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(Martin Dies, 1939 - managed to take the lunatic fringe to the lunatic edge)

A few months ago I ran a piece on Martin Dies, and his infamous Dies Committee for Un-American Activities. An earlier incarnation of Joe McCarthy, Dies also managed to slide off the rails with vicious accusations and wild innuendos about people in and around power. Famously fabricating lists of "known communists", many of whom did not exist.

But just before World War 2, paranoia was rife. We were dangling on the precipice of getting involved. The war had already started by the time this address was given on October 27, 1939 and fear of being overtaken by some evil foreign entity was running rampant in the newspapers on the radio and on Capitol Hill.

So Dies took up the crusade, cloaking himself in Americanism and preaching the gospel of fear, whipping people into a state of frenzy.

Martin Dies: “These enemies within our country are not easily exposed, it is most difficult to expose fearlessly and without partisanship the termites who have ceaselessly gnawed at the pillars of this republic, because there are those who would like for us to be partisan when the question is involved. I said in the beginning of this investigation that I was determined it would be conducted without fear and without favor and that I would not hesitate to expose any man, whether he’s a Democrat or he’s a Republican. Whether he’s a New Dealer or an anti-New Dealer. Whether he works in the government or whether he’s working in industry. Only on that basis can I reconcile my attitude with my conscience. If the time has come when in the interest of political expediency and in behest to demands of party leadership I must qualify my conscience, I’ll surrender my commission and go back to private life. At least with my honor unimpaired.”

Clearly, fear and paranoia haven't gone out of fashion. And the practitioners of that fear will probably never go broke perpetuating it. The times change, the situations change, the enemies change. But the fear hate and mistrust, then as now, are all the same.

Comforting, isn't it?

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(Abraham Ribicoff - Secretary of Health, Education And Welfare in 1961 - also Hand Holder, Paranoia Assuager, Debunker)

In 1961, JFK introduced a bill that would provide medical assistance to the Aged. It later became known as Medicare and would later pass in 1965 during the Johnson Administration. As is always the case, the mere mention of anything connection with a government aid program where Healthcare is concerned is immediately tossed into the realm of Socialized Medicine. And in 1961 it was no different.

Newly appointed Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Abraham Ribioff was confronted by a dizzying array of skepticism from the Insurance and Pharmaceutical industries who instantly labeled any kind of Healthcare reform as Socialized Medicine. As is evidenced by this exchange between Ribicoff and Meet The Press co-founder Lawrence Spivak:

Lawrence Spivak: “ Mister Secretary, as you know the AMA and others have charged that the Medical Bill for the Aged under Social Security is an opening wedge to Socialized Medicine. Now if you thought there was a chance that the bill might be an opening wedge to Socialized Medicine, would you still be for it?”

Abraham Ribicoff: “ Well, it’s not an opening wedge to Socialized Medicine, I’m for the bill.

Spivak: “No, I’m asking if you thought that it was an opening wedge . . .

Ribicoff: “I would be against it . . .I would be against the bill if it were Socialized Medicine. . . “

Spivak: “If it opened the door to Socialized Medicine?”

Ribicoff: “It doesn’t open the door to Socialized Medicine”

Spivak: “Would you tell us what makes you so sure that it doesn’t?”

Ribicoff: “Because you and I and every other American, Mister Spivak has the right to choose his own doctor. There is nothing in this bill that has anything to do with doctors. This bill takes care of the health needs to the people of America, our aged over sixty-five, and basically takes care of their hospital bills, their nursing home bills and their visits to the home for home care. The bill specifically provides that each and every American has the right to choose his own doctor and his own hospital.”

The bill wound up being defeated, owing to a Congress recess and an overheated paranoia campaign (sound familiar?). But the Medicare Bill did finally pass in 1965.

The eerie sense of Deja-vu is everywhere.

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(Ramsey Clark in 1968 - in something of an uncomfortable place that year)

February 18, 1968. In anticipation of another "long hot summer", as had been the case for a few years running, Meet The Press hosted a panel which asked Attorney General Ramsey Clark what was going to be done about the problems with our violent cities, with the protesters, the extremist groups - generally everything that was destined to make 1968 a milestone year.

