I can't keep up with the crazy

I'm in the process of writing a lengthy post that I want to have up today ... I've written half of it and have been debating whether or not I want to post that half while I keep working on the other half. A problem I'm encountering, today, is that I keep being interrupted by additional news that is relevant to the subject matter of my post.

For instance, I just noticed at Think Progress that a Republican rep from from Iowa said that if Obama is elected America will become a totalitarian dictatorship.

Earlier on Fox "News" - which is now running a 24/7 propaganda campaign against Obama - Carl Cameron said that McCain can't be linked to Bush's economic policies because he's on the record as having opposed them while Obama has a record of favoring higher taxes. Is Cameron an idiot, a liar, or both? He certinaly wan't being a journalist. Yep, McCain opposed Bush's tax cuts for the megawealth, but then McCain decided he had to sell his soul to the conservative movement to get the nomination in '08 and fully embraced Bush's supply side economics which he now plans to extend. And the middle class get a larger tax cut from Obama than McCain. This type of factual inaccuracy is simply inexcusable.

This morning on Fox and Friends, some Republican strategist was saying that the Obama camp canceling an interview with a local health reporter - whose husband is a Republican media consultant - who ambushed Joe Biden with AM radio smears so ridiculous that Biden had a hard time believing he wasn't being pranked is "scary" because it signals that an Obama administration will censor and intimidate the press. I'm actually already including this incident in my other post, but here I'll point out how absurd it is that folks who have no problem with the Bush administration spying on journalists and threatening them with criminal prosecution are oh so frightened for the first amendment when the Obama camp cancels an interview with a partisan hack masquerading as a journalist.

Also today, "Joe the Plumber," who has been sent out by the RNC to campaign for McCain told an audience member at a rally that he agrees that a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel. Joe is also telling people that Obama is a Marxist, that Obama is gonna take his money and give it to poor people. This is just flat out surreal - a guy who will pay higher taxes under John McCain is the centerpiece of the McCain camp's faux populism because the guy has internalized so much AM radio cant that he can't connect with reality and see that Bizarro Robin Hood supply-side economics drains America's wealth upwards into fewer and fewer hands. Concetrating the wealth into the hands of a neo-aristocracy ain't capitalism. And the death for Israel comment ... crikey, the McCain camp is going to be remembered as worse than the Goldwater campain in terms of bringing out extremist views.

And more generally speaking, it's just crazy how so many people are working themselves into a frenzy expecting that America is about to become a communist state. I mean, we're basically talking about going back to the Clinton administration tax policy but with some tweaks, and yet this hysteria about communism. Hello, crazy people ... were we a communist state while Ayn Rand disciple Alan Greenspan's favorite Bill Clinton was in office?

Here's another one: a Republican email equating Obama with the rise of Hitler.

And to close (via Frameshop) another video of a racist mob at a McCain rally. This one begins with a guy suggesting Obama be eliminated ("bomb" or "get rid of him".)



I've been saying for a while now that the moment a Democrat steps into the White House many in the conservative movement are going to believe that they are living under totalitarian tyranny. Why? Not because of what the Democrat does - the complete disconnect with reality in believing Obama a Marxist demonstrates that. It's because these individuals are Manichean authoritarians who do not really believe in the rule of law so much as the rule of a Leader. If it's their guy (or gal) that's fine because it's Us and we're Good; but if it's a Democrat then it's Them and they're Evil.

Update: See, another case in point that I just came across.

And some Christian nationalists are fearing a "Obamageddon."

Theodicy lies at the heart of the evangelical right's political strategy: Christians must perpetually engage in spiritual warfare with Satan, and take dominion over governmental and legal institutions. God will be pleased then; but if these Christian soldiers fail to vanquish Satan, God won't be happy at all. Chaos ensues: socialism, Bible burning, abortions in public schools, boy scouts forced into homosexuality!

Religious-right honchos are girding the troops for political apocalypse. Townhall magazine, owned by Salem Communications, one of the largest Christian broadcasters in the country, ran a September feature, "Obamageddon: Could We Survive a Barack Presidency?" This month evangelical publishing giant Stephen Strang, whose magazine Charisma endorsed McCain, predicted that "life as we know it will end if Obama is elected." Last week, the political arm of James Dobson's Focus on the Family sent out a "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America", a 16-page (pdf) parade of horribles, and talk radio show host Janet Porter imagined that Christians will be imprisoned with Obama in the Oval Office.