It always happens. I tell myself I’m going to take a break from politics and recharge my batteries with a nice cheerful Come Saturday Morning post — and I actually did manage it last week. But, you know what Michael Corleone said:
“Just when I thought I was out — they pull me back in.”
As Marcy points out, look at the sort of people Michael Chertoff, Bush DHS head, thinks are terrorists or at least their fellow travelers: Keith Ellison, Arianna Huffington, and Kos. And, just for grins, Janet Napolitano. Even better: Chertoff was using DHS’ Civil Rights Office and David Horowitz’ smear site DiscoverTheNetworks as the building blocks for finished intelligence reports based on Americans doing nothing more than exercising their right to free speech.
Now, again as Marcy points out, remember the firestorm last year when wingnut groups learned DHS did a report–initiated by the Bush Administration–on right wing extremist groups? Even though quite a few home-grown right-wing terrorists have, unlike Keith Ellison, Arianna Huffington, and Markos Moulitsas, done things a good deal more sinister that merely using their First Amendment rights.
For example, there’s the case of James Cummings. He was a neo-Nazi son of a real estate tycoon; he was getting $10 million a year from daddy’s trust fund, and had been pumping some of that money into building a dirty bomb in his basement, with the intention of detonating it at Obama’s inauguration. But his long-suffering and much-abused wife Amber, fearing he was about to start sexually abusing their daughter, finally gave him some high-velocity trans-cranial lead therapy back in December of 2008.
The wingnuts freak out over Mister Fruit of the Loom Abdulmutallab who probably had no chance of taking down an airplane even if he had managed to properly set off his bomb, yet are silent as the tomb over multimillionaire Nazi James Cummings. Nor will you hear them discussing pipe- and cyanide-bomb maker William Krar, who was mailing his wares to right-wing militia groups across the country until a package intended for a New Jersey militia ended up at the wrong address.
Nor will you hear any of them admit that it’s right-wing hate that’s on the rise in America:
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups in the US is up 40% since 2000, with nearly 1000 such groups active across the country right now. Fueled by bone-deep racism, an unnatural terror of liberal government, frustration over the economic downturn, and fears about America’s loss of world standing, they tell us, the militant right is rising again. You can find groups in every corner of the country, incidents of racist violence are rising; and the traffic on far-right websites is up, too.
But you won’t hear a word about this on the evening news. They’re too busy freaking out over somebody who castrated himself with explosives, or who was dumb enough to think he could take down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches, or a group of hapless noobs who couldn’t even afford shoes yet who were alleged to be this hideously dangerous terror cell set to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago.
Ai-yi-yi.
