Thinking about the election.....

I am thoroughly sick of the election coverage right now. This has been going on since November 2008. Sarah Palin is suffering from overexposure (and not just the Alaskan weather kind) and I can't keep track anymore of which vitriolic right-wing candidate's followers have arrested or beaten up people who disagree with the candidate. Joe Miller, Rand Paul, they all run together after a while. Personally, I think private retinues of political thugs is a rather ominous phenomenon. Alas, I'm not talking about Roderick Spode again.

The Tea Party is a formidable opponent, far more ferocious than the old-line institutional Republicans like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. They have a broad appeal to the people who feel they've been given short shrift by the system. Most of them are, however, probably mad at the government for what was actually done to them by their health insurance companies, employers, or banks, or the general and continuous slide in real wages since the 1970s, rather than the government.... but it is hard to get that point across. In any case, they're mad as hell and are lashing out at the most visible and vulnerable target. After all, you can't vote out the head of your HMO after your benefits have been slashed.

In that respect, they're not that different in motivation than the progressives who voted the Democrats into control of Congress in 2008, and into the White House in 2008. Some of them are probably even the same people.

Still, when the Tea Party puts the Republicans back in charge of the House, it won't be the hellraisers who get the prominent seats and the most power. We'll be back to guys like McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, et al., most of whom have been in DC for ages. Even if Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, or any of the other current crop of Tea Party heart-throbs get elected, they'll be reduced to cogs in a machine controlled by older men with very different priorities, including an affinity for corporate economics and an ill-concealed disdain for the people and populism, even as manifested in the Tea Party. There is seldom any gratitude in politics.

Thus the irony.

It also says a great deal about the respective priorities of the Obama White House and the Republican machine that while the White House has imposed strict new disclosure and access requirements for lobbyists and has fought for campaign finance reform, the Republican candidates in this year's election benefit from the Citizens United windfall, which opened the gates to a flood of unregulated cash from anonymous donors. The Republicans are outspending Democrats seven to one on media advertisements, and it hasn't escaped public notice that multimillionaires in New York are meddling in congressional elections in Oregon by essentially laundering money through a 527.

For all that President Obama and his supporters have accomplished in the last year and a half-- and the list is really impressive, to those who bother to read it-- it was unlikely the Democrats would retain even their nominal control of Congress after the midterms.

That the Democrats managed to accomplish what they did in the face of such entrenched, well-coordinated, and well-funded opposition is extremely impressive.

I call it a nominal control because of two things. The Republicans managed to get a great deal of mileage out of simply saying 'no' and filibustering at every opportunity, and because the Democratic majority was a paper tiger that depended too heavily on Blue Dogs, many of whom are 'conservatives in the wrong party,' so to speak-- leftovers from before Goldwater and Nixon turned the Republican party into what it is now. Once you stop counting the Blue Dogs as Democrats (which Reid and Pelosi might well have done, since they couldn't count on Blue Dog support without heaps of pork), the Democrats didn't have any kind of a majority at all.

Most importantly, the expectation that the Democrats will take losses in the 2010 election isn't sour grapes or pessimism, it's based in historical reality.

Incumbent parties almost always take a brutal walloping in the midterm after a new president is elected. The most recent such midterm, in 2002, was an anomaly, largely because of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Even in midterms in general, every midterm election for the last 70 years has resulted in the President's party losing seats in Congress, with exactly three exceptions-- 1934, 1998, and 2002.

I must admit, though, that the Democrats are actually doing better than I expected.

What I find exasperating, however, is how many Democratic candidates like Chet Edwards, Jason Altmire, and Joe Manchin have essentially given in to the right wing's demonization of the President, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and (perhaps most of all) Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most of these guys are essentially Blue Dogs anyways, and fighting for their lives against Republicans, but it is infuriating nonetheless.

The Republicans, for their part, generally wasted no time in running away from George W. Bush after 2006. I'm sure the world still wonders why.

I think part of the problem is that the public is just grossly misinformed about the issues.

TARP didn't start under Obama, it started under Bush.

So did the auto industry bailout.

The deregulation that allowed the crash of 2008 also happened under Bush, but Obama did something about that.

Most of 'Obamacare' consisted of strictures binding on health insurers, not the consumer, and were certainly more to the benefit of the consumer than the Republican bill of 2005, which forbade Medicare from negotiating pharmaceutical prices and gave Big Pharma the right to charge whatever it wanted.

The Obama administration actually CUT taxes for most people, which begs the question of exactly what reality most of the Tea Party howlers live in.

I'd particularly like to know how many people in the US actually understand what socialism is and how it works, as opposed to just parroting right-wing talking points.

In general, the election coverage as a whole increasingly begs the question of whether a non-conservative administration, candidate, or party can expect a fair shake from an increasingly partisan news media. Jon Stewart really IS the hardest-hitting journalist in the media, and I'm appalled by that fact too.

By partisan, of course, I certainly do not mean the mythical "liberal media." I point as an example, rather, to the network whose owner has donated millions of dollars to Republican party organs, and whose primary media outlet once used as a defense in court the argument that the media has no obligation to tell the truth.

The result ultimately remains to be seen......

Is Offshore Drilling a Legitimate Enterprise?