To say Clark had his hands full is an understatement, but the level of fear and paranoia being voiced by the media was something else. But then, so was the resistance to change in a lot of perceptions.

James Kilpatrick: “Mister Attorney General, in his recent message on crime, the President devoted a significant passage to narcotics laws. In recent months there’s been a considerable controversy about marijuana and its dangers. Some authorities appear to take the view that its non-addictive drug, no more risky to society really than tobacco or whiskey. What is your own view on marijuana?"

Ramsey Clark: "My own view is that the use of marijuana, the sale of marijuana is a federal crime. And we will investigate and prosecute where that use and sale of it is found. I also think in our time, and particularly among our youth, the atmosphere of permissiveness is a danger, a clear and present danger to our kids. Marijuana is so frequently coupled with LSD and other highly dangerous drugs that we have to enforce very effectively in this field to protect those youth from themselves, and to protect our society."

And this was only February.

The Mudflats: The real story behind the "rogue" in Palin's new book

digby: The right may be confused but they are thrilled to be wallowing in their domestic paranoia once again.

Pam's House Blend: Facebook poll - "Should Obama be killed?"

Taylor Marsh: In Iraq, General Ray Odierno and Ambassador Christopher Hill are at loggerheads

The Peking Duck: World Bank Head: The dollar will lose its place to the euro and reninbi

The Satirical Political Report: Forget Chicago as Host City. here's what Obama should really pitch to the IOC

"I Know There's Something Going On" by Frida, aka Ani-Frid Lyngstad of ABBA, is an intense slab of righteous relationship paranoia. The drums and the background vocals, both provided by Phil Collins (operating firmly in "In The Air Tonight"/"Take Me Home" mode) keep this song's tightrope near the snapping point from start to finish. This was the most successful non-ABBA song from any of the four Swedes. One listen and it's clear why.

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Probably the most ironic -- no, make that flat-out bizarre -- aspect of Glenn Beck's ultimately successful campaign to force out Van Jones is that it was predicated on Jones' supposed indulgence in extremist rhetoric ideas.

This isn't just a matter of the pot calling the kettle black. It's more like the black hole calling the sunspot dark.

Glenn Beck's history of indulging in extremism -- not just turning a blind eye to its presence, but promoting it outright to an audience of millions -- is so deep and wide that whatever indiscretions Jones might be guilty of fade into total insignificance.

Of course, we're all familiar with the remarks that lie at so much of the root of this matter: Beck's outrageous claims that President Obama is a "racist" who has a "deep-seated hatred of white people", which prompted a largely succesful campaign by Color of Change to encourage advertisers to pull their support for Beck's Fox News program. But that, frankly, is barely scratching the surface.

Keith Olbermann has put out a plea for information about Beck's own background in outrageous remarks. Of course, all he probably needs to do is go through the C&L archives on Beck for everything he needs.

Still, what Olbermann -- and everyone else wondering how to fight back from this latest round of right-wing viciousness -- should focus on is the inordinate number of times that Beck has simply promoted extremist ideas and memes straight out of the most fringe elements of the American far right.

It goes back several years. Beck, in fact, openly promoted the John Birch Society and its "New World Order" conspiracy theories frequently when he was still at CNN Headline News. As I observed at the time:

Beck is busy building a narrative that not only opens the Pandora's Box of mass public consumption of far-right conspiracism, it also portrays the most hateful and paranoid and poisonous bloc of American politics as credible and normative.

Since joining Fox in January of this year, however, the tendency has not only intensified, it's simply gone off the rails.

Most notably, Beck has actively promoted ideas, theories, and concepts taken directly from the far-right "Patriot"/militia movement, many of which in turn derive from the ugliest sector of the right, white supremacy:

-- He "war-gamed" out an apocalytpic American future in which society has completely crumbled, leaving behind a "Road Warrior" society in which militias remained the only defenders of the remnants of white society.

