A fire is building within those people, the same sort of fire that led to fascism in the 1930's, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, assassinations, right wing militias and plots against another popular Democratic President at a time of a grave domestic economic crisis when the interests of the rich, of large corporations, of bankers and their friends, the con artists on Wall Street were threatened.

This is the exactly the issue.

And this is exactly the solution:

This is why Democrats need to succeed in delivering on their promises of more jobs, of universal health insurance, of better times. because if they don't the storm that is moving ever closer each day they fail to act, each day they appear weak in the face of right wing agitprop, will come.

During the Bush administration, there was a lot of talk from the right about changing the reality faster than analysis could keep up.  And they implemented that tactic right into disaster.

Democrats need to implement that tactic to get us out of disaster.

Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism is worth a read at this point in history.  It is about how unbridled "competition" eventually created the resentments that lead to totalitarian dreams and actions.

At least Alan Grayson and Anthony Weiner and Jay Rockefeller are standing up to move in the direction you recommend.  And Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO is not idle in the battle.

The first battle is to get healthcare reform with a minimum of a public option.  The second is to get the Boxer-Kerry climate change bill passed-a jobs creator.  The third is to get real reform of the financial industry.  The fourth is to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed--actually to make it easier for workers to obtain a collective bargaining agreement with employers.

Then there is bring the Wage and Hour Act up to the 21st century, which means undoing a lot of overtime mischief and upping the minimum wage to levels it was in the 1960s (adjusted for inflation). ...and the list goes on...

And all of this before 2012.

Remember, hope is what you have when your optimism runs out.  And as Frank Herbert says, "Fear is the mind-killer."

50 states, 210 media market, 435 Congressional Districts, 3080 counties, 192,480 precincts

For those people, it really doesn't matter if the Dems deliver or not. The only thing that will get through to them is if the left somehow convinces them that, in the event of an assassination or an armed uprising, we will kill them in large numbers, and keep killing them until order is restored. People like Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachman, and Glenn Beck need to be put on public notice that if one of their followers assassinates our president, they will not live to see sunset.

There, I said it.

I've been biting my tongue for the better part of the last year, but that's what I think is necessary, drawing on the lessons of my youth when I was involved in street fighting against neo-Nazi skinheads. When you are dealing with that kind of animal -- an ex-person who has voluntarily seceded from the human race -- the only thing they understand, much less respect, is domination by force.

How did the Nazis bring down the Weimar Republic? The same way their ilk eats away at democracies everywhere: by taking advantage of the civilized misconception that all speech and belief must be tolerated. Sadly, that's just not a sustainable model. At the end of the day, any democracy that doesn't want to eventually vote itself out of existence must recognize that toleration of intoleration is a self-defeating behavior. The post-war Germans learned this lesson, and they banned the Nazi party and its symbols and speech forever. If we don't want to learn that lesson the hard way like the Germans did, we need to be prepared to move against the rapidly degenerating GOP as soon as they step over the line into direct action using the full power of the state.

Tolerating advocates of assassinations and coups d'etat is not a concession a free society needs to make; it is not one a free society can make for long if it wishes to remain a free society. We can either send such people to prison or to the gallows, or we can wait for them to do much worse to us.

Much of the American dream -- the original dream of freedom and equality, not the 1950's crap about owning a house -- was always a bunch of empty promises and ideals admired but never lived up to, grand and lofty gestures made by men who owned slaves and conducted genocide against the original owners of the land. But even so, we made progress, bit by bit, towards realizing those ideals and making the dream real. For all intents and purposes, that progress stopped with the right-wing violence and assassinations of the 1960's.

Today, we are approaching the same kind of real progress that triggered the fascist backlash of the late 1960's. They mean to finish us this time. I say that the time has come for us to finish them, to stop tolerating the implacable internal enemies of the original American dream, to defeat them, if necessary by force of arms, and certainly by force of law. We will not win this battle in Congress or the ballot box alone. The enemy must know that we will defend the American dream by any means necessary. They must know that we will not be cowed by their threats of violence, and that we are fully prepared to meet their force with an order of magnitude more force if necessary.

The alternative is to let the Rahm Emmanuels of the left continue their incremental retreat from the dream until the psychopaths of the neo-fascist right sense that their time has come and they turn our retreat into a rout.