Offshore oil drilling has, in the last two years, attracted more attention from the general United States public than it has had at any point in its history. Even before the April 20, 2010 disaster that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drill rig and unleashed a torrent of crude oil into the waters and beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, offshore drilling had developed into a significant battleground issue with economic, cultural, and political dimension.


Depending on one’s point of view, offshore drilling is a necessary evil, a legitimate exploitation of natural resources, a second-best option forced on the oil and gas industry by excessive regulation of possible onshore oilfields, or a dangerous process justified only by profit and the US’s dependence on petroleum.


The dispute over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska has recurred in Congress every few years since drilling was first proposed in 1977, and was a major rallying point for liberals after the Bush administration endorsed the idea in 2005. The chant of “Drill, baby, drill,” first heard at the 2008 Republican National Convention, likewise served as a rallying cry for conservatives during the latter part of the 2008 election and on through the first years of the Obama administration, right up until the news of the Deepwater Horizon disaster hit the world news on the morning of April 21, 2010.


This public tumult comes at a time when offshore drilling has, for all its hazards, become a vital part of the United States’ energy economy. A steadily increasing percentage of domestically-produced oil and natural gas comes from offshore sources: in 2009, 31% of the nation’s domestically-produced crude oil and 11% of its domestically-produced natural gas came from offshore wells in the Gulf of Mexico alone. Data gathered by NOAA and MMS accounts for 3,858 oil platforms in just two of the “planning areas” in US waters in the Gulf of Mexico. According to a 2009 Minerals Management Service report, “proved reserves in the Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are estimated to be 20.30 billion barrels of oil and 183.7 trillion cubic feet of gas from 1,229 proved fields,” or roughly twice as much oil and seven times as much natural gas as the Prudhoe Bay cornucopia on the northern shores of Alaska was estimated to contain when that oilfield was first developed in the 1960s.


The complexity of offshore drilling has also grown immensely in the last several decades. In 1983, the deepest offshore well in the world was drilled in 760 feet of water, 13 miles off the coast of San Pedro, CA. A quarter century later, dozens of new wells are being installed each year in deep-sea locations (1 to 1.5 miles deep) and much further offshore; depths that were once extraordinary are now perforce normal. In 2009 alone, over three hundred new production wells were drilled in US waters in the Gulf, and nearly two-thirds of the active oil leases in the Gulf are in water more than 1,000 feet deep.


These deepwater locations are comparable to the one that blew out in April 2010 –designated MC 252-- during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, since most of them are being installed in the same oil and gas bearing geological formations. The deeper the water and the deeper the drilling, the more complex, expensive, and dangerous the operation becomes. Somewhat ironically, the last well the Horizon had completed prior to beginning the fateful one was the deepest well yet drilled at the time, a whopping 30,918 feet into the seabed under 4,132 feet of water.


The reason drilling in such difficult or sensitive areas has increased so dramatically is simple. The global oil economy is rapidly approaching “Hubbert’s peak,” a phenomenon first predicted by the scientist M. King Hubbert in 1956 and commonly known as “peak oil.” While new oil and gas resources can still be found, much of the accessible oil – the “reserves” or “proven reserves” in industry and governmental language-- has been consumed or is currently being extracted. In order to expand production or to replace wellfields that have ceased producing worthwhile quantities of oil and gas, the petroleum industry has to look to other sources, and what is left is more difficult and expensive to get. The days when a wildcatter in Texas or Wyoming could find vast new oilfields simply by looking for oil sheens on creeks are long gone. In many cases ‘new’ sources such as those in ANWR or the tar sands of western Canada have been known about for decades, but the cost/benefit balance that would render them profitable didn’t work out until oil became more scarce, driving up the worth of a resource that in earlier decades was of negligible value and making it cost-effective to exploit the resource.


On June 4, Sarah Palin complained on her Facebook page that “Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country's energy needs, but your [referring to ‘radical environmentalists’] protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It's catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it." This allegation is simply not true. What is true, though, is that most of the allegedly “safer” areas are already producing, already exhausted, or are too inaccessible, small, or difficult to be worthwhile. Most of them aren’t actually any safer, when all things considered.


The dilemma of whether to drill in ANWR or the ocean is a complex one. In either case, there is the potential for irreversible destruction of the environment—neither area is truly ‘safer’ than the other. Each area is home to numerous rare species of animal and plant life, who would be trampled and poisoned.


Other concerns include possible incompatibilities with other uses of the areas. The Gulf of Mexico, for example, is both a major commercial fishing area and crosshatched with scores of shipping lanes, and freighter captains enjoy navigating hundred-thousand-ton cargo ships through an obstacle course of oil platforms about as much as fishermen enjoy pulling up nets full of oil-poisoned shrimp.


Drilling in the ANWR or other remote areas is also not much simpler or cheaper than drilling in mile-deep water tens or hundreds of miles out to sea, or for that matter, not much easier than drilling at the South Pole. Consider the Prudhoe Bay oilfields, where a massive infrastructure of roads, pipelines, well complexes, oil storage facilities, supertankers, and company towns had to be constructed in a bitterly hostile arctic environment in order to extract the oil and get it to market. The 800-mile Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System alone cost $8 billion. All of this infrastructure is extremely expensive to operate and maintain. There is even a television show about the truck drivers who regularly ferry supplies north across the ice and tundra. The truth is that as profitable as it has proven, Prudhoe Bay wasn’t considered economically worthwhile until the gasoline shortages of the early 1970s drove petroleum prices up sharply.