-- He told his audience for several weeks running that he "could not disprove" the existence of concentration camps run by FEMA in which conservatives were to be rounded up. After a few weeks of this, he finally ran a segment that in fact did debunk these claims, explaining that in reality all of the supposed "evidence" for these camps was the product of a long-running hoax that began in the 1990s with the "Patriot"/militia movement. (He then later claimed that he had done nothing to promote these theories.)

-- He ran several segments, including one on his radio show, in which he promoted the concept of the secession of Texas from the Union. A little later, he tried to pretend he didn't agree with the concept while in fact giving a secessionist the opportunity to promote his plans to Beck's audience.

-- He regularly promoted "one world government" paranoia. This included a supposed plot to put us all on a global currency controlled by the New World Order.

-- He tried to argue that the chief cause of the sour economy was the United States' reliance on a central banking system.

-- He hosted an entire hourlong segment devoted to promoting militia-derived constitutional theories about state sovereignty.

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(Beneath the posture - afraid of shadows, most living things, life in general)

With all the talk, all the hate and all the posturing going on - not only about the current Health Care debate, but our current state of life and society in general, I was wondering if this was anything new, some new direction our society had suddenly and dangerously taken.

Regrettably, no. As is evidenced in this documentary, part of the Second Sunday series produced for NBC Radio on March 3, 1969 - we've been a country fed on fear, hate and paranoia for a very long time. It appears to have cropped up in our DNA.

Frank McGee (Narrator): “Have we had time to become, or do we care to become something other than a collection of irresponsible individuals, having in common little more than a toleration, if not an endorsement of violence?”

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “We are today the most frightening people on this planet. The ghastly things we do to our own people, the ghastly things we do to other people, these must at least compel us to look searchingly at ourselves and our society before hatred and violence rushes on to more evil, and finally tear our nation apart. . . . we cannot blame the epidemic of murder at home on deranged and solitary individuals, separate from the rest of us. For these individuals are plainly weak and suggestible men stamped by our society with a birth rite of hatred and a compulsion toward violence. We must recognize, I believe that the evil is in us, that it springs from some dark intolerable tension in our history and our institutions. It is almost as though some primal curse had been fixed on our nation. We are a violent people with a violent history, and the instinct for violence has seeped into the bloodstream of our national life.”

And considering 1969 was a comparatively good year in retrospect.

Forty years on it's only gotten stranger - or maybe the microscope is looking more closely.

In any event . . .

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(Visions of the Fear Card: Priceless)

Historically, one would imagine every time any kind of reform is contemplated, the right wing quickly jumps in and pulls out the fear card. Socialism being the new paranoia. In 1949 as now, Socialism is lumped in with Fascism, Communism, Nazism, the entire spectrum - a whole stew of extremes geared solely to generate fear, paranoia and hate.

In this particular debate, part of the "Americas Town Meeting" series on December 4, 1949, the question "Are we slipping into Socialism" is asked of Republican Congressman Clarence J. Brown of Ohio and real-life Socialist Norman Thomas.

Typical of their exchange:

Brown: “ You can call any one of a dozen things, it all comes out of the same bottle. Socialism, communism, fascism, nazism, whatever it may be. It’s where the state becomes all powerful and the individual no longer counts”

Thomas: “I think, to be very . . . brutally frank, this sort of talk in itself is very dangerous. We’re not going to manage our very complicated civilization when you talk about fascism, socialism and communism being the same. When you talk about a movement like socialism, which has proved recently in New Zealand where it allowed itself very peacefully to be voted out of office, where you’ve got a movement that cares primarily for the individual and his rights, and you then equate it with a movement of that false renegade Mussolini, or with the communists and their tyranny, you’re mixing things up for the confusion of issues and the glorification of those who have power and property and don’t want to meet the challenges of democracy.”

Repeatedly during the exchange, Brown skirts the issues and solutions, instead throwing distractions around. It's typical of what's going on now - creating fear and hysteria in order to confuse. Thomas isn't exactly a saint either and his solutions aren't exactly concise.

But the fact is, whenever anyone tries to bring about some dialogue towards solution to a real problem, the Republicans have had a long track record for sand bagging and sleight of hand.

