the profits of character assassination

Republicans, and certain Tea Party leaders, who use words and images irresponsibly, know exactly what they're doing when they walk along the thin line demarcating civility and barbarism. They intend to incite passions and to demonize opponents, and they have been fairly successful on both accounts. The question that should be put to them, after the carnage in Tucson, is this: was it worth it?

contradictions of the insanity defense

The Tea Party and its fellow travelers will hit the “mental illness” explanation as hard as the alleged shooter’s likely legal defense team; which will be curious, since law and order Republicans will likely decry such a defense. Hence, we could witness the following display of doublespeak from Republicans and Tea Party extremists: the alleged shooter is insane, he is not part of the anti-government movement; but the alleged shooter is sane enough to face trial and, potentially, capital punishment. It will be interesting to see how these two opposed claims will be reconciled.

Sarah Palin's chickens...

have come home to roost. It comes as no surprise that reckless, anti-government rhetoric has inspired violent action.

“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” Ms. Giffords said last March. “But the thing is the way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that.”

I suspect Palin will turn this shooting into a political advantage. She'll make herself out as the victim of the "liberal media" for associating her with the attack on the Congressperson. She'll play the liberal media card while serving as a paid Fox News analyst, probably on Sean Hannity's program.

Meanwhile, Eric Cantor (the Republican House Majority leader) has wisely postponed debate on the proposed total repeal of “Obamacare,” which was the object of most of the Tea Party's symbolic violence. He's likely aware the extremist rhetoric that House Republicans -- newly infused by Tea Party supported members -- deployed last year would not play well with the American public under the circumstances. Who knows how the rhetoric will be reshaped.

the year of reading tea leaves VII: violent tea

It could be that the USA is in the midst of conservative days of rage that recall the period of uncivil unrest that occurred in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Those Tea Partysans who are unable to contain their disappointment over a legislative defeat appear willing to cross over the line from a peaceful remonstration of grievances into violent opposition. Even “Pro-Life” conservatives have turned on other Pro-Life politicians who are now deemed “baby killers” because they wrangled an executive order banning the use of federal funds for abortion from a pro-choice President (and in the screwy logic of the contemporary conservative base of the Republican party, what would otherwise be treated as a victory is viewed as a defeat or, worse, as a traitorous surrender). The overlapping membership of the remnants of 1990s militias and the newly-minted extremists within the Tea Party camp could lead to the formation of groups analogous to the Weathermen/Weather Underground. Whereas the Weather Underground’s theory of the legitimate use of political violence was fueled by Marxist-Leninist theory, copious quantities of pot, LSD, and polymorphous perversion, today’s incipient Rogue Underground is driven by apocalyptic visions of death panels and hidden Muslim agents, Hitler and the Anti-Christ -- all embodied in the Affordable Health Care for America Act -- and fueled by a collective memory of rage that was stoked when the Branch Davidians were consumed in the cleansing fires of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’s secular purgatorium. Similar to the Weather Underground, which possessed a photogenic and charismatic frontperson in Bernadette Dohrn, a conservative Rogue Underground can already claim a candidate with similar qualities as the attractive face of its armed resistance.

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It would be interesting to know whether, and how deeply, the FBI has infiltrated the Tea Party organizations.

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Lacking moderate voices among their membership, the Republican party has only one option as long as it is out of power: total, absolute, non-cooperation. That is understandable, even rational. However, the way in which it pursues non-cooperation is curious, especially the use of slogans and distortions of reality that only invigorate the less emotionally stable segments of its political base. Republicans only paint themselves into a corner. It's been said many times before: if Republican legislators insists on describing the Affordable Health Care for America Act as a threat to American democracy and values, as a government takeover, and as socialist, then there's no way these legislators can contribute positively to such a piece of legislation, and the rhetoric will be impelled further into loon land. And the loons will come out to play.

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Also curious is the way the once staid, emotionally controlled presentation of the Republican Party has morphed into an uninhibited expression of feelings and a political style that exhibits the characteristics of a new form of secondary narcissism. In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch described the shift in the type of patient who presented him/herself for psychoanalytic treatment: "Psychoanalysis, a therapy that grew out of experience with severely repressed and morally rigid individuals who needed to come to terms with a rigorous inner 'censor,' today finds itself confronted more and more often with a 'chaotic and impulse-ridden character.' It must deal with patients who 'act out' their conflicts instead of repressing or sublimating them." Todays Republican politician, no less than the Tea Partysan that is her de facto mirror-image, now presents similar characteristics. The Republican politician reacts impulsively to disappointments, and "acts out" against the agency (whichever one is found to be handy at any given moment: "liberals," Obama, ACORN, unions, Pelosi, "Hollywood," "illegal immigrants," the "mainstream media," etc.) that is perceived to be the source of disappointment through the use of disparaging language that reaches for the worst metaphors of political degradation. The emocons of today are no longer able to sublimate frustrations and anger, and their rage boils over on the floor of the House ("baby killer"), in town hall meetings, at Tea Partysan gatherings, and on voice mail left for members of Congress ("I hope you bleed ... (get) cancer and die"). None of this is new, of course: paranoid style rage against the changing political cultural circumstances is older than McCarthyism, the clinic bombings, and Tim McVeigh. What is new is the open embrace of a discourse of victimhood, of victimization, from the conservative milieu. The fear of victimization is the emotional anchor of conservative politics today, a sense of victimization conservatives enable through their refusal to participate in the political process like responsible legislators and citizens.

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Individuals identifiable with the Tea Party-Patriot tendency now feel entitled to attack governmental authority using symbolic and physical violence (if necessary). This new violence entitlement, often claimed in the name of Jesus, the Second Amendment, or Ayn Rand, has, unfortunately, been given comfort by mainline Republicans (who should know better) and by rogue conservatives (who don't know any better).