The oil industry routinely weighs the costs of a offshore drilling against on-shore drilling, based on the amount and quality of oil and gas that could be extracted, and the cost to get it out of the ground and onto the market. A fifth-generation mobile drill rig such as the Deepwater Horizon—built at the cost of half a billion dollars, and with a billing rate of nearly half a million dollars a day for the rig, her crew, and all the support ships and other necessities—is a major item on any budget sheet. Add to that against the costs of having to fit out another arctic oilfield on the scale of Prudhoe Bay. BP is, in fact, contemplating exactly such a project, involving constructing an artificial island in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska.


Offshore drilling is an intrinsically dangerous and environmentally risky process. It can be done safely, if the proper safeguards are in place to prevent spills or to clean up pollution before it does too much damage. The problem is that the equipment and infrastructure to cope with oil pollution on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon’s simply does not exist. While a great deal of thought and effort has been put into devices such as blowout preventers and “Christmas trees,” which are intended to prevent spills, it is surprising to see how little the art and science of cleaning a spill up has advanced since the late 1960s, when the primary source of spills were leaks from ships in harbors rather than the relatively few and comparatively small offshore drilling and production rigs in use at the time. Despite the media attention given to “magic boxes,” “top hats,” and similar devices used in attempts to shut off the flow of oil and gas from the well, the primary tools for cleaning up spilled oil are still containment booms, skimmers, pumps, and brute manpower, and they are wholly inadequate for combating spills of the current magnitude.


Congressman John Culbertson of Texas described the Deepwater Horizon disaster as a ‘statistical anomaly’ in a June 18 open letter to President Obama, in which he protested the federal government reinstating its off-again, on-again moratorium on new offshore drilling. In one sense he is correct—only one of the thousands of wells in the Gulf blew out. On the other hand, consider the amount of damage this one well has done, the inability of BP and the federal government to cope with the disaster, and the amount of destruction that even three or four more blowouts of the same size could wreak.


In the long run, however, the choice between wildlife preserve and ocean will ultimately disappear, once scarcity and the inevitable depletion of existing oilfields has driven the cost of oil up and availability down. The situation will change from an either/or decision to a both/and situation, in which the US is forced by economic necessity to drill everywhere there is oil, regardless of the increasing costs to extract it.


Prudhoe Bay is estimated to be four-fifths depleted. Unless the US can reduce its dependence on petroleum, it will ultimately face the need to drill in both areas regardless of cost and consequences, simply because it cannot do without the oil. Bearing that sad truth in mind, the nation should seriously attempt on a large scale what has been often talked about over the last twenty years, but towards which nothing has been done—developing renewable energy sources and reducing the need for fossil fuels.

Obama vs. Carville vs. BP vs. Me.

I saw this on the Huffington Post this morning, and since I generally find James Carville about as pleasant as an ingrown hair, I wanted to offer a few comments on some of his comments about President Obama.


Carville, a Louisiana political commentator who was an advisor to the Clinton presidency, has blasted the president for a “lackadaisical and naïve” approach to the Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed eleven men, has shut down one of the nation’s largest fisheries, and threatens to ruin the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico.


Whatever any of their other shortcomings may be, neither the President nor the federal government should be held responsible for what has happened to date, because up to this point (and probably continuing for the near future) the federal government has not been in charge of the situation-- BP has, because BP created the mess in the first place.


The federal government became involved for two reasons. First, certain federal agencies, such as the Coast Guard, have jurisdiction over environmental disasters that occur in the waters of the United States. This, I should point out, in no way excuses Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen for his practice of simply parroting whatever BP says. The second reason is that the sheer scale of the disaster has made it into a problem for the entire region.


Fox News and other right-wing news outlets have given a great deal of attention to the concept of the Deepwater Horizon being “Obama’s Katrina,” a reference to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina which devastated the Gulf coast, rendered the city of New Orleans uninhabitable, and revealed the egregious and criminal incompetence of the Bush administration in so plain a fashion that it probably cost the Republican party the 2006 midterm elections as well as the 2008 elections. “Heckuva job, Brownie.”


The essential difference between Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon disaster is, of course, that the oil spill is manmade. More to the point, it is the result of man’s—whether BP, Transocean, or Halliburton is moot—negligence and complacency. The particular “men” involved are the private sector, not the government. This isn’t Obama’s Katrina, this is the oil industry’s Katrina.


Over the past month, since the explosion and fire which sank the Deepwater Horizon occurred, BP has continuously downplayed and obfuscated details of the magnitude of the spill, such that the quantity of oil and gas released per day is now known to be an order of magnitude larger than BP’s initial estimates. There is no excuse for that—any engineer could calculate the daily volume of oil simply by looking at the size of the pipe and the rate the oil was exiting it, which is child’s play when you have a camera-equipped robot staring right at the blown-out well. BP didn’t release footage of their observations of the well until three weeks after the blowout and fire, but even so it was plain even from just what was visible on the water’ surface that BP’s estimates were bogus.


