Instead of taking this day to reflect on the Inauguration and the eminent change facing us, how oh-so different everything is going to be, and every other overstated bit of hopeful drivel with which the internet is still a-buzzing, I'd like to muse on my relationship with the outgoing president.…
From Democracy Now: A top Republican internet strategist who was set to testify in a case alleging election tampering in 2004 in Ohio has died in a plane crash. Mike Connell was the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove and created websites for the Bush and McCain electoral campaigns. He…
Did you think that the election was over? Nope. In the Minnesota Nov 4 Senate election, Al Franken (D) lost by 206 votes (out of almost 3 million). This close of a margin requires a hand recount. About 34,000 votes were rejected by machines (uncounted), primarily in Democrat-heavy districts. With this…
I've made no secret of it: I believe Barack Obama has the best chance of unifying the country enough that we can make coherent decisions for the benefit of the majority of American citizens. If the polls are correct, it appears that Barack Obama has a very good chance of…
Sure it could. The same way fascism always happens. Not imposed, all of a sudden, from above, like a boot on your neck in the dead of night. It grows and festers in dark corners of society, feeding off the irrational fears and resentments and feelings of entitlement of an angry minority and growing ever stronger, with noone noticing it, until it bursts into pungent & infectious & malignant life, strangling its host. Fascism grows from the ground up and keeps growing uncontrolled until it stops – or is stopped.
Tim Wise at Redroom has written an eloquent and timely call-to-arms entitled “This Is How Fascism Comes: Reflections On The Cost Of Silence.”
Before you read the whole thing, I present some snacks to whet the appetite:
…If fascism comes it will dress like a hockey mom, or a NASCAR dad. It will believe Toby Keith to be an artist, Larry the Cable Guy to be a comic, and that the world was made in six literal days less than 6000 years ago.
If fascism comes it will come from the small towns; the ones Sarah Palin, quoting a famous racist and Jew-hater, said “grow good people,” and which occasionally do, but which, just as often grow provincial, isolated, fearful and superstitious ones.
If fascism comes it will come from faux populism, from anti-immigrant hysteria, from persons who have more guns in their homes than books, or whose books, when they have them, are principally volumes of the
