Dark Forces

by digby


I've been getting some flak for suggesting that the conservatives are building up a racist argument to explain the financial crisis. And, to some degree, that's fair. They aren't just blaming racial and ethnic minorities for the problem. They are also blaming their best friends, Wall Street and liberals. You can always count on Ann Coulter to get to the heart of the matter at a time like this:

When Democrats controlled both the executive and legislative branches, political correctness was given a veto over sound business practices.

In 1999, liberals were bragging about extending affirmative action to the financial sector. Los Angeles Times reporter Ron Brownstein hailed the Clinton administration's affirmative action lending policies as one of the "hidden success stories" of the Clinton administration, saying that "black and Latino homeownership has surged to the highest level ever recorded."

Meanwhile, economists were screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were forcing mortgage lenders to issue loans that would fail the moment the housing market slowed and deadbeat borrowers couldn't get out of their loans by selling their houses.

A decade later, the housing bubble burst and, as predicted, food-stamp-backed mortgages collapsed. Democrats set an affirmative action time-bomb and now it's gone off.

In Bush's first year in office, the White House chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, warned that the government's "implicit subsidy" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, combined with loans to unqualified borrowers, was creating a huge risk for the entire financial system.

Rep. Barney Frank denounced Mankiw, saying he had no "concern about housing." How dare you oppose suicidal loans to people who can't repay them! The New York Times reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were "under heavy assault by the Republicans," but these entities still had "important political allies" in the Democrats.

Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats' two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.

Political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.


This would sound like irrelevant raving to me except for the fact that this economic crisis and the fact that we have a person with a "foreign sounding name" running for president seems to have made the right wing come completely unhinged. And I'd worry much less if the Republican establishment, including the Republican candidates for president and vice president, weren't stoking the free floating anxiety out in the nation instead of trying to calm it.

If you've seen these videos and others that are floating around the intertubes, you know what I'm talking about:





Kathy G writes:


I'm trying not to be a drama queen about this stuff, but honest to God, I am very scared for Barack Obama. Just watch those videos again. Look at the faces of those people. Listen to their voices. I don't know what's scarier: the ranting hysterics, or the ones who, with cool, calm, unembarrassed certainty, aver that, oh yes, of course they know that Barack Obama is a terrorist who hates America.

Clearly, there are a whole lot of hateful, enraged, and very crazy people out there. No, I don't think the majority of McCain/Palin supporters are like that, but yes, enough of them are like that, that I think we all should be seriously disturbed. I don't think I've ever seen, or heard of, anything like it. And just a few, or even one, of those people are capable of inflicting incalculable damage.

[...]

Dark forces have been let loose across the land. The rancid rhetoric coming out of the McCain/Palin campaign is but one example. But there ae many more: there's the Protocols of the Elders of Zion-like attempt of many on the right to blame the financial crisis on greedy, lazy minorities. There's the conspiracy mongering and rank insanity over at the National Review's The Corner, where the leading lights of American conservatism seriously debate whether Barack Obama is a Maoist or Stalinist.

Ultimately, though, it is the McCain/Palin campaign which is setting the tone here. And they, more than anyone else, are responsible for enabling this horrorshow. Their words feed the madness, and stoke the rage. Overarching ambition and searing hatred have eaten away at them, leaving holes in the places where their souls used to be.

I watch and read this stuff, and I despair. It's not that I think it will actually hurt Obama much at the voting booth. In fact, I'm more convinced than ever that he will win. And not only that: it might not even be close. And he may win with enough of a commanding majority in Congress to actually accomplish something big.

But, like Digby, I do worry that a toxic narrative is taking hold that will cause substantial numbers of Americans to see an Obama presidency as something that is illegitimate and must be destroyed. And honest to God, I worry about Barack's personal safety as well. He and Michelle are two exceedingly brave people. God only knows the thoughts that must go through their heads every day.

read on...



I think what I find most disconcerting about this is that these angry people in the audience keep screaming that they want McCain to take the gloves off and really go after Obama. Apparently, they believe he's been some kind of a softie. Today, they cable netwroks are showing footage of a man who says that there's got to be some way to "line up" all of these guys Obama's been palling around with. The tone is vicious and violent.

And lest you think this is just some rubes with pitchforks out in Jesusland, the alleged intelligentsia of the right wing is no less hysterical:

Second, and relatedly, Obama's radicalism, beginning with his Alinski/ACORN/community organizer period, is a bottom-up socialism. This, I'd suggest, is why he fits comfortably with Ayers, who (especially now) is more Maoist than Stalinist. What Obama is about is infiltrating (and training others to infiltrate) bourgeois institutions in order to change them from within — in essence, using the system to supplant the system. A key requirement of this stealthy approach (very consistent with talking vaporously about "change" but never getting more specific than absolutely necessary) is electability. With an enormous assist from the media, which does not press him for specifics, Obama has walked this line brilliantly. Absent convincing retractions of his prior radical positions, though, we should construe shrewd moves like the ostensibly reasonable Second Amendment position as efforts make him electable.

This is why Ayers is so important: it is a peek behind the curtain of Obama's rhetoric. When he talks about "education reform," that sounds admirable and, given the state of the schools, entirely reasonable. But when you look at what the Obama/Ayers program really tried to do to the schools (see, e.g., Stanley's work on this), it is radical. With a guy who speaks in euphemisms — "change," "social justice," "due process," etc. — it is vital to have concrete examples of how these concepts are put into action.


Ok, so you have the base and you have the wingnut welfare queens growing ever more unhinged. But it's actually still a bit of a shock to me that the McCain campaign itself is feeding into this fear and anger with nary a thought to the context in which this election is being fought. He is still a US Senator with a reputation and family legacy to protect. And yet he is dangerously close to endorsing the assassination of Barack Obama.

They have a perfect right to fight hard for the election and I wouldn't expect them to be nice about it. But we are in the midst of a national crisis and people are feeling disoriented and scared. Stoking that free floating anxiety at a time like this with dark suggestions of Obama being part of a terrorist infiltration of the government is beyond the pale.


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