Fanatic Beasts And Where To Find Them

From  Crooks & Liars: 'Steve Bannon Is Going To Eat Reince Priebus For Lunch'

 From The New York Times Editorial Board today:

‘Turn On the Hate’: Steve Bannon at the White House

...

In an ominous sign of what the Trump presidency will actually look like, the president-elect on Sunday appointed Stephen Bannon as his chief White House strategist and senior counselor, an enormously influential post.

Many if not most Americans had never heard of Mr. Bannon before this weekend, and for good reason: He has kept a low profile, even after taking over Mr. Trump’s campaign in August. Before that, he worked as the executive chairman of the Breitbart News Network, parent company of the far-right website Breitbart News, which under Mr. Bannon became what the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a “white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill.”

Mr. Bannon himself seems fine with that description, telling Mother Jones last summer that Breitbart was now “the platform for the alt-right,” a loosely organized group of mostly young men who believe in white supremacy; oppose immigration, feminism and multiculturalism; and delight in harassing Jews, Muslims and other vulnerable groups by spewing shocking insults on social media...

From Right Wing Watch today:

Ann Coulter Celebrates Trump Victory By Attacking ‘Snarling Muslim’ Khizr Khan

Anti-immigrant pundit Ann Coulter was one of the speakers at a post-election gathering in Florida this weekend hosted by far-right activist David Horowitz, where she joined activists including Mike Huckabee, James O’Keefe, Dinesh D’Souza and alt-right icon Milo Yiannopoulos, who received a journalism award. Donald Trump’s campaign CEO Steve Bannon, who has since been named to a senior position in the president-elect’s White House, was scheduled to attend as well, although we have not been able to confirm that he actually did so.

In her speech to the gathering, Coulter rejoiced in Trump’s victory, even going out of her way to attack Khizr Khan, the father of a slain Muslim-American soldier who became the object of Trump’s wrath after he criticized the candidate’s anti-Muslim rhetoric at the Democratic National Convention...

From Rod Serling writing in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times in 1964, in response to a series of articles by wingnut-apologist Morrie Ryskind (text only available in Serling's biography):

...

What Mr. Ryskind seems constitutionally unable to understand is that there is a vast difference between the criticism of a man or a party, and the setting up of criteria or patriotism which equates differences of opinion with disloyalty.

We have need in the country for an enlightened, watchful and articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions of this republic that should and must be held sacrosanct.

...

“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.”

After a decade or two, when all the recriminations die down, the three most important facts to come out of this election will be:

1. Tens of millions of Americans went to the polls an voted for a racist, fascist con man enthusiastically, with their eyes wide open and a song in their hearts,  They wanted this.  They have always wanted this.


2. The tens of millions of Americans have always wanted this would never have gotten it without the active collaboration of the Beltway Cult of False Equivalence.  For sordid wages, the Quisling media built the fascist Right a royal road to this moment, and now they will use every resource at their command to make everyone forget it.


3. The Left has been right about the Right all along.  Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you or selling something.

Meanwhile, Operation Memory Hole is in full effect as Right is prepares to mind-wipe it's meathead base to forget that "deficits" were ever a thing in 3...2...1...

From Politico:

GOP and Trump put deficit on back burner

Giant infrastructure plan, major tax cut on the agenda — and so is a huge increase in the debt.

A serious case of fiscal amnesia may soon be sweeping the GOP.

For eight years, Republicans hammered President Barack Obama for exploding the national debt. But now a GOP-led spending spree is coming, with Donald Trump riding to the White House on trillion-dollar promises and a Republican Congress that looks likely to do his bidding. It’s a potential echo of the last time Republicans ran Washington, when then-Vice President Dick Cheney memorably remarked, “Deficits don’t matter.”

Trump campaigned heartily on a spending splurge and nothing he’s said since his shocking election suggests he will reverse course. Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, are papering over divisions with the man who frequently tossed party orthodoxy aside on the trail.

“There is now a real risk that we will see an onslaught of deficit-financed goodies — tax cuts, infrastructure spending, more on defense — all in the name of stimulus, but which in reality will massively balloon the debt,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget...

Yes, the fact that the Republican base is just a shitpile of infinitely reprogammable Golem is now so baked into the blase Beltway in-house vocabulary that Politico can casually mention the GOP's coming mass "amnesia" as if they were discussing cherry blossoms in D.C. in the spring.  Oh right, it's that time again.  Time for the GOP to jettison everything they told the rubes and get on with the real agenda.  Hell, they even hauled up that Cheney quote from cold-storage:  you know, the quote that virtually no one but the dirty hippies seemed to remember as the Fake Tea Party flooded the street to "take their country back" from the scary black man because, uh, freedumb!  And deficits!

Or as I wrote a decade ago:

...these days the Last Republicans Standing are the dregs of the dregs.

Morally and politically inbred pig people who, without batting an eye, would cash in their children’s life insurance to plunk down the extra $10,000 for the special bone-speaker implants so they can have Rush and Falwell and Coulter and the rest of the cast of “GOP Friends” talking inside their heads, telling them which slogans to scream minute-by-minute, 24/7/385.

Who will not only believe absolutely any insane drivel the Dear Leader shits down their throats, but will do so while applauding and squealing for seconds.

And with an army of infinitely reprogrammable Golem for his audience, the Dear Leader does not need to worry about the quality or subtlety of his lies.

Right.  All.  Along.