On Jun 13, 4:08 pm, "Douglas W. \"Popeye\" Frederick"
<Pop...@finalprotectivefire.com> wrote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14rich.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1245
006383-x7k4o4UzZokIHLFN/c8tYg

The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers
By FRANK RICH
Published: June 13, 2009

WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail
traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up”
Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,”
maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than
most.

The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the
bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for
his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But
very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the
Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely
disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both
reported and decided, loudly.

What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more
and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election
season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages
spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama
and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president
was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a
scary place,” Smith said.

Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes
that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone
who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr.
George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these
sorts of things about the president of the United States ...” He left
the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.

These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-
rated star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller
the baby killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows
before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O’Reilly was
unrepentant, stating that only “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News
haters” would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while
stopping short of blaming O’Reilly, was breaching his network’s brand
of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten
their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama
haters.

What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new
president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit
creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated
the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did
to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable
minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving
generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of
the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in
inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the
country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s
not change you can believe in.

We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this
crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend
to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the
words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before
the latest murderers struck — well before another “antigovernment”
Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April —
there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of
control.

This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s
name with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the
McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was
“palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better
of it and defended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who
vented her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-
Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama
two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised
leadership.

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate
ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But
the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer
Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan,
detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When
“the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,”
she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke”
repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from
Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself
with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and
Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then
strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs.
Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken
Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the
final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von
Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to
describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the
same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in
America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot
cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV
and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of
this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul
Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s
national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that
Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no
longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10
years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still
thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is
nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there
might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find
“bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire.
The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and
his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous
personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus
cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her
thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been
tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican
presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David
Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic
caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review.
Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization
only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist
screeds.

Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations
reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a
prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some
fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging
“in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped
Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong
Christian — “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous
global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama
by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of
providing material support for terrorism.”

If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take
the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter,
what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts
have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of
our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high
double digits, recession be damned.

The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is
really a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not
about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters
resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their
conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their
alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative
leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall.
Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning
intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be
buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.

It’s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the
Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically,
prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago,
the conservative response was to trash it as “the height of insult,”
in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also
said last week, Homeland Security was “warning us for a reason.”

No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders
nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and
Newt Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any
mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the
actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event.
Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet
Obama.”

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is
toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one,
not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.