In 1949 we were knee-deep in the Cold War. It was very easy to play the fear card to gather support - the looming presence of the Soviet Union and the threat of nuclear war was very real, at least in the minds of most people. But in many ways, playing that card created an opportunity for many in the right wing to exploit the fear to their own advantage. And many have created huge fortunes and massive presences by scaring the shit out of you.

It was the same in 1949 and it's the same 60 years later.

If the fear ain't broke, why fix it?

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We had one of those great existential crises occur yesterday: Rush Limbaugh showed up to talk about the Evil Federal Government on Glenn Beck's Fox News show.

Normally, this much complete wingnuttery in one location threatens to create a black hole, a tear in the time-space continuum, and thus end all life as we know it. Fortunately, we seem to have been saved by the fact that Limbaugh wasn't actually present in Beck's studio. Who knows what would have happened then.

As it was, it was pretty bad. They devoted the focus of the segment to talking about Beck's theory that the government is going to "nationalize" the states and strip them of their ability to levy taxes, which even Mark Sanford dismisses as a "conspiracy theory". But evidently, Limbaugh believes in Beck's theory, at least in its larger outlines:

The question that we're all asking is: At what point the American people decide they wanted this kind of power grab by government into the private sector or have they decided that? Did they vote for a cult-like figure based on emotion when they voted for Obama? If so, what's it going to take for them to wake up?

I mean, the politics of this is, that with the numbers in Washington, even if the Republican Party was a unified conservative opposition in stark contrast to Obama, even if they were all unified, they don't have the numbers to stop anything that he is doing. It's going to be — it's going to require the American people stopping this and you have to wonder at this stage at — where are they?

Do they want the government owning their house? Do they want the government owning the mortgage company that they deal with and the bank that they deal with? Do they want the government owning the car company that they're going to buy their little putt-putt from?

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The National Rifle Association is having its big annual convention in Arizona this week, which means we'll see the usual parade of fearmongering and liberal-bashing on steroids that these affairs always are -- with a special emphasis on President Obama, that scary Muslim left-wing radical who wants to take all our guns away.

It's all paranoia, all the time. As you can see from clips above, all the raging talk at the convention is about how gun sales are through the roof because everyone's afraid Obama is going on a gun-grabbing spree. (Side note: Was that a Freudian slip on Larry Kudlow's part, calling the NRA the "IRA"?)

Pretty typical is Ted Nugent, who's blogging the affair from Arizona for Human Events and coming up with some prime bon mots ("Write this down: Gun Free Zones are a felon’s playgrounds. Ban Gun Free Zones now. Join the NRA.") while drawing a bead on the bottom line: Keep your hands off my guns, you dirty stinking liberals:

Meanwhile, in order to stop the drowning and murders, I will work on banning water, Obama can try to ban guns. Good luck. Save an innocent life, join the NRA and celebrate 138 years of keeping and bearing. Drive a bad guys nuts. Then shoot him while he’s committing a violent crime.

That's the stuff circulating for mainstream-media consumption. But always at these shows, and around them, there's the gaseous nebula of conspiracism. The warnings of an NRA fan posted at one of the local news stories is fairly typical of the material floating about the convention and among its attendees:

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Keith Olbermann, on Countdown last night, brought the whammy down on the wingnut talking heads at Fox (and the rest of the conservative media as well) for their ongoing attempts to blame immigrants for the spread of the swine flu from Mexico:

Well, yes, you are a racist. Exactly how does that apply, though, to the people who the Centers for Disease Control confirmed actually carried the Swine Flu from Mexico to the U.S., a group of Catholic school students from New York City, who spent Spring Break in Cancun. Uncontrolled Catholic immigration, open borders for private school kids reckless?

Anyway, unswayed by the facts, the Republican echo chamber tried to stir the American melting pot with a classic recipe of hate and fear.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I thought that this line, though, was very ironic, this morning in one of the articles I read about surveillance at the Mexican border. You thought we had an immigration problem, well now we might actually want to prevent the sick people from crossing over the border.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Chaos in Mexico; from earthquakes to Swine Flu, will it mean more illegals heading for the U.S.

