“The Company Elected Officials Keep”: Is There Any Group Too Extreme For A Member Of Congress To Meet With?
Even among right-wing groups, the Oath Keepers organization is a pretty alarming bunch. As recently as May, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes told a conservative gathering that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) should be tried for treason and “hung by the neck until dead” for going “along with the program of the destruction of this country.”
A month later, Rhodes was in New York, insisting that President Obama is “trying to” create “a race war.” He added, “[T]he leftists in this country hate this country, they hate it, and they will get in bed with radical Islamists because they have a common enemy, western civilization.”
With this in mind, it was of interest to see the New York Daily News report that Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) recently spoke to an Oath Keepers chapter.
A Zeldin spokeswoman acknowledges that last month he addressed the Long Island chapter of Oath Keepers, a group of retired military, police and fire department employees who say they are committed to fighting “the tyranny we experience in our local, state and federal governments.”
The organization has dabbled in what critics call “fringe conspiracy theories,” citing concern about concentration camps and martial law in the United States. The chapter’s website includes postings by a member embracing a film that claims the December 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax and calling President Obama a “Muslim/Extremist.”
The congressman’s office doesn’t deny Zeldin, an Iraq war veteran, attended the Oath Keepers event. Rather, the Republican lawmaker’s spokesperson said he’s met with a variety of groups “representing all sides of the ideological spectrum.”
“It is completely absurd to make it a litmus test for a member of Congress to agree with every individual or group 100% in order to meet with them,” Zeldin spokeswoman Jennifer DiSiena told the Daily News.
At first blush, that might seem vaguely compelling. Lawmakers often have diverse constituencies, so they’re bound to meet with a variety of organizations, some of which they’ll like, some of which they won’t.
That said, is there really no limit? Zeldin apparently doesn’t agree with “100%” of the Oath Keepers’ message, and I’m glad to hear it. But what percentage does he agree with?
Is there any group that Zeldin might consider too extreme for a member of Congress to meet with? And if so, why doesn’t Oath Keepers meet that standard?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 10, 2015
“Radicals Feeling Emboldened”: ‘They’re Nothing More Than Domestic Terrorists’
It’s been nearly a week since the U.S. Bureau of Land Management tried to enforce federal court orders at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch, only to back off in order to deescalate a potentially dangerous situation with heavily armed protesters.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D), who of course represents Nevada, said earlier this week, “We can’t have an American people that violate the law and then just walk away from it. So it’s not over.”
Yesterday, Reid went further.
U.S. Sen. Harry Reid on Thursday called supporters of Bunkerville rancher Cliven Bundy “domestic terrorists” because they defended him against a Bureau of Land Management cattle roundup with guns and put their children in harm’s way.
“Those people who hold themselves out to be patriots are not. They’re nothing more than domestic terrorists,” Reid said during an appearance at a Las Vegas Review-Journal “Hashtags & Headlines” event at the Paris. “… I repeat: what went on up there was domestic terrorism.”
The senator added that he’s been in communication with Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI leaders, and Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie, as well as the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association, ‘which has not backed Bundy’s personal battle but has expressed concerns about access to public land.”
There is, Reid said, a task force being set up to deal with the situation. “It is an issue that we cannot let go, just walk away from,” he added.
One assumes Bundy’s militia allies weren’t impressed with the senator’s comments, but Reid probably isn’t foremost on their minds. Rather, many on this far-right fringe are contemplating their next move, embracing what they see as a new precedent established six days ago at the Bundy ranch.
Reuters ran a striking piece yesterday, citing militia experts saying that armed Americans “using the threat of a gunfight to force federal officers to back down is virtually unparalleled in the modern era.” It’s left the radicals feeling emboldened.
Energized by their success, Bundy’s supporters are already talking about where else they can exercise armed defiance. They include groups deeply suspicious of what they see as a bloated, over-reaching government they fear wants to restrict their constitutional right to bear arms.
Alex Jones, a radio host and anti-government conspiracy theorist whose popular right-wing website, Infowars, helped popularize Bundy’s dispute, called it a watershed moment.
“Americans showed up with guns and said, ‘No, you’re not,” before confronting the armed BLM agents, Jones said in a telephone interview. “And they said, ‘Shoot us.’ And they did not. That’s epic. And it’s going to happen more.”
“More” is precisely what the American system cannot expect to tolerate.
As we’ve discussed, there’s an obvious problem with establishing a precedent that says Americans can disregard laws and court orders, whenever they feel justified in doing so, if they surround themselves with friends with guns. It’s a dynamic that invites and encourages lawlessness.
