KSM And What He Tells Us About The Right

[Prophet 451]

"I predict KSM will walk and it will be all Bush's fault"

Up until a couple of months ago, I worked for a fairly well-known spirituality website. I was laid off a few months ago (because of a Fox buyout the previous year) which exacerbated my already deteriorating mental health, so I'm now on the British equivelent of disability but I still pop in from time to time. Just glancing around, saying "hi" to old friends, that kind of thing. And I happened to glance onto the Politics board. Naturally enough, there was a thread about KSM and the other two being brought to NYC for trial.

And then I read the line reproduced above. Startled me. The poster is a hardcore right-winger of the kind that was cheerleading Bush through his very worst excesses but now pretends they never liked the guy ("Bush wasn't conservative", you know the kind) so I knew he wasn't being serious. He was trying to innoculate Bush from the (legitimate) criticism of how he handled KSM's interrogation. And this is a good illustration of how wingers think: It's the playground view that saying something in a sarcastic voice makes it untrue. I don't think KSM will walk for a second but if he did, Bush would bear the majority of responsibility because he ordered the man to be frickin' tortured. So it would be largely Bush's fault. So what the poster is trying to do is roughly equivelent to saying "oh yeah, and I suppose the sky is blue too?". It's playground stuff, five-year-old mentality.

And then I read further and what emerged was that the right, on this board anyway but I think it's a fair representation, want KSM to walk so they can blame Obama for it. And then they're talking among themselves, predicting the left will throw ticker-tape parade's for KSM and celebrate his walking away. They actually believe that the left actively hates the USA, actively wishes it harm.

I knew, on some level, that the right often thought this but it's startling to see it written down. And I think this explains a lot about the current level of political discourse, the vitriol and obstruction: The right are seeing themselves as being at war, with the left as an invading army and how do you deal with an invading army? You stop them in their tracks, no surrender, scorched earth and kill as many as you can. No compromise, no negotiation, no discussion, just fight. And that's why they're abusing the filibuster on absolutely everything; why getting anything done has gone from 50 votes plus the VP to a de facto 60 vote minimum; why the vitriol on the right has esculated to such terrifying levels; why guns are showing up at rallies; why there's the continual march on the Capitol. And that's why none of the right would raise issue with that disgusting Dachau poster at Bachmann's moron march, because they already consider themselves to be at war. And it's frightening because if a faction of the country, say 20%, are viewing themselves as actively at war with a domestic fifth column, it's only a matter of time until the bodies start piling up. Now, about this time, the right start saying that the left were just as bad to Bush, the Olbermann was just as bad as Beck is being, etc, etc. I'm not sure whether they're lying or if they're actually suffering a psychotic break from reality but either way, it's not true.But how can you make them see that? If you try to point out that they are believing things which are provably not true and that's usually a sign of schizophrenia, they start going on about how Stalin locked people up under the pretext of insanity. If this is a mental disorder, it's a totally self-protecting one. How can you possibly get through to people like this? How can you make a grown-up get their fucking shit together when you're not allowed to hit them? I can throw down as well as anyone but smacking them around, while satisfying, just serves to reinforce their self-delusion of being at war with a domestic enemy.

Guys, this is really fucking frightening because there is no reasoning with these people. This isn't just difference of opinion or politics, we could work with those. It's not just stupidity either, this is outright paranoid delusions. This is believing that one if being followed by a man-eating hedgehog. And these people are now at a boiling point. Many of them are armed and they genuinely believe (because Beck has told them to) that the people in power are ultraleft fascists actively trying to destroy the country. How can you possibly reason with that?