XPost: talk.politics.crypto, alt.politics.howard-dean, alt.flame.rednecks   
   XPost: alt.bullshit   
   From: okamuraj005@hawaii.rr.com   
      
   Can man rule himself?  Should man be allowed to rule himself?  When should   
   man not be allowed to rule himself?   
      
   "Old Gil"  wrote in message news:Xns9F4F43A8F6A03fdas@194.177.98.144...   
      
   John Moore  Aug 3, 2011 – 8:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Aug 2, 2011 3:28 PM   
   ET   
      
   Six years ago, I was shopping a book idea to publishers. The concept was a   
   guide to how the Internet and radio and television gabbers were creating a   
   self-contained parallel universe for American conservatism complete with   
   its own system of economics, a fanciful version of U.S. history and even   
   its own science. That this loopy world view required the rejection of   
   matters established in fact and history posed no impediment to its   
   adherents: They merely asserted that the record and the facts were wrong.   
   My central thesis was that a portion of the American conservative movement   
   had quite simply gone nuts.   
      
   The consensus of editors I met with was that the phenomenon was a cyclical   
   historical blip explained in Richard Hofstadter’s seminal essay The   
   Paranoid Style, which documented the ebb and flow of hysteria in American   
   politics. During one meeting, a publisher leaned forward and said, “We   
   love the idea but really, how much crazier can things get?” She was afraid   
   that the looniness had crested, and she didn’t want to buy into a   
   declining stock.   
      
   Flash forward six years and crazy still hasn’t found a floor. As their   
   radical postures in the debt-ceiling fight shows, right-wing nutters have   
   taken reason hostage and the American government along with it.   
      
   This is not to tar the entire Tea Party, because the movement actually   
   includes a significant cohort that can grasp simple concepts like the fact   
   that you cannot be a libertarian and tell everybody else how to live. But   
   as the expression goes: Not all Tea Partiers are crazy, but all the   
   crazies seem to be in the Tea Party.   
      
   This largely Christianist movement has extended its Biblical literalism to   
   the American Constitution, a document its adherents regard as perfect.   
   Even when it comes to the passage ranking a black man as having three   
   fifths the value of a white man, they argue it was actually an ingenuous   
   poison pill designed by the founding fathers to bring about the timely end   
   of slavery. This group is so prone to improvised revisionism that would-be   
   presidential candidate Sarah Palin recently floated the idea that Paul   
   Revere’s ride was to inform the British of the colonists’ right to bear   
   arms.   
      
   When not reading aloud from centuries-old documents, the Partiers are   
   incanting passages from Ayn Rand’s blunderbuss screeds. They love Rand’s   
   uncompromising vision of the supremacy of the individual and the tyranny   
   of government. They gloss over the fact that the only individuals Rand   
   respected were Nietzchean ubermen. She referred to people who actually   
   work for a living as “savages.” And she held religion in greater contempt   
   than even Karl Marx did.   
      
   On economics, the new right descends further into monomania — convinced   
   that the answer to every question is lower taxes. They remember that their   
   patron saint Ronald Reagan presided over the largest tax cut in American   
   history but forget that when government couldn’t pay the bills he also   
   presided over the largest tax increase in American history. When reminded   
   of this, they counter that Congress made him spend more than he wanted   
   even though the record shows Congress actually passed budgets smaller than   
   the ones Reagan sent.   
      
   It’s one thing to hold differing views on the role of government but quite   
   another to actually maintain facts and arguments that are provably false.   
   But in the last 20 years, this has become the specialty of well-known   
   right-wingers such as Glenn Beck and anti tax crusader Grover Norquist.   
      
   The editors I met with six years ago maintained this would all blow over.   
   I think they gravely underestimated the Internet’s power to not only   
   disseminate false information but also feed the overarching   
   anti-government paranoia required to make it all seem coherent. The   
   Internet is a permanent challenge to expertise and authority. Who needs a   
   Harvard historian setting the record straight when you have Sarah Palin to   
   tell you he’s just some ivory tower snob who doesn’t understand what   
   Americans know in their hearts?   
      
   National Post   
      
   http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/08/03/john-moore-america-is-   
   being-   
   held-hostage-by-right-wing-purists/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)