Investigations and whistle-blowing have also revealed that much of the drill rig’s safety equipment didn’t work, and that BP and its contractors skipped important tests that would likely have warned of the impending disaster. That may sound like Monday-morning quarterbacking, but there is a very good reason that safety equipment and well logging are standard practices in the oil drilling industry—they prevent disasters and save lives. Likewise, there is no excuse for BP not having proven contingency measures ready to go, so that they would not have to resort to trying one bit of oilpatch jargon (“junk shot,” “top kill,” etc) after another, only to watch them fail because the water is too deep or the blowout too intense. Even relatively simple things required by BP’s permit, like as-built blueprints or having barges laden with spill booms and crews trained to lay them properly, turned out to be deficient or missing entirely.


The federal government’s error, as evidence has shown, lay in taking BP at its word, trusting the oil company to do (and to be able to do) what it said it would do. BP signed the lease for the oilfield, took out the permit, claimed it could drill safely, said it had contingency plans if anything were to go wrong, and assumed the responsibility for handling leaks or spills. Bear in mind, however, that BP arguably has the worst safety record of any major petroleum company in the United States—in just the last five years, it has had several major spills, one refinery explosion in 2005, and another refinery shut down out of safety and pollution concerns. Exxon was responsible for the Prince William Sound disaster, it is true, but at least Exxon learned from the experience and, for whatever its other faults, now at least walks the walk on safety and emergency preparedness issues.

It is not now, and has never been, the role of the federal government to hover over every well, refinery, pipeline, or filling station, or to immediately jump on every oil spill. The federal government is not a first-responder service. The government’s job is to set a standard of care (in the form of statute and regulations) that is intended to keep manmade disasters to a minimum, and the private sector is supposed to obey the regulations. Regulations are not in force only when the MMS or EPA inspector is onboard the rig—they are in force all the time, and drillers must obey them all the time. Blaming the government for BP’s failures and negligence is akin to the man who built a house badly, only to have it fall down, blaming the building inspector for not forcing him to build a better house.

None of this bears directly on the President—he is, after all, the President, and not a BP engineer or an EPA spill-response coordinator. While the spill has turned into a major regional disaster, the cleanup mechanisms are several dozen pay grades below the Oval Office. If Carville wants to vent his spleen at anyone, I would suggest BP, the Minerals Management Service, the Bush Administration (who authorized the drilling), or perhaps the Coast Guard. He should remember, however, that the sins of these various government agencies consist in that they trusted BP too much, and that the ultimate fault therefore devolves on BP.


BP doubtless has its own motivations here—to restore the immense damage to its reputation, which has turned the company into a pop culture laughingstock, and to save money by stopping the release in the most expeditious way possible. Some of these motivations are, at best, tangential to the desires of the government and the public, who want the spill cleaned up, the environment restored, and the fishermen and others whose livelihoods have been disrupted to be compensated. BP, meanwhile, wrote a blank check to its Gulf-area franchises and subsidiaries to deluge the media with advertising, ostensibly on behalf of gulf states’ tourism boards, advertising open beaches and fresh seafood.


It’s the very old story. Greg Palast recently summed it up thusly:

Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby, Toyota accelerators speed us to our death, banks blow our savings on gambling sprees and crude oil smothers the Mississippi. Then, suddenly, it's, "Where was hell was the government? Why didn't the government do something to stop it?”

In short, the federal government has to take over because the private sector failed…….. again. That should be quite clear by now, at least to anyone short of Rush Limbaugh or Rand Paul—the former has alleged that environmentalists blew the oil rig up, and the latter has, in a spate of fundamentalist libertarianism, called Obama’s supposedly harsh approach to BP’s actions “un-American” for assaulting a corporation that plays a big part in the American economy.

In one sense I agree with Rand Paul’s extreme syndicalist outlook—certainly not one unreimbursed cent of public money should be spent on cleaning up a spill caused by a private sector operation which was engaged in exploiting for profit resources owned by the public.

I wonder…. If you give people enough rope, they can proverbially hang themselves with it. Does the same apply to giving BP enough boom?

Americans can be terrorists too

Americans can be terrorists too

Most national news agencies in the United States have by now reported that federal law-enforcement agencies raided the homes and other facilities of a militia organization, the Hutaree Militia, over the weekend. The raids, in which the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force cooperated, were staged in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.

U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade stated that agents took action the group because the militia members were planning a significant attack for an undetermined date in April. The plan reportedly involved murdering a law enforcement officer and then ambushing the funeral procession with explosive devices in order to kill more police officers. Nine persons, all members of the Hutaree Militia, were charged on Monday with seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosive materials, and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence. Other allegations about the Hutaree included reports that several Muslim leaders, including Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on Islamic-American Relations of Michigan, that the Hutaree had made repeated threats of violence against them.

What little is known of the hitherto virtually unknown Hutaree group is not exactly flattering. News reports published in the wake of the raids, many of them citing the group’s own website, portray the Hutaree organization a small, secretive, heavily-armed and militantly fundamentalist Christian militia, whose primary focus lies in preparing to fight alongside a returned Jesus Christ during the supposedly imminent events which they believe to be foretold in the Book of Revelation. By way of a mission statement, the group’s website declaims:

“Jesus wanted us to be ready to defend ourselves using the sword and stay alive using equipment. The only thing on earth to save the testimony and those who follow it, are the members of the testimony, til [sic] the return of Christ in the clouds. We, the Hutaree, are prepared to defend all those who belong to Christ and save those who aren’t. We will still spread the word, and fight to keep it, up to the time of the great coming.”