And it’s why this standoff isn’t over.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 18, 2014
“Evidence And Logic Are Beside The Point”: Newtown Truthers Follow The NRA’s Playbook
Conceived in a dream of reason, what the Internet too often reveals is mass credulousness and fathomless irrationality. According to Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald, a video depicting the Newtown, CT elementary school massacre as a government-sponsored hoax has drawn 8.5 million views on YouTube.
No doubt many viewers were drawn by idle curiosity or sheer incredulity. What would “evidence” for so transparently preposterous an allegation consist of? Nevertheless, there appear to be thousands of True Believers.
Try googling “Emilie Parker alive,” to sample the crazy.
Adepts claim that a photograph of a young girl sitting in President Obama’s lap reveals that six-year-old Emilie Parker was not murdered along with 19 classmates at Sandy Hook elementary as reported. Supposedly, the photo reveals a telltale blunder.
In reality, the child in the photograph is Emilie’s little sister, Madeline.
But why go on? There’s plenty more in the same dogged, delusional vein. Debunk one aspect of the conspiracy, and a dozen absurdities replace it. To anybody capable of imagining that staging the Sandy Hook tragedy would even be possible—requiring, as it would, the active cooperation of half the population of Connecticut—mere evidence and logic are beside the point.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Apart from religion, more Americans appear to be nuts on the subject of guns than all other topics. The National Rifle Association has raised and spent millions in recent years peddling scare stories about President Obama’s secret plan to abolish the Second Amendment, confiscate everybody’s deer rifles and set up a gun-free dictatorship.
Newtown conspiracy theories are only incrementally madder spinoffs of the NRA’s master narrative. Yet its leaders are treated as VIPs in newsrooms and TV studios. Why?
To Believers, guns have become fetish objects in American popular culture, having magical potency. Witness Bushmaster Firearms’ advertising its .223 caliber AR-15—Newtown killer Adam Lanza’s weapon—with the slogan: “Consider your Man Card reissued.”
Viagra ads are more subtle.
Hence conversations with gun cultists tend to be conducted in the dualistic, all-or-nothing terms of fundamentalist theology. Although polls have shown that large majorities of gun owners favor, for example, improved background checks to make it harder for criminals and severely mentally ill people to acquire deadly weapons, cultists see all such legislation in apocalyptic terms. All regulation amounts to total confiscation.
Hollywood’s equally to blame. About half the emails I get on this topic invoke the Red Dawn fantasy, although it’s not foreign communists people imagine taking to the hills to fight. It’s mainly tyrannical US government SWAT teams intent upon seizing their personal arsenals and making them eat arugula that they’re determined to repel by force of arms.
I’m always tempted to warn these jokers that I’ve forwarded their messages to the Obama White House for inclusion on Big Brother’s Hellfire drone strike list, but I’m afraid most wouldn’t get the joke. Tanks, helicopter gunships and drones have pretty much put an end to the adolescent fantasy of plucky survivalists taking on the U.S. Marines. Everywhere except in movies and at certain kinds of gun shows, that is.
Then there are the Lethal Weapon/Die Hard revenge comedies I’m partial to myself: the Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis vehicles where a wisecracking hero and his plucky sidekick shoot their way through legions of wicked, heavily armed villains with universally poor marksmanship.
Let’s put it this way: Ever seen a headline like this? “LAPD Detective Kills 17 Gangsters in Nightclub Shootout” (Lethal Weapon) Or this? “Vacationing Cop Foils Xmas Plot; 34 Terrorists Slain.” (Die Hard)
Of course not. Because the working part of your brain understands that these films bear approximately the same relationship to reality as a Roadrunner cartoon.
Sometimes I think it’s mainly about the wisecracks.
“Go ahead, make my day.” The average dweeb wishes he could say something so clever to a rude supermarket bag boy, much less to a lone demento with a .357 mag.
However, deep in many of our lizard brains the Dirty Harry fantasy lurks nevertheless. NRA president Wayne LaPierre invoked it during his notorious Newtown press conference. You know, the bit about a good guy with a gun shooting it out with a bad guy with a gun—inside a first-grade classroom.
That’s why the single most useful piece of journalism since Newtown may be Amanda Ripley’s “Your Brain in a Shootout: Guns, Fear and Flawed Instincts.” Writing for Time, Ripley interviewed highly trained, experienced cops and soldiers who talked to her bluntly about the crazy, jagged chaos of armed combat.
“[R]esearch on actual gunfights,” she writes “the kind that happen not in a politician’s head but in fluorescent-lit stairwells and strip-mall restaurants around America, reveals [that]…Winning a gunfight without shooting innocent people typically requires realistic, expensive training and a special kind of person.”
