Big Shots

by digby

Read the following article and ask yourself if we live in a sane country:

Barack Obama said he would improve the economy. Turns out he already has, at least in one retail niche: gun sales. Starting in the days before the election, gun shops across the state have been mobbed by buyers who fear that Obama and a larger Democratic majority in Congress will restrict firearm sales.Many were stocking up on things such as assault rifles, high-capacity magazines and handguns that they think would be the most likely targets of new laws, though practically everything related to shooting has been selling more quickly. “It’s been an absolute madhouse,” said Trey Pugh, a manager at Jim’s Pawn Shop in Fayetteville, which is selling 15 to 20 AR-15 assault rifles a day. “I’m getting guys come in and say I always wanted that gun, and give me that one too and that one and, oh, I need a gun safe, too.”

I might chalk it up to a bunch of gun nuts using this as an excuse to buy some new toys, if it wasn’t for the ugly nature of the conservative campaign against Barack Obama and the ongoing sense of paranoia and victimization that characterizes the right wing.

Here’s an example from one of the Republican presidential nominee’s good friend:

On the November 4 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, G. Gordon Liddy spoke to a caller who stated: “I’m ready to go to the concentration camp, that [Sen. Barack] Obama’s police force — he will round me up. Because I — I’m a white American.” Liddy then said, “Well, listen to this,” and aired an edited clip of Obama [talking about the America Corps program] saying in a July 2 speech in Colorado Springs: “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” Liddy then stated: “Shades of the Gestapo. The Geheime Staatspolizei,”

As Dave Niewert has thoroughly documented, this is the way the far right nutballs get their lunacy mainstreamed. It’s a much bigger danger when the fringies like this become the dominant voice in a minority Republican party.Unfortunately, there are a lot of them.

… we are fooling ourselves if we think the United States is still a Christian nation. Its people just elected a barbarian as president, authorized the killing of both its youngest and sickest, rejected scientific fact that human life begins at conception, blocked parental intervention of abortions of young girls, and voted down the wording of an abortion ban they said only two years ago they would support.

[…]

Obama’s election means Roe v. Wade has been taken off the table for the next 20 or 30 years. Throughout his four- to eight-year tenure, Obama will nominate at least two or three young Supreme Court justices to ensure the majority continues to agree with that decision, forcing the continued legality of abortion on all 50 states for decades.

So the holy grail for many pro-lifers is now gone. Just get used to thinking of pro-life strategy without it.

This lunatic says that people all over the country rejected the anti-choice measure on the ballot and that Obama has taken Roe vs wade off the table so the “pro-life” movement must develop a different strategy than through the ballot box and the courts to stop abortion. She says that the church must become more active in teaching that sex is bad, but I suspect that zealots who read this will perceive the literal call to arms in her words, “God’s people are commissioned.”

Ed Kilgore points out:

I know some religious progressives, with encouragement from Barack Obama, are working hard to find common ground with anti-choicers on efforts to reduce the demand for abortion. But so long as such efforts rely, as they always will, on aggressive promotion of birth control, you have to recognize that many if not most self-conscious right-to-life activists regard the most popular and effective forms of birth control as abortifacients, not contraceptives. Progressives need to understand that we are talking about people who sincerely think that every abortion is an act of homicide, representing an ongoing Holocaust of about one million victims a year. They use the Holocaust analogy very deliberately, because they believe they are living in a latter-day Nazi Germany, wherein the rest of us are as complicit in evil as the “good Germans” of the Third Reich. And they are not going away. There’s good reason to believe that homophobia will fade due to generational changes and the steady exposure of more and more Americans to gays and lesbians. But if anything, young conservatives (who often call themselves “abortion survivors” and spend time thinking about their “murdered” co-generationists) are more adamant in their anti-abortion views than their parents and grandparents.

I’m not so sure about the homophobia either anymore, to tell you the truth. The Christian Industry believes it’s found it new Holy Grail and is delighting in the fact that it has another issue from which to become millionaires on the backs of bigots. They’re not going to quit.

The stuff we saw at the McCain Palin rallies was not a fluke. It’s not like the two of them were long time Republican favorites and their worshipful followers just got carried away in the heat of the moment. These people were not their followers — they were fundamentalists, talk radio dittoheads, racists, militia types and gun nuts who were there to make their voices heard. They are motivated by hatred and paranoia — and they are now the face of the Republican party.

A lot of people have compared this to the period in the 1990s leading up to the Okalahoma City bombing. But I actually think it will be substantially worse. For one thing, the conservative movement was at its zenith at that point, filled with confidence and political power. As much as they let their ids run wild, they had a stake in maintaining their own political viability. Today, after their miserable failure at governance they are scattered and confused, with their Big Money Boyz and internationalist intellectuals trying to distance themselves from the rubes and the rubes defiantly asserting their dominance. I don’t think the party poohbahs can keep a lid on this, even to the rather weak extent they did a decade ago.

And this time, instead of a mere womanizing good old boy from Arkansas, we will have a president who these people literally believe is a foreign, barbaric, baby killing, communist, Muslim terrorist. They think the liberals have illegitimately taken over the political system and are literally endangering the country in order to force their foreign philosophy on Real Americans. They believe that violence is always the best way to deal with enemies, lest they live to fight another day. They are hoarding guns. You do the math.

H/T to BB