Several spokesmen of the South Michigan Volunteer Militia (SMVM) quickly denounced the Hutaree, stating that although members of the Hutaree group had on occasion trained with the SMVM, the two groups otherwise had nothing to do with each other. Michael Lackomar, a SMVM spokesman, referred to the Hutaree as a “cult,” “who believe that this is the end of the world as prophesized by the Bible and it is their duty to take up arms to fight alongside Jesus against the impending forces of Satan."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines ‘domestic terrorism’ as

“the unlawful use, or threatened use, of violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States (or its territories) without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”

As of this writing, the national media has steadfastly avoided calling the Hutaree Militia members arrested last weekend terrorists, instead employing a wide array of euphemisms ranging from ‘alleged militia’ to ‘Christian warriors,’ and Attorney McQuade has attempted to downplay the role of religion in the group’s intentions, the group’s own professed doctrine, objectives, and website notwithstanding.

This series of raids will, of course, do nothing to calm the increasingly frenzied and potentially militant right wing movements currently agitating in the United States, a population that includes innumerable organizations similar to the SMVM and the Hutaree. Other, similar organizations may well take the federal government’s raids as persecution of the right-thinking, as proof that the militia organizations’ beliefs about the feds’ dictatorial ambitions were right all along, much in the same way that the disastrous 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian organization in Waco, Texas stirred up a tide of right-wing resentment that culminated in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

There is nothing new about political violence in the United States. This country has a long history of violence born of political agendas and prejudices, including the Indian Wars, pitched battles fought during labor unrest (e.g. the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado), sectarian religious violence (e.g. the KKK’s attacks on Catholics and Jews), radical leftist violence during the 1960s, outright domestic terrorism such as the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, and of course the American Civil War, which remains the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history. In more recent years, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization who track militias, white supremacists, and other racist organizations, identified some 75 instances of domestic terrorism between the years of 1995 and 2009.

The Indian Wars aside, many of these incidents can be characterized as clashes between conservative and liberal groups, whether it is the Weathermen’s bombing campaign of the late 1960s and early 1970s, racial violence by the KKK in order to intimidate African-Americans and preserve white political hegemony, or reactionary use by corporations of private armies of Pinkerton “detectives” to intimidate striking workers during labor troubles of the late 19^th Century.

The early 1990s was the most recent previous heyday of right-wing domestic trouble. Although some militia groups such as the Posse Comitatus had existed as far back as the early 1980s, most (including the SMVM) were formed in the early 1990s in response to what many people saw as a series of unlawful actions by the federal government, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Brady Bill and other restrictions on private firearms, the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, the Ruby Ridge standoff, and the siege of the Freemen Militia compound in Jordan Montana. A further inspiration were the 1992 riots in Los Angeles and several other cities, which raised the specters of social collapse, race war, and similar issues.

The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the high-water mark of the antigovernment domestic terrorism movement during the 1990s, perhaps because the appalling carnage shocked many in the militia groups and other organizations into backing away from outright violence and talk of overthrow, and retreating into talk radio and the then-burgeoning Internet.

The movement was virtually quiescent during the Bush administration’s tenure in office, either because they perceived their great nemesis, the federal government, to be under the control of people more aligned to their own views than previously, and partly because of the patriotic pressure-cooker environment that enveloped the country for several years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC. Fears of the Zionist Occupied Government (to use a term embraced by some militant fringe groups) suddenly took a back seat to fears of foreign terrorism and subversion.

One of the common themes linking together groups as diverse as the anti-communist and paleoconservative John Birch Society, the SMVM, the antiabortion Army of God, and neo-Nazi groups such as the Aryan Nations or the World Church of the Creator, is the belief that the federal government is either not to be trusted, if not outright illegitimate. The objective of many such groups is thus to defend themselves against excessive government intrusion, or in some extreme cases such as the Hutaree, to overthrow the government outright.

Conspiracy theories involving the federal government, the United Nations or secret government agencies became so pervasive during the 1990s that idioms such as “the tin-foil hat crowd” or references to black helicopters entered popular culture. The black helicopter meme, in fact, was the creation of Mark “Mark from Michigan” Koernke, a militia activist and talk radio personality who later served seven years in prison for assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest.

The phenomenon of the conspiracy theory as a motivator in politics was recognized several decades ago in Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” an exploration of the circumstances of the arch-conservative Barry Goldwater’s victory over the more moderate Nelson Rockefeller for the Republican presidential nomination, and arguably the most succinct summing-up of modern US politics yet written. Hofstadter’s introduction might as well refer to the events of the present day:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

As Hofstadter recounts, ‘paranoia’ and the fear of political, social, or economic conspiracies have been a major theme of politics in the history of the United States, extending from a distrust of the Jesuits and esoteric quasi-Masonic groups in the early days of the Republic, to Freemasons in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, to the military-industrial complex during the Cold War, to New World Order bêtes noirs like the Bilderberg Group and Trilateral Commission and so on, even into the 21^st century with allegations of corporate price-gouging on necessities such as gasoline.

