OH Suh-Nappp! By: Mark W Adams

Oh my. Godwin lives!

It can be a very dangerous thing for an ideological zealot to gain a large and uncritical audience, whether you're talking about Adolf Hitler, Muqtada al-Sadr, or Ann Coulter. The kind of solipsistic, eliminationist rhetoric these people trade in has a particular appeal to disaffected angry young men who are socially isolated and bursting with undirected rage. When you band these people together into groups, they turn into mobs. If they're religious extremists from Muslim cultures, we call them muhajadeen or jihadi. If they're political and religious extremists from Western nations, we call them freepers or just "Republicans".

Chad Castanaga is a 39-year-old, unemployed Californian who, in his own words, thinks of Ann Coulter as "a goddess" and "worship(s) Michelle Malkin and (Reich Wing Talk Radio shrew) Laura Ingraham". Up until a few days ago, Mr. Castanaga was living with his parents and seemed like a nice enough guy, sure. A quiet type. Kept to himself. You get the picture. (TRex)

"Nice enough" until we found out he was arrested on suspicion of sending fake anthrax through the mail to "demagogues" like Jon Stewart, Nancy Pelosi, David Letterman and Keith Olberman.


Go ahead and read the rest of TRex's screed against the suspected Freeper terrorist and his rant on the Pajamahadeen's disgusting excuse for "dialogue" that manages more to incite and outrage rather than legitimately debate issues.

The Right Blogosphere is a cesspool of boiling hate and howling insanity and we need to stop pretending that these are people who can be engaged rationally, appeased, or tolerated. They stand in direct opposition to everything that America is about, freedom of speech, plurality of ideas, and equality before the law regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, and ideological or spiritual affiliation.

Funny, throughout Wingnuttystan and the beltway punditocracy, great pains are being taken to push the meme that the Republican loss of Congress was not a loss for the conservative movement because Bush and the Rovians are not true conservatives, and the newly elected Democrats are. TRex must have missed the memo.

I would have ignored that memo too. While I do agree that it is too early to bring down the curtain on conservatives, especially in their most extremely virulent form, they are in critical condition. But it's farse not to recognize that repudiation of conservative ideology at least played a significant role in their defeat.

The upshot is, if it was not the triumph of liberalism that rejected Compassionate Conservatives™ but rather the elusive and nearly extinct middle American -- who just elected their first muslim to Congress, a self-described socialist and 16 women to the Senate along with over 70 in the House led by a liberal San Fransisco grandmother; not to mention red state Ohio voting for an anti-free-trade, bona-fide progressive Senator -- then the Limbaughs, Hannities and Pam Atlases of the world are even more radical than even I imagined. Of course that's because as a proud liberal, I seem to be more in the mainstream than I was ever led to believe.

Of course, to fully understand this you must embrace the Orwellian hyjacking of the language we've been subject to for the last several decades -- which reached it's zenith only recently. It's not what they say, but rather what they did. They did lable themselves proudly as conservatives. Those self-described conservatives did reach new heights in arrogance, deception, hubris, exploitation, fiscal irresponsibility, historical ignorance and indifference to consequences. Those conservatives did vilify Democrats and all things liberal as equivalent to murderous terrorist extremists who target civilians with airliners and lop off the heads of journalists just for effect.

Maybe TRex is a bit over the top. Maybe I should let it go -- and if I were in a position of authority I'd consider it -- for the good of the country. But I don't have to, and I'm not ready to forgive and forget just yet. The extremist on the right will not be, and have not been silenced by their defeat. Those that have not already reverted to form, soon will. They're not done by a long shot.

Their noise machine is still in place, their infrastructure is as strong as ever. They're not going away and they not only have learned nothing, they will preach exactly the wrong lesson to millions and millions of listeners, viewers and readers for hours and hours each and every day. The MSM (mindlessly stupid media) will continue to pair the most insane right-wing exibitionists and hacktacular propagandists against a mainstream Democrat representing a reasonable position and present it as a balance between conservatives and liberals -- that the "truth" lies somewhere between the rational and irrational, that the middle ground is somewhere between reality and fiction.

It's absurd, of course. But it will continue to skew the argument not only to the right, but away from reason.

The O'Reillys and Saviges, Hindrakers and Glenn Becks, the Little Green Footballs, Instapundits, and Hugh Hewitts will not stop just because middle America chose to vote for their avowed enemies. They will only stop driving this nation apart and profiting from divisiveness when actual conservatives directly denounce them, when the GOP, for it's own survival, repudiates their tactics and philosophy in no uncertain terms.