saxitoxin wrote:ooge wrote:saxitoxin wrote:Phatscotty wrote:oh and it was from a Libertarian page. Is it mostly the Libertarians who use
Every strain of American conservatism recently has been infected with Bircher lunacy.
Birchers have spent the last 60 years accusing every single U.S. president - including Reagan - of being a communist sleeper agent about to overthrow the U.S. and usher in a Marxist dictatorship at some point in the next few weeks/months. After 60 years of trying, they finally got that idea to stick with a fairly large segment of the population in 2008. That has, in turn, opened the door to a lot of their other unconventional and universally discredited theories - like "the U.S. isn't a democracy, it's a republic" - getting a hearing they've never before received and seeping out into a wider audience.
Like all cults, the Birchers obfuscate their ideas in more attractive ones. For instance, they oppose the U.S. constitution, but know their target audience doesn't. So they take their arguments against the constitution and declare they're actually arguments in support of the constitution (see the Anti-Federalist / Federalist switcharoo I exampled in my previous post).
That's a very, very great point, oogle.
Early-on the Tea Party was an admirable group composed of an entirely different element of society than it is now - a mainstream organization of concerned citizens offering a situational response to a single event or a series of events that they viewed as a hallmark of a directional error in policy. (The arguments about it going on to be funded by special interests and so forth are pretty much non-starters for me, that doesn't strike me as being the case to any high degree.)
However, its early failure resulted in a husk that allowed an entirely different group to move in. I personally observed a founding meeting of a chapter of the Republican Liberty Caucus in a major metro area (the dormant and usually inoffensive libertarian branch of the Republican Party that has recently been taken over) several months ago in which the state chairman happily noted she was also state director of the John Birch Society. This particular state chapter has so many members that they will get 10% of the delegate slots in the upcoming RLC convention in Austin.
On these boards during the RNC I was critical of the rigged voting that took place. I now would admit I was wrong. The Republican Party needs to do everything it can to keep these people from getting anywhere near levers of national power, just like the Democrats self-eviscerated their lunatic fringe in 2004. This is less a politics and more a security matter, I hate to say.
I think we basically agree,I think though that the repubs name recognition was in the toilet,They knew this so they saw a way to re-brand themselves by using the "tea people" movement. What I will never forgive these people for though is this.Obama wins in a land slide election not one month into his presidency,The American public is getting bombarded with the story's of the "tea people" and how they have to "take our country back". At that time the country was dealing with a financial crises that was far more threatening to the future of the country than 9/11.And they are yelling the president has to be stopped.The democratic party did not behave this way after 9/11. only when the Bush administration chose to expand the war into Iraq was there push back and not much unfortunately.A MSNBC host was fired because he kept doing segments questioning the intelligence of going into Iraq.