Parenthetically, none of these ‘conspiracy theory’ ideas are new ideas in and of themselves—the allegations of FEMA-run concentration camps, for example, date back to the 1980s and the Reagan Administration’s “Operation Pegasus,” the black-ops continuity-of-government program headed by National Security Advisor Oliver North (himself now a Fox News television presenter), which would theoretically have placed the United States under martial law administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Operation Pegasus went through numerous drills, culminating in an operation codenamed Rex 84 (Readiness Exercise, 1984) that, as revealed during Lt. Col. North’s testimony on the Iran Contra affair, tested the preparedness of the federal government to detain large numbers of US citizens in the event of disaster or domestic unrest. Rex 84, in turn, had its origins in conceptual plans prepared by retired General Louis Giuffrida (who was later Reagan’s director of FEMA) for sequestering most of the African-American population (“21 million Negroes”) in the event of an uprising by the Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, or other militant groups.

Much of the acute antigovernment sentiment of the radical fringe during the 1990s stemmed from their resentment of the Clinton administration’s pre-1994 policies, before the Democratic establishment was eviscerated by the Republican victory in the 1994 elections. The main worry stemmed from the fear that the “liberal,” activist, and overreaching government so thoroughly vilified by conservative pundits, talk radio personalities, and politicians would (possibly in conjunction with foreign powers) use federal power to strip people of their Constitutional rights and institute a totalitarian state. An alternative hypothesis is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the weakening of Japan as an economic power, certain social elements characterized by militant patriotism and other ideologies needed a new “other” to dislike.

The dichotomy between anti-government militancy when out of power and “for reasons of national security” when in power is a recurring theme for the right wing over the last three decades, but it is difficult to make generalizations about the militant right-wing fringe’s attitudes towards the government during the Bush administration’s second term. On the one hand, white male, conservative, and evangelical Christians were still nominally in charge and were saying all the right things, but the administration as a whole had ‘betrayed’ the cause on several fronts, notably failure to restrict legal and illegal immigration, one of the main hot-button issues of the day.

The more liberal elements of society at the time fretted over the increasingly intense and overtly Christian character of the political culture in Washington and the ‘red states,’ especially when it came to issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and the separation of church and state -- cases in point, the Defense of Marriage Amendment, the White House’s Faith-Based Initiatives, covert or overt religious litmus tests for public office, the teaching of evolution, and abstinence-only sex education in schools.

On the other hand, however, as the Bush administration staggered through its second term and as the election wars began, many in the right-wing fringe gave up on the Republican establishment, accusing them of having let the side down, so to speak. Much of this populist fury was subsequently given substance in the “Tea Party” organizations that arose in 2009.

The revival of the militant right wing after the election of President Obama was perhaps to be expected, given the tensions attendant on the election of a liberal black Democrat after eight years of notionally conservative government, and eight years before that of a Democratic president politically outgunned by a vigorous conservative block in Congress. President Obama receives about thirty death threats per day, which is a record number according to the Secret Service. The number of right-wing militia groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law center, has increased 240% in just two years, adding over 300 new groups in one year alone.

During the 2008 presidential campaign alone, various right-wing organs, some mainstream and some not, accused then-Senator Obama of being variously a crypto-Muslim, a socialist, and an outright Communist. Allegations that he is not by birth a US citizen persist on talk radio and in other conservative and fringe circles. He was further tarred with the brush of all the usual accusations—being a tool of the Bilderberg Group, United Nations, New World Order, or one of a hundred other ‘anti-American’ bêtes noirs, with alleged goals including wanting to nationalize the health care industry, ban private firearms, etc. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

The rupturing of the Republican establishment’s conservative hegemony in 2006, followed by its outright collapse in 2008, signaled that the conservative movement’s following had shrunk. Eight years of the Bush administration, with two stagnated and expensive wars, economic collapse, and revelations of rampant corruption and cronyism, had soured many moderated, independents, and fellow-travelers on the movement, and what was left in the cold light of January 2009 was a party and a movement that had shrunk like a dried plum, losing much of the malleable outer part but retaining the hard inner core.

This should not be taken to mean that all conservatives or Republicans are members of the radical fringe or espouse anything like the same ideas. If the Republican party and the conservative movement (and their respective national leadership cadres) are far more closely tied to and influenced by the hardliners and the radical fringe of the right wing in 2010 than they were ten years previously, however it is because most of the other people jumped ship after 2006, leaving the hardliners and fringe as a higher proportion of what remained.

The crowning irony of the right wing in the United States is, when you get right down to it, how ideologically diverse that end of the political spectrum is. It is a testament to the extent to which politics can make strange bedfellows that antigovernment libertarians, who resent every intrusion of government into their concept of a private sphere, with white supremacist or white separatist groups, or would-be theocrats who wish to see the government enforce Biblical laws and codes of morality for all citizens.

Theoretically, there are two common threads of conservatism in US society—fiscal conservatism, which is concerned largely with the role of government as an administrative and financial structure, and social conservatism, which has a notionally broader spectrum that includes views on race, morality, religion, social order, and the like. The two are neither distinct nor inherently opposed, however, and tend to overlap a great deal.

One of the most significant sea changes in modern-day politics in the United States is the increased influence of evangelical Christianity, if not as an outright ideology then as an organizing principle. Indeed, numerous polls by Rasmussen, Zogby, and others have shown that evangelical Christians, as a block, were instrumental in getting George W. Bush elected president and keeping him there, and played a similar role in the Republican domination of Congress that began during the Clinton administration.

