, along with a great many people I moved to the right precisely in reaction to the hideously narcissistic leftism of the boomer generation, my idiotic peers. I was reasonably at home on the right for nearly two decades – while it meant constantly having to overlook banalities or make excuses for the excesses of the Christian Right, it was still the case that all the exciting talk was there, and the privilege of being heard as a woman without being squeezed into the soul-killing assumptions of hard-core feminism meant a lot to me.

 

But something changed for this woman in the nineties:

 

The attacks on Clinton were so viciously over the top and so ugly that, although no Clinton defender, I felt a growing unease; the unreason of the anti-science right infuriated me (creationism is a particular hot button for me, it has never seemed to me that a serious Christian should have any difficulty accepting real science). In 2004, I almost stayed home from the polls because of Bush’s social conservatism, so smug and intolerant, not to mention a missed opportunity (he could have had a Nixon-to-China moment on the subject of gay marriage, but instead embraced the predictable smug, small, conventional, cruel, Adam-and-Steve bigotry).

 

Still, I’m a slow learner, and it wasn’t until Limbaugh’s announcement of Operation Chaos during last year’s primaries (plus considerable prodding from my four children, all fierce Obama supporters) that I finally realized I’d had it. I turned off the radio, vowed never to listen to Rush again (and nor have I), and became a fairly dedicated Obamacon.

 

As Robert Frost would say, that made all the difference:

 

Once my soul was freed of the daily imperative of making excuses for the angry excesses of the right and pretending to myself that I wasn’t being sickened by so much of what I was hearing, I became aware of a peculiar thing – it was very much like giving up drinking or cigarettes, giving up my daily dive into the right had somehow begun the process of healing my very brain chemistry. I was thinking without rage, suspicion and paranoia – and it was only in giving these things up that I realized the extent to which they had become my peculiarly toxic daily bread.

 

I’ve come to believe that the endless mantras of hate, the repetitions of key phrases, the ritualistic paranoia, the angry, fraught refusal even to hear other words (so pitifully depicted in your reader’s comments) are drug-like – I know shamefully little about science, but I would be willing to bet that if you could test a Limbaugh fan in full spleen you would find real and significant alterations in the brain chemistry.

 

And now she is frightened by what she sees going on now:

 

This level of rage and unreason is measurably worse than its corollary on the left over the eight years of the Bush presidency. There is a call to violence going on out there, whether conscious or not, and it cannot end well.

 

And that might explain the Department of Homeland Security item. The foot’s on the other hand now. And people are taking themselves far more seriously than ever. But it’s not funny at all.