A couple of things came together to help us remember how far we still have to go to wipe away the stain of the Bush years.
Andrew posts this today
The Barbarian Inside The Gate
"I was very struck also by Janet Napolitano’s comment, I hadn’t read it before to see her say that, that the number one priority is to bring [Hasan] to justice is such a knee-jerk comment and such a stupid comment. He’s going to be brought to justice. He is not going to be innocent of murder. There are a lot of eyewitnesses to that. They should just go ahead and convict him and put him to death," - William Kristol, appearing on Fox News.Let us be clear: this is a fascist statement.
You begin to understand now why these goons instituted torture. They have total contempt for the Western system of justice, utter contempt for the rule of law. Kristol here is all but calling for a lynching. This is what "conservatism" has come to: the worship of violence and revenge. It makes the Cheney years more comprehensible, doesn't it?
Yesterday I chatted with a particularly pungent example of the authoritarian follower on the Twitter:
HULAgate @GoToTwlv I'd make the argument that the ACLU and the rest of the Diversity First crowd should be tried right next to the 9-11 thugs.
HULAgate @GoToTwlv "The Nuremberg Trials dealt w/ officials of an actual state." Bin Laden says he's king of the camels. Who would argue with that?
HULAgate @GoToTwlv It is about lib Political Correctness run amok, just as Fort Hood was the victim of leftist stupidity playing enabler to terror.
HULAgate @GoToTwlv "Being terrorized can do that" Enough about the brave Dutch, how much did you give to Obama in 2008 to appease the PLO in 2009?
HULAgate @GoToTwlv And still, even after your jive, NO MERIT to AG Holder's stupid decision to re-terrorize the 9-11 victims. Some change, that one.
HULAgate @GoToTwlv So you're saying these were just more late term abortions, on 9-11? I can see how the loon left might take comfort in that, sure.
HULAgate @GoToTwlv Your lost liberal logic is rounder than Oprah's head. Holder has given Al Queda EXACTLY what they wanted, on a Tiffany TV platter.
@HULAgate hey, F-the victims right? NY & DC R overwhelmingly liberal/socialist/muslim lovers right? Prob lots of ACLU mbrs too! U think bad about 16 hours ago
@HULAgate I'm sorry that after 233 years this country's resilience and strength has not yet become apparent to you. I gotta go. about 16 hours ago
@HULAgate Friend, for anarchy/death/fear to occur a terrorist needs *us* to be scared, die or abandon our society's rules.They care abt us about 16 hours ago
@HULAgate How come you guys flit from one topic to another? A lack of commitment 2 serious discussion. Being terrorized can do that to a guy about 17 hours ago
@HULAgate You are classy. And you're responding just the way a terrorist would want you too.
(Side note: I remember starting a new job in September of '93. My new boss, an idiot of the first order, had a homemade 'Impeach Clinton' bumbersticker on his ratty Honda. 1993!)
27% of the country still likes Palin.
AMY GOODMAN: [John Dean,] talk about your research, going back in time, what social science you drew from.
JOHN DEAN: Right. What happened in looking for answers, I first went down a lot of bad alleys, where nothing was there. Then I ran into this body of research that really commenced after World War II, where social scientists were trying to figure out if we could ever have in the United States what had happened in Italy and Germany under Hitler and Mussolini. And the short answer was, they found, yes, we could have that. There is clearly an authoritarian personality.
The initial research was very Freudian-based. Other researchers quickly, who debated that and didn’t think that was the most solid, began asking empirical questions, asking surveys of people, and developing scales to determine, you know, which personalities were more likely to become followers and those that are leaders.
So they did develop—now we have 40 years of this material, and it has been replicated time and time again, and we know an awful lot about this type of personality. There are people who submit very easily to an authority figure. They do it because they’re frightened. 9/11 drove an awful lot of people into submitting to authoritarianism, and they’re very aggressive once they submit. This explains a lot of the incivility, the nastiness, the mean-spiritedness. They’re not self-critical, and they become true advocates, not unlike the clips you saw earlier in the show, of whatever position they’re advocating and pushing.AMY GOODMAN: One of the quotes you begin with is Jonathan Schell. “The administration of George W. Bush is not a dictatorship, but it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form,” he writes.
JOHN DEAN: Yes, well taken. I must say that as somebody who was in a White House where it was dubbed an imperial presidency, which had its own authoritarian nature, we now have a presidency that is the imperial presidency on steroids. They have really bulked it up. It is unchecked by the Congress.
I found when I started looking and applying this research, Amy, that it really starts in the Congress, and it blossoms there in the congressional leadership, setting up a very almost dictatorial system within the House. And then, when Bush and Cheney come in in 2000, they give all this a new legitimacy. 9/11, they exploit that further and give it more legitimacy. And it’s a very troublesome thing, because it is proto-fascist behavior.
Now, are we on the road to fascism? No. The problem is we’re not very far from it. And I’m told by the experts in that area that if it comes here, it will come with a smile on its face, and we’ll give up things that we’ll wish we’d never given up.
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