The so-called “religious right” of the political spectrum in US society, a broad-brush term for social and religious conservatives as a subset of conservatism as a whole, and comprised, primarily evangelical Protestant Christians. The religious right is decidedly outspoken and ambitious, and is one of the primary motivators of the radical right. Between end-times groups like the Hutaree, other religiously motivated groups such as the antiabortion and would-be theocratic Creator’s Rights Party run by Neal Horsley and the Army of God, and the occasional fundamentalist outburst about or within government itself (Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, for example, or the role of the so-called “Family” to which a number of Republican legislators belong) there is a tremendous social and political pressure from the right for government and society to conform to their wishes.

The point is, you cannot easily separate religion as an ideology, meme, or motivator from a society of the religious, since religion is part of what makes a society what it is. This is arguably why the principle of a separation between church and state was important to the founding fathers of the US, drawing on the experiences of the Huguenots of France and the various non-Church of England sects in the United Kingdom—not only to protect the state from the influence of religion, but to protect religion from the influence of the state. This is also why Attorney McQuade’s attempt to downplay the role of religion in the Hutaree plans are, to say the least, quite disingenuous.

Some of the more significant religious concepts emphasized by the militant fringe of the right wing include:

• Antinomianism, or the belief that a supposed divine law supersedes the laws of a civil government, with the corollary in some circles that obedience to civil law is not necessary for one’s salvation. An inversion of this concept, also common in some circles, holds that Christians are obligated to resist civil law in instances where law and their interpretation of the Bible conflict, for example in cases in which religiously-motivated antiabortion protesters murdered physicians. Enforcement of civil laws that contravene supposed divine law—including protecting the civil rights granted to others—is often interpreted as oppression of Christians.

• Dominionism, also sometimes called Theonomy, or the belief that the sole appropriate law of the land is the divine law (as distinct from theocracy, government by a deity or by clergy), applied equally to Christians and to anyone else who lives there. This concept is sometimes entangled with religious interpretations of ‘American exceptionalism,’ such as the latter-day Puritan belief that America was founded as a divinely-sanctioned ‘city on a hill’ or the oft-uttered, baseless assertion that “America is a Christian nation.” One corollary to this theory, embraced by some groups such as the Army of God and the Hutaree, is that any government not founded explicitly on Christian principles is inherently illegitimate. Please note that this theory dispenses with the last 500 years of Euro-American political thought and social change, even Hobbes’ Leviathan, and kicks us back essentially to the Divine Right of Kings. The concept of dominionism, as taught by the Assemblies of God church to which Sarah Palin belongs, explicitly encourages Christians to enter politics and use their influence to ‘Christianize’ government and society.

• Various interpretations of Christian eschatology, which is that aspect of theology concerned with the end of the world. The belief in an imminent end of the world, complete with the rise of the Antichrist, the return of Jesus, tribulations, desolations, beasts, angels, the battle of Armageddon, and the like. 35% of Americans surveyed in a 2002 Time/CNN poll asserted that the Bible is the word of god and should be taken literally, and 59% believed that the events of the Book of Revelation would happen or were happening. More troublingly, 24% of Republicans responding to a recent Harris poll apparently believe that President Obama may be the Antichrist. It is no surprise that the Left Behind series of Christian fiction books dramatizing the end of the world has been so popular—at one point, the series was selling 1.5 million copies per week.

To the extent that there is an element of society in the US that intends to use violence to further religiously-inspired ambitions, an “American Taliban” does exist, but only in a loose and metaphorical sense, rather than as an organized entity.

The SPLC has recently expressed concern over the great increase in right-wing militant activity. According to the SPLC’s most recent report, Rage On The Right:

The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation.

Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called "Patriot" groups — militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans — came roaring back after years out of the limelight.

In terms of numbers of militia organizations, the SPLC found:

But last year, as noted in the SPLC’s August report, "The Second Wave: Return of the Militias," a dramatic resurgence in the Patriot movement and its paramilitary wing, the militias, began. Now, the latest SPLC count finds that an astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) — a 244% jump.

The SPLC credits the rapid and dramatic increase in such activity to the influence of nationally-recognized politicians and pundits such as Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn), Lou Dobbs, and particularly the perpetually petulant and porcine Glenn Beck, all of whom blend religious and political vitriol in their rhetoric.

Some of the specifics cited in the SPLC’s report included:

· Glenn Beck’s insistent claims that that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is running concentration camps in the continental united states (even after he was humiliated by Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman on the subject).

· Former CNN host Lou Dobbs’ claims of supposed Mexican plots to take over the southwestern U.S.

· Rep. Michele Bachmann’s statements about secret political reeducation camps run by a supposed liberal establishment.

· Sarah Palin’s allegations of government "death panels" during the health care debate.

To these examples, I would add Palin’s most recent “Don’t Retreat—Reload” slogan, rolled out after the passage of the Obama administration’s health insurance reform legislation in late March 2010, and which was accompanied by a map of the U.S. targeting (politically, and possibly physically) vulnerable Democratic members of Congress with rifle-style crosshairs. I would also add Sean Hannity’s wholesale endorsement of the Tea Party on April 1, 2010 (sadly, this was not an April Fool’s Day prank), which received vigorous applause:

“When you think about the vast majorities that they have in Congress and they had to bribe, backroom deals, corruption, that’s all because the tea party movement, the people — all these Tim McVeigh wannabes here.”