And normally not the kind of person, oddly enough, that makes an excellent kindergarten teacher.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 22, 2013
“The Coming Post-Election GOP Freak Out”: For Republicans, Any Turn Of Bad Luck Or Unwanted Results Is A Conspiracy
What’s the state of mind this weekend of the conservative outrage machine? With regard to liberals, I think it’s fair to say as of Saturday that most of us (excepting your allowed-for percentage of nervous nellies) expect Barack Obama to win. If he somehow doesn’t, we’ll be surprised and deeply depressed. But provided the outcome doesn’t involve some kind of Florida-style shenanigans, in a couple days’ time, we’ll come to terms with it.
Meanwhile–conservatives? I think that they are certain that Mitt Romney will win and that all information to the contrary is a pack of lies; that they will be completely shocked and outraged if he doesn’t; that, if he loses, it will be the inevitable product of foul play; and that therefore they’ll immediately start scouring the landscape looking for parties to blame and will keep themselves in a state suspended agitation for…days, weeks, four years, forever. Which wouldn’t matter to the rest of us but for the fact that they’ll continue to have the power to screw up the country.
The conservatives I read, and certainly my conservative commenters, just can’t wait for Tuesday, when the American people will arise out of their torpor and finally send Obama to the dugout. I’m continually struck–nay, impressed, even–by the iron certainty with which they say this, and by their unswerving ability to pluck out the favorable polls (getting fewer and farther between, incidentally) and throw a bucket of ice-cold water on the ones they don’t like.
Objective reality says Obama is ahead. But to conservatives, there’s always something wrong in objective-reality land, always a reason to claim that the world is in fact spinning in the opposite direction. Quinnipiac has too many Democrats! PPP is a Democratic firm! This one oversampled blacks, that one Latinos. And of course, these objections are never merely just stated. They’re the rhetorical equivalent of dirty nuclear bombs. Conservatives on Twitter howl derisively at these polls as if their purveyors are offering alchemical cures for venereal disease.
We’re all prey to “confirmation bias,” as Paul Waldman called it in his American Prospect column Friday. We look at the polls that we know will be more likely to show the result we want to see. With Republicans, that has meant Rasmussen, obviously, and Gallup. With liberals it has meant…well, virtually every other polling operation under God’s golden sun, more often than not, because the simple fact remains that Obama has led in most polls for a year, nationwide and statewide.
But there’s confirmation bias, and there’s denial. Pennsylvania is up for grabs? If you say so, wingosphere. But Obama’s led in 53 straight polls there, journalist Eric Boehlert tweeted yesterday. In the last two days we’ve seen about 20 different state polls. Obama led in 18. If my guy were on the business end of results like those, I’d be psychologically preparing myself.
Which, indeed, I am anyway. You never really know. The mess in Eastern Pennsylvania could, maybe, so discourage turnout in the Obama-friendliest areas of the state he could lose. Fifty-three straight polls, and 18 out of 20, could be wrong. That many polls have never been that wrong before, but I guess there’s a first time for everything. (Please don’t mention 1948, wingers–comparing polling then to polling today is like comparing a ’48 Plymouth to a new Lexus.)
You never really know. Most liberals acknowledge this simple reality. But wingers seem to know, or think they know. Of course they don’t know, and deep down they know that they don’t know, which must be a kind of psychological torture to them, and so they compensate for having to endure that torture by putting up that front of absolute certainty, which in turn brings its own rewards whatever the result. Their guy wins, they get to say, “Ha! I knew it all along.” Their guy loses, they get to be outraged and blame the blacks, the media, the pollsters, Nate Silver. In a weird sort of way I suspect many of them prefer the latter outcome.
Yes, it’s strange. And it’s made all the stranger because I would imagine that outside the political realm, most conservatives are pretty reasonable people who accept outcomes just like the rest of us. If their team loses the Super Bowl, or their kid’s project doesn’t win the science fair, or even if they get passed over for that promotion, most conservatives surely are unhappy, as anyone would be, but they fundamentally accept the legitimacy of the outcome.
But not in politics. In the political realm, we have this hate machine, this massive propaganda apparatus, that tells conservatives that any turn of bad luck is not merely bad luck but the result of a conspiracy that society has hatched against them. Thus, Mitt Romney–whom conservatives used to hate, before they were forced to embrace him–has made no mistakes on the campaign trail. The furor over the 47 percent remarks, the two debate losses, and much else–these aren’t signs of his misjudgment or fallibility. To conservatives, they’re all part of the broader plot against him, and more importantly against them.
And so, when you look at the world that way, the conspiracy never dies, the rope never stops spinning. If Obama wins, the excuses will start coming; the excuses will mushroom quickly into reasons why the victory was illegitimate; illegitimacy thus “established,” the next mission is to oppose Obama at every turn with even greater fervor. Any political means necessary to stop or even remove him will become justified. It’s all as predictable as a goose sh*tting. And if Obama does win, it will start Wednesday morning. What am I saying? I meant Tuesday night.
By: MIchael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 4, 2012
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