Waiting for John Brown, when someone drops one of these into your email box ... HARPER'S FERRY PDA

Friends:

Please believe me that if I had time to write a personal note to each and every one of you, I would. As it is, I've spent 8 hours on this, that I ought to have been using for editing and rewriting.

I break silence because one cannot remain silent in the face of murderous madness. And because I've been warning about this for at least 15 years in print. Call me Cassandra.

Now, the Southern Poverty Law Center agrees with me. We are fast approaching conflagration.

Hart


23 August 2009...4:18 pm
Waiting for John Brown
by Hart Williams © 2009

Two years and a month ago, I was savaged by the Right Wing blogosmear (who, conveniently, don’t allow for rebuttal on their blogs), Faux Nooz™ and WorldNutDaily’s editor, Joe Farah in their ‘pages.’ And I wrote this later that month [emphasis added]:

… And that’s just ONE front of this ‘War on Terra,’ (never mind the climate or clean air and water). There is a push to intimidate and silence the blogosphere. Perhaps to provide cover for the next link in the chains of fascism that this country is descending into. (Ask not for whom the chains are forged, Lefties. They are being forged for thee.)

Welcome to the battle of the bulge. The Morlocks are out for brains to eat, and if you’re reading this, probably brains like yours. Morlocks get very hungry with all that strenuous blogosmearing. Michael Moore, Scott Thomas, Daily Kos, Me, The New Republic, and there are more. The offensive (in both literal senses) is under way. Will we defend? Will we curl into a fetal position and whimper? I’ll not hazard a guess. But if ever there were a time ….
(For some odd reason, WorldNetDaily has not devoted a word to the story, so far. But then again: so many targets, so little time.)

And I heard them to shriek
between conniption fits
we hate you all and
to all a Happy Apocalypse.
America is a nation waiting for a John Brown.

Let’s hope that it’s a longer wait than I fear it will be.

Now, for you Doubting Thomasinas out there, I will note that the Weakly Stranded’s Michael Goldfarb — the “point man” for the attack on the New Republic – became McCain’s point man in his attempt to become president by way of dastardly deceits and dissimulation — No doubt BASED on his ability to coordinate the blogosmear.*

[* And, thus, the new coordination of Koch Brothers astroturf groups to kill health care.Did you know that Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks were, formerly, Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation and Citizens for a Sound Economy, (dis)respectively? If anybody out there is interested, I have the paperwork, the tax returns, the photographs. But I'm doing something to put food on the table right now, and my sense of personal survival is in conflict with my sense of social responsibility. ]


Seemingly, literally if possible. These a**holes don’t believe that words have consequences. And they’ve gone back to the playbook that gave us the Oklahoma City bombing — which, despite all their anti-Arab, anti-Muslim racism, they have never particularly decried: it’s OK for home grown terrorists (as long as they’re not “leftists” or “socialists” or, ghod help us all, “communists), but don’t let none a them furriners join the fun. Nosirree. The Nine-Twelve movement to return to the “unity” we all felt the day after Nine-Eleven-Oh-One doesn’t include y0u or me, frankly.


It is the unity of the fanatic. The return, using coded racist and hate speech, of “the lost cause” of secession. One a**hole* governor (OK, Rick Perry of lunatic Texas) even parsed around it: If we don’t get what we want, we’ll secede.
[* I apologize for the language, but sometimes, you have to call a spade a spade, and "a**hole" is the only word that comes close to characterizing our self-obsessed "patriots," whose sacred writ and only ideology seems to be "no taxes." How noble! This is generally the mind-set of the three-year old, as any mother can tell you. ME!]
But listen to Frank Rich today in the New York Times:

On Monday — the day after he gave a pass to those threatening violence — a dozen provocateurs with guns, at least two of them bearing assault weapons, showed up for Obama’s V.F.W. speech in Phoenix. Within hours, another member of Congress — Phil Gingrey of Georgia — was telling Chris Matthews on MSNBC that as long as brandishing guns is legal, he, too, saw no reason to discourage Americans from showing up armed at public meetings.
In April the Department of Homeland Security issued a report, originally commissioned by the Bush administration, on the rising threat of violent right-wing extremism. It was ridiculed by conservatives, including the Republican chairman, Michael Steele, who called it “the height of insult.” Since then, a neo-Nazi who subscribed to the anti-Obama “birther” movement has murdered a guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, and an anti-abortion zealot has gunned down a doctor in a church in Wichita, Kan.

This month the Southern Poverty Law Center, the same organization that warned of the alarming rise in extremist groups before the Oklahoma City bombing, issued its own report. A federal law enforcement agent told the center that he hadn’t seen growth this steep among such groups in 10 to 12 years. “All it’s lacking is a spark,” he said.

At the risk of patting myself on the back, that’s what I’ve been talking about. The slow ratcheting up of the hatespeech, as we have tolerated angry, hateful, ain’t-never-beens like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, whose vocal histrionics might SEEM enchanting, but whose life history does not bespeak any familiarity with the actual practices that they advocate. They talk the talk, but they’ve NEVER walked the walk.