It is entirely and reasonably foreseeable that the inflammatory rhetoric belched from these mouthpieces will start a fire somewhere. In the week following passage of the 2010 health insurance reform legislation, a number of Democratic legislators received death threats and offices were vandalized. In the worst such incident documented as of this writing, the gas service at the residence of the brother of Rep. Tom Perreillo (D-VA) was sabotaged in a manner that could have caused a lethal explosion after the property’s address was posted as Perreillo’s own residence on a right-wing website with the suggestion that Tea Party members “pay a visit.” Fortunately, nobody was injured, and the FBI is investigating.

Alarmingly, however, if matters follow the two most relevant parallels (the run-up to the Oklahoma City bombing and the superheated rhetoric about abortion), it is unfortunately only a matter of time before the violence becomes real and people start being murdered over religion and politics.

What responsibility will the bigmouths bear for the actions of their followers?

A further concern is how the other groups in the fringe will interpret the Hutaree raid; if the conventional wisdom evolves into a perception of innocents persecuted by authority, it could exacerbate problems in much the same way that the Branch Davidian disaster or Ruby Ridge inspired the Oklahoma City bombing.

We are as a nation, however, reluctant to call any sort of domestic political or religious violence ‘terrorism,’ perhaps because on some level we resent the connotations of religious fanaticism, indiscriminate violence, and other hallmarks of political and religious terrorism in other countries. Cultural or religious preconceptions also color the picture; we associate terrorism with militant Islam, with screaming mobs of grubby men in the streets of Baghdad or Gaza or Tehran, with an Orientalist view of the place, people, and phenomenon as the product of an alien, primitive, and unthinking fanaticism. We do not like to think that we may have it within ourselves to act like that. Small wonder, then, that we choose to call it anything else.

Admitting to a problem with domestic terrorism is, for a nation, akin to a person admitting that he or she has tertiary syphilis. It’s a terrible embarrassment and casts all kind of shadows over one’s moral character and fitness to exist.

The truth is, however, that Americans can be terrorists too. The sooner we admit that, and call a spade a spade, the sooner we can have a levelheaded discussion of what to do about it.

Thus we return to the FBI’s definition of the issue.

“Domestic terrorism the unlawful use, or threatened use, of violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States (or its territories) without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”

The real threat to public order and the republic in 2010 is not from black helicopters, secret police, extraordinary renditions, torture, politicized justice, bought-and-paid-for legislators, or corporate-sector leg-breakers such as Blackwater. Neither is the problem the prospect of a wholesale rebellion. The United States is unlikely ever to face the prospect of a legion of plucky Browncoat-analogues rolling down Main Street towards an encounter with the Third Marine Division, or the President frog-marched from the White House by a Tea Party mob like Louis XIV was dragged from Versailles.

The real threat is from bigmouths with big audiences and clever people with short tempers. Four people with a rented truck full of fuel oil and fertilizer blew a federal office building off the map in 1995, killing 168 people.

One of the more influential experiences of my teenage years was watching several years’ worth of news coverage of the Bosnian Civil War on television. Sarajevo was a nice city by the standards of Cold War era Eastern Europe (it hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics) became the center of the bloody and protracted civil war that gave birth to the terms “ethic cleansing” and “Balkanized.”

I particularly remember once, when I was driving down Maple Street in Springfield during a driver’s ed lesson, I looked out over the downtown area and thought to myself that one of the better things the United States had achieved was that no bombs had ever fallen from that sky. As decrepit as downtown Springfield was (and remains), it was nice to know nobody was bombarding it with heavy artillery, and that no snipers haunted the upper floors of apartment buildings.

Sarajevo ultimately withstood the longest siege in modern military history (generally reckoned as April 1992 through February 1996). It was strange to watch tanks firing at skyscrapers; it looked more like the sort of thing you would expect to see in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max movie than something out of the generally complacent and prosperous 1990s. It would be nice if the US could continue to avoid that sort of thing.

YEE HAW!!!

OBAMA WINS.

Governor Palin Vs. The Spanish Inquisition

If you haven't seen the recent interviews of Governor Palin by Katie Couric, you're missing some hilarious footage. They're funnier than the Tina Fey skits on SNL, the "I can see Russia from my house" line nonwithstanding. I'm still laughing about her description of the evil head of Vladimir Putin floating into US airspace.

The September 25 one was one step up from the Monty Python skit featuring the Spanish Inquisition.

This Palin interview is like listening to a high school student try to bullshit her way through a class discussion without having done any of the assigned reading for the last year. It's irritatingly obvious that she has no idea what she's talking about, and is just regurgitating talking points. It's painful to listen to, and worse to read. Oh, she also flat-out lied about the trade missions she claimed were part of her foreign policy credentials. The last one of those was in 1997, and was conducted by then-governor Tony Knowles.

Katie Couric: Why isn't it better, Gov. Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

Gov. Sarah Palin: That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the -- it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

It just resonates--the confusion, the cadence-- with the part of the Python skit where Michael Palin, dressed up as a Cardinal, barges in through the door and blasts off the following:

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.

I was just waiting for Palin to say ".... amongst our talking points are such diverse things as....."


I bet she'd like some nice red uniforms, too.