To 95% of the world, what Obama and the Democrats are doing you can agree or disagree with, but it is being done by the all-American way of Congress proposing, and the president disposing. Even Obama's executive grabs like taking over private business finds precedent in American history among presidents. Obama is dead wrong. But he is not a Marxist, or Nazi, or even a socialist. He is a far left American liberal which, by the way, puts him considerably to the right of the Euro-left.

To casually toss about the terms "Marxist" and "Nazi" shows that those who do so are wildly exaggerating what the liberals are doing. Mrs. Werthmann may be a witness to history but her analogies are childlike in their logic. Exaggeration is not argument. It is emotionalism run rampant. And at its base is simple, unreasoning fear. Fear of change, fear that the powerlessness conservatives feel right now is a permanent feature of American politics, and, I am sorry to say, fear of Obama because he is a black man.

  On the points where I most strongly agree I'd place at #1

  this situation is not going to simply melt away---and I'm convinced that it shall persist whether or not "Democrats" "deliver" on jobs, health-care, etc.

 To suppose that such measures could defuse the explosive situation now at work is to misunderstand what is really going on.

   A stark ideological rupture has already occurred; it means that in a specific way that matters most, the people of the U.S. have already disintegrated into two or more irreconcilable camps.  That has now been left ignored for so long that it is anything but clear at this point that it is reversible prior to seeing the entire civil order dissolve into chaos.

   Right now, two (or more) irreconcilable views of what the U.S. are supposed to "be" as a people and as a government are in open conflict to such a point that many among the antagonists refuse to recognize those opposed to them as deserving to be counted as "Americans" or the government as it is constituted under Obama or as it was constituted under Bush and Cheney as a legitimate government.

   What's going on is now is the continuation of an already long-at-work process of break-down---social, cultural, ideological---with all that it implies for the political and economic "orders" recently so clearly discredited.   Any interested reader could find tremendous help in better understanding what is wrong and why if he or she read Amin Maalouf's book, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong [ http://www.amazon.com/Name-Identity-Violence-Need-Belong/dp/0142002577/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=book s&qid=1254390833&sr=8-2-catcorr ].  That book alone doesn't supply all the needed intellectual background to the disaster now unfolding but it offers a useful place to start.

  If I were to pick out just two major elements to summarize the fault-lines where Western society in general is foundering (and the predicament we are in encompasses all of the Western socio-cultural-economic order, and not only the culture, society and economy of the U.S.) I'd point to these two:

   the industrial revolution of society since the 17th century and, with it, the profound collapse of the whole edifice of organized religion as it was then known and practised---thus, in particular, the judeo-christian world of Catholic and Protestant and Jew.  To the long collapse of these we must now add, in own time, that of Islam, against which collapse a  fanatical fundamentalist version is the present-day manifest reaction.

  Certain unifying themes and threads, however, run through and across many of the seemingly disjoint and disparate phenomena.  It the particular virtue of Amin Maalouf's analysis in his book mentioned above that these themes and threads are brought into startling relief for the reader to consider.

   Another of his key insights is that in no way, shape or form does our "salvation" consist in "recovering" what has been lost of the past.  Rather, if societies are to survive the upheavals now in effect, they are going to have to correctly grasp what about their social, political, cultural and ideological heritages has been fundamentally false and erroneous, jettison these in a deliberate way and replace them with other, sounder, more humane and livable arrangements.  This process could and should include the much-talked-of alternative world order as embodied in such movements as those associated with Porto Alegro [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altermondialism ].

    Such a re-thinking would entail recognizing what parts of the European Enlightenment period's liberal-democratic and economic theory which form so fundamental a part of the ideological infrastructures of our time were deeply flawed and planted the seeds which have now flowered and propagated so much mischief---especially evident in spirtually empty a mass-consumption ethic which has deeply accentuated confused moral collapse which is at the heart of what now haunts us through its influences on our economic, social and political disorder.

   There's much to add here but at this writing not the opportunity to continue.

So, yeah, we have to deliver so that the people don't decide the only solution is try something else.  That something else is lethally dangerous.  

But the military today has no reason to overthrow Obama. If the military ever has a sit down with "those who control" Obama they would in large part be talking to themselves. The military's agenda has continued during Obama's White House residence with barely a hiccup. Iraq still occupied? Check. War in Afghanistan getting bigger? Check. Hey, we may even get a third war in Iran if we can borrow enough from China.

