Kooks on Parade- Evil Kooks

Here is a great article on the Teabag convention, from Jonathan Kay, in Newsweek. Kay is a self-described conservative who attended the convention, and has this to say:

"Black Helicopters Over Nashville

Never mind Sarah Palin and the tricornered hats. The tea-party movement is dominated by conspiracist kooks.

...Within a few hours in Nashville, I could tell that what I was hearing wasn't just random rhetorical mortar fire being launched at Obama and his political allies: the salvos followed the established script of New World Order conspiracy theories, which have suffused the dubious right-wing fringes of American politics since the days of the John Birch Society.

And yet, instead of these beliefs being held by a few thousand easily ignorable maniacs, they have become the battle cry of millions, who will believe anything that will enable them to keep pursuing the imaginary carrot at the end of the Republican party's stick- the ludicrous promise of an all-white country where everyone is rich and powerful.

This world view's modern-day prophets include Texas radio host Alex Jones, whose documentary, The Obama Deception, claims Obama's candidacy was a plot by the leaders of the New World Order to "con the Amercican people into accepting global slavery"; Christian evangelist Pat Robertson; and the rightward strain of the aforementioned "9/11 Truth" movement. According to this dark vision, America's 21st-century traumas signal the coming of a great political cataclysm, in which a false prophet such as Barack Obama will upend American sovereignty and render the country into a godless, one-world socialist dictatorship run by the United Nations from its offices in Manhattan.

Sure enough, in Nashville, Judge Roy Moore warned, among other things, of "a U.N. guard stationed in every house." On the conference floor, it was taken for granted that Obama was seeking to destroy America's place in the world and sell Israel out to the Arabs for some undefined nefarious purpose. The names Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers popped up all the time, the idea being that they were the real brains behind this presidency, and Obama himself was simply some sort of manchurian candidate.

A software engineer from Clearwater, Fla., told me that Washington, D.C., liberals had engineered the financial crash so they could destroy the value of the U.S. dollar, pay off America's debts with worthless paper, and then create a new currency called the Amero that would be used in a newly created "North American Currency Union" with Canada and Mexico. I rolled my eyes at this one-off kook. But then, hours later, the conference organizers showed a movie to the meeting hall, Generation Zero, whose thesis was only slightly less bizarre: that the financial meltdown was the handiwork of superannuated flower children seeking to destroy capitalism."

I just want to add that I have heard all of this, and much more, at the tea parties I have attended.

This is, of course, the world that I have been reporting on as long as this blog has existed. This is not a loyal opposition. It is a large number of people, maddened by hatred and greed, and on the edge of a violent rampage not unlike things we have seen in Rwanda and the Congo, and yes, in 1920's Germany. This is not a joke, or a small number of harmless loons. These people may have no hope of turning this country into their dream Cromwellian theocratic dictatorship, but they could precipitate the deaths of millions before they are put down, and could produce a country so dysfunctional that the Great Depression will look mild in comparison.

And of course, here is the other part of the puzzle, as I have so often pointed out:

"Perhaps the most distressing part of all is that few media observers bothered to catalog these bizarre, conspiracist outbursts, and instead fixated on Sarah Palin's Saturday night keynote address. It is as if, in the current overheated political atmosphere, we all simply have come to expect that radicalized conservatives will behave like unhinged paranoiacs when they collect in the same room."

The "liberal press," which is willing to collaborate with the Republicans to the extent that they manage to make Obama's winning the Nobel Peace Prize look like some gigantic humiliation, is doing everything it can to distract attention to this growing conflagration in our country. Democrats could crush the Republican party like bugs. But they cannot seem to find a way to combat the Republicans and the Press, allies in their fight to destroy everything this country is supposed to be about.

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