The Right Wing & Blue Dogs, blocking health care, is a page out of the fascism handbook.

[dixiegrrrrl]

Really, it is.

This is a great and fast read on what is fascism, offers 5 defining stages, and where we are.
Whadda think?

Regarding the RW/Blue Dog obstruction of President Obama's agenda, for example:

"....succeeding at the second stage "depends on certain relatively precise conditions:
the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation;
and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner."
(snip) Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: "deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."

And more ominously: "The most important variables...are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."

That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.

When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to full-fledged government fascism -- begins."

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009083205/fascist-america-are-we-there-yet