Michelle Malkin pioneered this new sphere of affairs last year by kicking off a campaign to attack a group of college antiwar protesters with their home addresses and phone numbers.
It was, of course, unusually reminiscent of what went down in Rwanda during ethnic strife there, where radio announcers would give out the home addresses of intended victims. But this hasn't just happened in Rwanda: we've seen similar tactics here in the Northwest used against environmentalists.
Malkin has continued to expand on the concept with her "John Doe" campaign, which urges paranoid Americans to take action against anyone they suspect might be a terrorist, no matter how fevered their imaginations.
What she and her torch-bearing cohorts are tapping into, of course, is the right's innate eagerness to form ugly eliminationist mobs bent on purging anyone who opposes their agenda. Indeed, the ease with which they form bands of flying monkeys -- even when the story isn't just false but an embarrassing mistake -- has also been duly noted. Orcinus
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Aside from the disgusting nature of the attacks on the Frost family, this is one of the things that has many of us aghast. To what end are these Freepers and Malkinites and Corner readers attacking these people, as even if the Bush veto of the expansion holds, they are going to still qualify for the program? The inability to recognize this, and the instinctive need to just attack, attack, attack and smear, smear, smear is what has surprised me the most. This is not a policy dispute to these folks- this is tribalism, and something deeper and darker and more sinister. It was a mob whipped into a frenzy, a blind rage, and there was no point to it other than the rage itself. John Cole
But not to worry--we're living in the instant information age, which puts some limits on what the political thug class is willing to risk:
To really get a mass slaughter off the ground, the society carrying it out must somehow remain unaware of what it's doing. While one hand is bludgeoning the subhumans to death, the other has to remain clamped firmly over the eyes. I guess I've heard rumors the national guard went kind of crazy in Oregon, but there hasn't been anything about it on CNBC, so...
With the development of the internet, cell phones that take video, etc. this type of doing-but-not-knowing can't be maintained. This weird-but-real aspect of human psychology has important consequences...especially when it concerns violence toward first worlders, but for others as well. I'm certain one reason we haven't rolled out the carpet bombing in Iraq is that our political class would be confronted immediately with the consequences of their actions. Things are hideous in Iraq, but not as bad as they'd be if information didn't get back here so quickly. The blissful ignorance of mankind's overlords can't remain as total as it used to. Jonathan Schwarz
I think Schwarz is partially right, but I think that the "overlords" have learned since 2001 that it doesn't matter how much exposure their crimes get. We have learned that there is nothing these people can't stonewall. No opposition strong enough to break through the wall can be mustered. Have the Abu Ghraib photos stopped torture? Did they disgust and outrage enough people not to vote for Bush in '04? No, instead we get the Military Commissions Act. What about Larry Craig from Idaho? Even he's able to tough it out. Remember the good old days when even the appearance of impropriety was politically damning. We've learned in the last six years that you can get away with almost anything if you're a member in good standing of the political thug class.
The political thug class is slowly, but steadily pushing the limits of what the broad, electorate will accept as normal or justifiable. There will be no serious opposition so long as most people here are kept well-fed and distracted. Things will continue to get worse until (unless) there is some significant outrage and push back.
P.S. It should also be said that this business with the Frost family was clearly a shot across the bow warning Dems who want healthcare reform that the battle is going to be a bloody, take-no-prisoners battle to the death the guerrilla opposition led by the uber-creepy Mitch McConnell and his "flying Monkeys," Malkin, Limbaugh, Fox, NRO etc. It going to be ugly, ugly, ugly. Any moderates out there still think that all we need to do is sit down and talk sense with this lot?
Update: Greenwald this morning:
O'Reilly summarized what the Far-Left America would look like once John Edwards got done with it:
[W]ould you support President John Edwards? Remember, no coerced interrogation, civilian lawyers in courts for captured overseas terrorists, no branding the Iranian guards terrorists, and no phone surveillance without a specific warrant.
Who could even fathom an America plagued by habeas corpus, search warrants, and a military that fails to beat, freeze and mock-execute its detainees? And nothing is more sacred to core American values than branding other countries' armies as "Terrorists" ("The [Revolutionary] Guard is the SS of Iran").
O'Reilly has aptly highlighted here the new ideological divide in our political culture -- one is now on the "Left," usually the "Far Left," if one supports what were previously the defining attributes of basic American liberties, while one is "Serious" and "Responsible" and "Centrist/Right" only if one is too sophisticated and "tough" to actually think that such effete and abstract things matter.
That's how it works: slowly, incrementally we adjust as slowly, incrementally the infrastructure for tyranny is laid. So you might think, "Who listens to that old crank O'Reilly, anyway?" Greenwald addresses that in an update:
To underscore the key point here -- that O'Reilly's views of "leftism" and radicalism are shared generally by the Beltway establishment -- look at those two endlessly instructive columns on FISA by that bellweather of Responsible Serious Beltway Centrism, David Ignatius. In both columns, Igantius rails against the two intractable, "absolutist" partisan sides which are blocking a fair, bipartisan solution. One excessively partisan side is Bush/Cheney, for refusing to allow FISA to be amended to make their warrantless eavesdropping legal. The other excessively partisan side are those who oppose amending FISA to legalize the President's warrantless eavesdropping activities.
The only responsible, centrist approach is from those who beg the White House to be allowed to re-write FISA to make legal the President's warrantless eavesropping activities. Those who opposed legalizing the President's NSA program -- on what ought to be the uncontroversial ground that warrants should be required for eavesdropping -- are "playing partisan games," "pursuing absolutist agendas," and impeding important centrist solutions.
Thus, put another way, in the Ignatius/Beltway world, if you believe that the Government should have to get warrants before eavesdropping on the conversations and reading the emails of Americans, then you are -- for that reason alone -- a radical, shrill, obstreperous fringe partisan interfering with the Serious, responsible policy-makers in the Beltway. Seriously, that is literally what they believe, the prevailing Beltway view.
And by now it should be clear that legislators care more about their Beltway cred than they do about how the voters see them. As long as they can hide in the conventional wisdom as guys like Ignatius project it, they have nothing to fear from the majority of their constituents who are either uninformed or don't care.