Village Blowback
by digby
The Michigan Militia may be throwing the Christian Soldiers under the bus, but the mainstream conservatives are defending them. That's interesting. More interesting is the fact that the spokesman for the Michigan Militia, appearing on Dylan Ratigan, says the Hutaree Militia members are more of an armed religious cult, which in his view is unconstitutional because the constitution requires no religious test. Ok. But that certainly has never been a key point to the Patriot Movement before. Indeed, they turned the Waco seige into a constitutional martyrdom operation and "honor" the Waco dead every April 19th (culminating in the Oklahoma City bombing on the same day.) If Koresh and the gang weren't an "armed cult" I don't know what is.
What's fascinates me most about the resurgent rightwing fringe is the fact that it's so confused. And I think that actually works for it. Their only true organizing rationale is a common sense of outrage that anyone would think their philosophy/ideology is not a majority position. And when you think about it, that's not entirely irrational.
After all, this doesn't just come from the FOX ghetto --- the mainstream media have also been saying for years that this is a conservative country and that these salt-o-the-earth Red State Republicans are the Real Americans etc. If that's what you've been told all your life, the idea that a liberal (ish) black president and a party of women and non-whites could legitimately win an election wouldn't seem possible.
Blame the fatuous gasbags. They're the ones who have sold these people that bill of goods all these years. They believe that their cramped, conservative intolerance was shared by the majority because that's what the villagers believed --- and told them so for the past several decades.
Update: Amanda makes a good point that relates to the above I think:
Any fool could see from the outset that the teabaggers are a bunch of Fox News-addled right wing nuts that are sore losers whose anger is exacerbated by racist resentments. But the mainstream media insists on covering it like it’s an exciting, fresh shift in the political landscape. I don’t think they’re carrying Republican water on this issue, though. I think the eagerness to run with this “teabaggers are fed-up independents” narrative is stoked by a desire for novelty above all other things. But it defies common sense. You can look with your own eyes and see that the teabaggers aren’t really a collection of spring chickens.
But according to the mainstream narrative it's these elder chickens who are the heart and soul of the Real America, you see. So when they speak, they speak for The People and are therefore extremely newsworthy.
These folks, not so much:
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