The DOD is run by Bob Gates and Gates has his people running the show. Gates was head of the DOD for Bush II and CIA chief for Bush I.

All this is just a fantasy of racists. While the oligarchy continues to drain the blood from the rest of us, racism and nativist is the illogic that solves the riddle of "Why do things suck now?" Obama is being left with the proverbial bag of sh*t (that was a proverb, right?). The boodle boys get to keep their loot and the angry white guy can blame Obama, the Democrats, illegal aliens, coloreds and hippies who get abortions and smoke grass.

Expect to see films about illegal aliens as rats spreading disease across America, just like the Nazi propaganda films.

  "No doubt the politicians of the Weimar republic never thought the Nazis would obtain power. They only won roughly 30% of the vote in 1932, after all? The actual number of party members was much fewer than that. How could they destroy a democratic society with so few adherents?"

  The answer to that question is obscured in the brief account given in Wikipedia's page; even so, the Wikipedia account itself does point out that, so far from Weimar's politicians never imagining that Hitler might one day come to power, they watched as, at last,

  "Papen, his successor Kurt von Schleicher, and the nationalist press magnate Alfred Hugenberg spent December and January in political intrigues which eventually persuaded President Hindenburg that it was safe to appoint Hitler Reich Chancellor at the head of a cabinet which included only a minority of Nazi ministers, which he did on 30 January 1933."

  ________________

 "Chancellor Franz von Papen called another Reichstag election in November, hoping to find a way out of this impasse. The result was the same, with the Nazis and the KPD winning 50% of the vote between them and more than half the seats, rendering this Reichstag no more workable than its predecessor. But support for the Nazis had fallen to 33.1%, suggesting that the Nazi surge had passed its peak - possibly because the worst of the Depression had passed, possibly because some middle-class voters had supported Hitler in July as a protest but had now drawn back from the prospect of actually putting him into power. The Nazis interpreted the result as a warning that they must seize power before their moment passed. Had the other parties united, this could have been prevented, but their shortsightedness made a united front impossible. Papen, his successor Kurt von Schleicher, and the nationalist press magnate Alfred Hugenberg spent December and January in political intrigues which eventually persuaded President Hindenburg that it was safe to appoint Hitler Reich Chancellor at the head of a cabinet which included only a minority of Nazi ministers, which he did on 30 January 1933."

 

   You'll find better indicators in Ian Kershaw's [ http://www.amazon.com/Ian-Kershaw/e/B001ITX4WI/ref=sr_tc_2_0 ] work on Hitler and Nazism on how Hitler eventually came to power, including the fact that, despite all Hitler's many short-comings, he proved to have an immense appeal as an orator.  Whatever the relatively meager NSDAP membership, Hitler's voice and message reached and captured the imagination of many millions of Germans---especially by the time Hindenburg made his fateful decision.  By that time, it was thought that there was little alternative to allowing Hitler to assume the post which he demanded and claimed was his due.

   By the time he actually came to hold his first post as Reich Chancellor, Hitler was any _but a surprise.  Victor Klemperer [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Klemperer ] gives us a day-by-day account as a very perceptive eyewitness to it all in his brilliant diaries: http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1254405551/ref=sr_pg_1?ie=UTF8&rs=&keywords=victor%20klemperer%2 0diaries&rh=n%3A%211000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3Avictor%20klemperer%20diaries&page=1

   "They only won roughly 30% of the vote in 1932, after all?"

   this overlooks the fact that, in a parliamentary election, a mere 30% might amount to one the largest portions of the total totes cast.

09.30.09 - 4:04 PM
Full-Service Thuggery

A weirdly ominous story out of tiny Hardin, Montana, where the little-known, Blackwater-ish American Police Force, a global security and military training company, has taken over the town jail, which has no prisoners - having arrived in shiny SUVs with the logo of the Hardin police department, which doesn't exist. Who are these guys, and howcome their Bolero-themed website boasts that they interdict terror activity and sell weapons that include "Nuclear/Biological/Chemical (WMD)"?

"American Police Force is dedicated to maintaining our well-deserved professional reputation as a results oriented full-service private investigative and security agency by way of commitment, diligence, unique resources, creativity, and tenacity on behalf of our clients."

They are picking a different banner, arming and calling for the dear leader's head.

People might pay more taxes for a health care system, but would they literally fight for it?


Declaring the bottom is the only way back up..