Fasten Your Seatbelts, Ladies and Gentlemen: A Warning from Guy Fleegman

Paul Krugman:

Not about the financial crisis - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog: The crisis isn’t the only scary thing going on. Something very ugly is taking shape on the political scene: as McCain’s chances fade, the crowds at his rallies are, by all accounts, increasingly gripped by insane rage. It’s not just a mob phenomenon — it’s visible in the right-wing media, and to some extent in the speeches of McCain and Palin.

We’ve seen this before. One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons — they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn’t just show up in fringe publications — it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. Ronald Reagan was supposed to have settled that once and for all.

What happens when Obama is elected? It will be even worse than it was in the Clinton years. For sure there will be crazy accusations, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some violence.

The next few years are going to be very, very tough.

And here is ground zero of the slime machine: National Review: "posing," "Maoist," "Stalinist," "infiltrating," "stealthy," "ostensibly reasonable":

Andrew McCarthy: Ramesh has cited Obama positions that are misleading — moderate-looking camouflage for his actually extremist positions. For example, what he calls his "tax plan" does not account for — to take just a couple of examples — the tax (probably on fossil fuels) that would have to be imposed to pay for the Global Poverty Act he proposes, nor the levies implicit in any cap-and-trade or similar scheme in response to climate change.  And on the Second Amendment, Obama is posing as supportive of the Supreme Court decision with the caveat that the decision leaves plenty of room for gun regulation — a loophole that you can drive a truck through.

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.

In the immortal words of Guy Fleegman:

I don't like this. I don't like this at all. Sure, they're cute now, but in a second they're gonna get mean, and they're gonna get ugly somehow, and there's gonna be a million more of them...

Comments

[Rob]

If there is an afterlife, I get the feeling the Devil right now is asking Nixon for pointers on how to take something good and make it rot from the inside.

[Oscar Wilde-Assguess]

"...a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate."

That's the natural audience for divine-right monarchy. I have always maintained that the (modern) Republicans were not just badly named, but uniquely badly named.

[m. adams]

The perma-link to the National Review post is here:

Re: Omnibus Response (on Radicalism) [Andy McCarthy]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjZiZmE4ODgwNDVmMjhkOTEwOTUxY2JiZmUzZDRlYWY=

Look, Brad, they can't even give their blog post a human-readable filename. They're obviously not human.

[Peter]

Now I have to watch that tonight. Favorite Guy moments:

Guy Fleegman: [whimpering] I changed my mind, I wanna go back.
Sir Alexander Dane: After all the fuss you made about getting left behind?
Guy Fleegman: Yeah, but that's when I thought I was the crewman that stays on the ship and something is up there and it kills me. But now I'm thinking I'm the guy that gets killed by some monster five minutes after we land on the planet.
Jason Nesmith: You're not going to die on the planet, Guy.
Guy Fleegman: I'm not? Then what's my last name?
Jason Nesmith: It's, um... um, um... I don't know.
Guy Fleegman: Nobody knows. You know why? Because my character isn't important enough for a last name... because I'm gonna die five minutes in.
Gwen DeMarco: Guy, you have a last name.
Guy Fleegman: [hysterical]: Do I?!

and right after that

[The shuttle has landed and the hatch is being opened by Fred.]
Guy Fleegman: [frantically] DON'T OPEN THAT! It's an alien planet! Is there AIR?! You don't know! (begins holding his breath)

Sam Rockwell was fantastic in that part.

[David Graves]

Halfway through the Andrew McCarthy quote, just switch the ideology from "left wing" to "right wing". You will then observe the entire program of American "conservatism" since it learned its lesson from the 1964 Goldwater campaign. Sound reasonable, but act radically to dismantle institutions once you hold the levers of power. It culminates in Rovism, where for example the Justice department becomes an extension of the party, run by and for its apparatchiks, with little regard for the rule of law. Did McCarthy write his piece ironically?

[esme]

the chubbchubsbs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLABCoFNJHo

[Michael Turner]

"Did McCarthy write his piece ironically?"

Irony is dodo-bird dead, after Casey Mulligan.

Another great Fleegman line: "I'm so tired of being right." I know how he feels. I can't even stand the ways I've been wrong, recently. Like, I had half a mind to start bottom-fishing when the Dow finally drifted slowly down to ... 8500. Which was going to happen some time in ... late November or early December, was my guess.

Anyway, it really does seem like it's only a matter of time before you have glaze-eyed skateboard punks waking up and tuning into some guy with a megaphone down at the mall in a very depressed Riverside (or Scottsdale, or Tampa), one who's blaring something about the international jewish banking conspiracy, about how it's leading to socialist world government, and about Obama as a model for general miscegenation, him being merely a pawn of the elite, and especially convenient as a conspicuous (but very misleading) exception to the general rule of that such race-mixing is a depraved practice that can only lead to a stagnant human gene pool ....

But I think that's overextrapolating, and at the same time too retro.

[Michael Turner]

It's rare for Krugman to be so vaguely anecdotal. However, there are some numbers that indirectly back up his claims. It's not just McCain rallies, which (it might be argued) could feature only a highly unrepresentative slice.

Some recent poll results (http://www.pollingreport.com/right.htm)

Gallup Poll. Oct. 3-5, 2008. N=1,011 adults nationwide. MoE +/-3.

"In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?"

Sit down for this: *90%* "dissatisfied". That's sharply up from 77% a few weeks ago; we've had a range of 70-85% this year until now, with both 70 and 85 appearing to have been outliers.

CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. Oct. 3-5, 2008. N=510 adults nationwide. MoE +/-4.5.

"How well are things going in the country today: very well, fairly well, pretty badly or very badly?"

"Very/fairly well": 20%. "Pretty/very badly": 80%. That's up from 69% less than two weeks before this polling period.

Other samples from the last two weeks look similar. What's disturbing is not only the speed with which this surge in disaffection is climbing, but also that, in the sheer size of the fraction reporting discontent, it necessarily includes a lot of those who believe that the world's going to hell in a handbasket simply because it looks (to them) like America's about to elect a radical islamic-and-or-commie terrorist.

[CCBC]

Listen, somebody should caution these guys to quit dissing the Maoists, they're the only thing keeping the economy afloat! Maybe Obama should make Ayers a special envoy to China or something. Maybe he should bring it up in the campaign. "My good friend and fellow board member, Bill, who is now going to beg another couple of Trillion$ from his Comrades..."

[mike]

The cool thing about Obama is his coolness. He's much less flappable than Clinton ever was.

That means

1) the attacks will be less effective that they were on Clinton.

2) the wacko conservatives will get even angrier, and this won't help them.

If the crazy types don't do something violent, and perhaps even if they do, they will rip what little remains of the Republican into tatters. After a wildly popular and unifying Obama recedes from the scene, the Democratic party will split, with one fragment pandering to the segments of old disenfranchised Republicans and Libertarians.