Flutterby™! : The "fringe left" was right 2009-08-20 23:45:27.738401+00

The "fringe left" was right

2009-08-20 23:45:27.738401+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Glenn Greenwald: Fringe leftist losers: wrong even when they're right. Some musings about why the mainstream called everyone who suggested that the "terror alerts" were politically motivated, in the face of Tom Ridge saying that he resigned because he was asked to raise the terror alert level before the 2004 U.S. Presidential election.

And I giggle and cringe that 39% of Americans (and 62% of McCain voters) think the government should stay out of Medicare.

I do have to admit that I do want in on the "Pubic Option": Funniest signs from the healthcare meeting protests (Strongly suspect that most of those signs are plants).

We live in an Idiocracy. Fact, thought and reason have no place in the public "discourse." The arbiter of decision making is adrenaline.

I wonder if pre-WWII Germany looked and sounded like this before the third Reich became more organized, uniformed and orchestrated. We have an enraged confused populace that could be directed to strike out at anything and everything. One must wonder where it is all going. It would be funny if it weren't so terrifying.

Pre-war Germany, yes. Pre-war US as well. We had Chas. Lindbergh praising Nazism, and Fathr Coughlin in the role now filled by Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck, et al.

This is the basic argument against democracy dating back to Plato and Aristotle - that the people are too incompetent to rule themselves - that a class of "Philosopher Kings" should rule. Unfortunately, we have too many supposed Philosophers...

This may have been an argument against democracy, but it is an affliction not limited to democracy. A basic technique for the "popular" overthrow of established power.

I am aware of the hatred of Father Couglhin, the Nazism of Lindbergh and many major American families including the coup they planned against FDR. The "Red Menace" of the '30s and McCarthyism. But I don't know how to compare what happened then to what is happening now. It seems that the current level of insanity is reaching an extreme level of intensity.

I don't recall this level of vitriol and upheaval even during the Vietnam War protests -- the others are before my time. That may just be because I am an old fart caught up in imagined exigencies of the moment. The panic is not occurring in the streets as it did in the '60s, but rather deep within the structure of the government. COINTELPRO and its ilk could not compare to the damage done by the Patriot Act, the formal legal acceptance of torture, damage to habeas corpus and other Magna Carta based protections, and a laundry list of crimes that make anything Nixon did look like a school boy's misbehavior.

This is I suppose the major problem in applied history and politics. The emotional immediacy of the moment has far greater impact than the drier fact(oids) of the past. Having been trained in the physical sciences, I always thought that having standardized measures of hate, fear, love, etc would go a long way towards improving the softer fields of study ;^>