GLENN BECK, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Does anybody wish maybe we could control the border just a little bit at this point.

SHEPPARD SMITH, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Everybody is e-mailing, going the illegals are bringing it across the border. Relax.

SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Tonight, Swine Flu spreads from Mexico to the United States. Is this the latest border crisis.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The U.S. is not currently testing travelers from Mexico. But customs officials are wearing protective clothing.

MICHAEL SAVAGE, “THE SAVAGE NATION”: Illegal aliens are carriers of the new strain of Human Swine Avian Flu from Mexico. Is this a terrorist attack?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Some, though, say the solution is to close the border.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now talk that we should even close the border?

BECK: If this is so important, why haven‘t we closed the border.

NEAL BOORTZ, “THE NEAL BOORTZ SHOW”: There‘s the bio-terrorism angle. What better way to sneak a virus in this country than to give it to Mexicans.

This kind of talk -- directly associating the targets of a "drive them out" campaign with disease -- is classic eliminationist rhetoric. It's not surprising that it's bubbling up out of Fox News' fetid cauldron, either.

Tom Allison at Media Matters put together a first-round look at some of the ugliness:

-- Savage declaring that Mexicans "are a perfect mule -- perfect mules for bringing this virus into America."

-- Michelle Malkin warning that the pandemic was the product of "uncontrolled immigration."

-- Beck warning that the pandemic will create a crush of people trying to flee north across our border.

And that's just scratching the surface. As Eric Ward at Imagine 2050 observes, some of the nativist right's more inflammatory figures were saying even uglier things.

Writes Nezua at The Sanctuary:

The stances of those who most vocally oppose immigration today are so predictable that one could paint a face on a septic-tainted soccer ball and paste up word balloons and rest well, knowing that The Nativist Lobby point of view on any immigration-related topic will end in "deport them all" and "seal the borders" if not "round them up" and other tired ideas. And nobody reading now needs a reminder of how throughout time, both Latin America as well as all immigrants have been slurred and painted with the brush of disease by those resistant to changing demographics.

The NCLR's blog points out that this fearmongering has real life-and-death consequences:

It's unfortunate, then, that certain individuals with an obvious axe to grind are shamelessly exploiting a public health emergency for their own purposes. It's not surprising that some are implying that all immigrants are a threat to our health-that's standard fare on the hate group circuit.

Ironically, the very act of attempting to demonize and stigmatize entire groups, and even entire countries, is likely to impede these and other critical steps that the authorities are taking to protect all Americans from the spread of the flu, for example:

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(So infamous, they even wrote songs about him)

The name J.Edgar Hoover has been fading from Americas collective memory the past few decades. He died in 1972. But from 1924 up until his death he ran the FBI, taking it from a somewhat bumbling government agency into a monolith that was synonymous with eavesdropping, wiretaps, file keeping, political power plays, espionage and dirty tricks. He was the reason all subsequent FBI Directors had term limits. He made the FBI his life and his kingdom and was in charge right up to the last. He was the guy with all the secrets and he made a lot of innocent lives uncomfortable as the result.

Here he is from September 23, 1940 giving an address to the America Legion Convention in Boston, talking about one of his favorite subjects, The Communist Threat and "Foreignism".

With all that paranoia floating around, it's a wonder anybody slept at night.

How stupidly, small-mindedly paranoid is this?

... deep inside an 86-page supplement to United States export regulations is a single sentence that bars U.S. exports of vaccines for avian bird flu and dozens of other viruses to five countries designated "state sponsors of terrorism."

The reason: Fear that they will be used for biological warfare.

Under this little-known policy, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria and Sudan may not get the vaccines unless they apply for special export licenses, which would be given or refused according to the discretion and timing of the U.S. Three of those nations — Iran, Cuba and Sudan — also are subject to a ban on all human pandemic influenza vaccines as part of a general U.S. embargo.

Even Bob Gates thinks it's "the nuttiest thing", when Indonesia does the same thing in reverse.

And the scientific community is not impressed.

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