Like an allegory sunning itself on the banks of the Nile...wearing a straw hat saying Barry's the One!

The overall strangeness of this thought aside, consider the timing. An angry man had just smashed his airplane into an I.R.S. office in Austin, Tex., killing one federal employee, injuring others and breaking quite a few windows. Does this seem like the very best time to be encouraging people to assault government property? Pawlenty’s defenders will undoubtedly say that he did not want his listeners to literally grab a golf club and hit something. But it is my experience that many Americans do not totally understand the concept of a metaphor.  Gail Collins, 2/20/2010

One of the reasons that domestic terrorism is such a problem lies from whence domestic terrorism springs. Far be it from the AXE to condemn another man's sense of grievance -- without that sense of grievance, less fun -- but whether it's the Freemen or the Hayden Lake Racists in Idaho plotting the assassination of a Senator who's been a strong advocate for workers and veterans, or the Ku Klux Klan and their other furry fans, American domestic terrorists are less Stalin and Mao and more Symbionese Liberation Army and generally twits. The Tea Party movement is hard to take seriously; it's like the folks who advocate secession which a leftie-socialist-communist-pinko-fag guy like Antonin Scalia has indicated is totally whack. So, when idiots like Scott Brown and idiot-wannabes like Tim Pawlenty start talking about 9 Irons to the rear windows of government (T-Paw) or between pimping their daughters while saying the latest nutcase was frustrated by lack of openness and just another guy who doesn't like paying taxes (P.diddle.Brown), the AXE is moved to headshaking. Now, I'd like to shake their heads off their silly ass necks, but that would be wrong. Not as wrong as flying a fucking airplane into an office building, but wrong. Brown, speaking in complete ignorance of anything can not be labeled an appeaser to domestic terrorism; to steal a bit from Dana Carvey channeling Bush 41, Brown might not have been "prudent" in his response to this dumbass Khalid Sheik Mohamed wannabe Texan twit, but his heart was obviously in the right place.

Ms. Collins  has saved the AXE from having to spending a lot of time researching the errant pilot; she was a helluva reporter and editor before becoming a Mencken-esque pundit, and in terms of fact checking, she's in the same league as Rachel Maddow and George Will. Something about being a Rhodes Scholar makes you far more likely to get your facts straight. Anyway, here's her description of the ideology that drove this guy...

Let’s think this through. Andrew Joseph Stack III, the pilot, was a man with multiple hatreds, from Catholicism to unions, whose rage at the I.R.S. apparently began when the agency refused to allow him to declare his house a church for the purpose of avoiding taxes. And the end of the story is that he crashed a plane into a building, killing and injuring innocent people. Plus, he burned down his house. Where his wife and her daughter lived.

Now, I'll be the first to say that angry fantasies are as American as poison ivy and as human as brain cancer. There really is nothing wrong with feeling aggrieved for no good reason; the problem and the evil lies not in the thoughts but in the action. It would be nice to live in a world where actions have no consequences...actually, it wouldn't. That's a scary place -- the good consequences would be erased along with the bad ones. However, Mr. Stack was obviously a quietly percolating nutcase. Which makes Scott Brown's linking him on FOX to the unfortunate election in Massachusetts understandably troubling...The fact is that a lot of people who voted for Brown probably feel this way, at times; hell, I feel that way at times. BARRACK OBAMA probably feels that way at times. Feelings are morally indifferent and ethically irrelevant. IT'S WHAT YOU DO WITH THE DAMN THINGS that either makes you a good citizen, a great American or a goddamned terrorist, murderer and traitor.

I've seen some references lately to Richard Hofsteader's Fun with Dick and Jane: Proper tablemanners at the Tea Party...oh, that is, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. The link takes you to the original article from Harper's in 1964. The article is a classic that every thinking human ought to consider...The beginning alone is worth the effort of clicking the link...

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.

    American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
    Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

Ultimately, the Tea-Party/CPAC nonsense is well-summed up by the Bushie twit who's angry that the Obama administration is actually killing terrorists in combat. Go figure... Perhaps a better summation of the whole mess is best summed up by that great American paranoid, Jack D. Ripper...

Comments

[neight]

Sorry if this is being totally naive, but I was thrown off by the sentence about "international bankers, Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers."
Because it seems international bankers, munitions makers, and (as a general stand in for the Church) Jesuits, are prime examples of exactly the people one should be suspicious of, due to their historical penchant for pulling strings.
Its also funny that an article providing the framework to discredit "paranoid style" appeared in 1964. I wonder what they were trying to assass... i mean hide.
Whoa, how did I get to the bottom of this slippery slope?!

[Crusader AXE]

Well, the Masons and the Jesuits were tied up with the Illuminati and the Aliens in Roswell in trying to get the water in California fluoridated...I remember Brendan Behan citing a speech he heard at an Orange political rally in the 50s, where the speaker railed against the Pope and communism and then announced a conspiracy between "the Pope in Rome and Joseph Stalin." Behan turned to his Protestant friends and said in the local dialect of the time, WTF? They told him it was silly and they knew it but the IRA was saying the same sort of shit about them in Dublin so who cares? Well, I'm as fond of satire as the next guy, so long as the next guy is Jonathan Swift, but the problem is the people who can't quite bridge the gap between satire and reporting...