A Fresh Hell: Hyping an Angry Base with Lies

We’ve seen an incredible amount of lies, distortion, and bigoted memes aimed at the most frustrated and ugly part of the Republican base.  These racist dog whistles (see the am post by BB) have been so bad that I can’t believe that any dog in america has been sleeping.  Ralph Reed’s group has been trotting out its usual set of  over-the-top rhetoric too. The Romney camp is desperate, and desperate angry people do desperate angry things.

A mailer blasted out by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a nonprofit group spending millions of dollars to mobilize evangelical voters this November to help Mitt Romney’s campaign, compares President Barack Obama’s policies to the threat posed by Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II. It also says that Obama has “Communist beliefs.” A copy of this so-called “Voter Registration Confirmation Survey” was obtained by Mother Jones after it was sent to the home of a registered Republican voter.

The Faith and Freedom Coalition is the brainchild of Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition who was once hailed as “the right hand of God” and who is now tasked with getting out the evangelical vote for Romney. In the mid-2000s, Reed was ensnared in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Reed was a longtime friend of Abramoff’s, and he took payments from Abramoff to lobby against certain American Indian casinos. Reed once ran a religious-themed anti-gambling campaign at the behest of an Abramoff-connected Native American tribe to try to prevent another tribe from opening a competitor casino. His current efforts for Romney are something of a political rehabilitation for Reed.

We’ve seen the President of the United States called “foreign”, “not really American”, and deemed an apologist for radical Islamists and communists.  We’ve now got conspiracy theories about his birth, his education, and the mainstream public polls. What positive outcomes can come from hyping up a base that tends to be filled with militia groups, dooms day-oriented religious followers, and old school, KKK-like racists?  What possible outcomes might happen if these groups decide they should save their country from the outrageous stereotypes built around a democratically elected leader? This is a questions explored by Josh Holland at Alternet.

It’s an exceptionally dangerous game that the right-wing media are playing. If Obama wins – and according to polling guru Nate Silver, he’d have a 95 percent chance of doing so if the vote were held today – there’s a very real danger that this spin — combined with other campaign narratives that are popular among the far-right — could create a post-election environment so toxic that it yields an outburst of politically motivated violence.

A strategy that began with a series of rather silly columns comparing 2012 with 1980, and assuring jittery conservatives that a huge mass of independents was sure to break for Romney late and deliver Obama the crushing defeat he so richly deserves, entered new territory with the bizarre belief that all the polls are wrong. And not only wrong, butintentionally rigged by “biased pollsters” – including those at Fox News – in the tank for Obama. (See Alex Pareene’s piece for more on the right’s new theory that the polls are being systematically “skewed.”)

Consider how a loosely-hinged member of the right-wing fringe – an unstable individual among the third of conservative Republicans who believe Obama’s a Muslim or the almost two-thirds who think he was born in another country – expecting a landslide victory for the Republican might process an Obama victory. This is a group that has also been told, again and again, that Democrats engage in widespread voter fraud – that there are legions of undocumented immigrants, dead people and  ineligible felons voting in this election ( with the help of zombie ACORN ). They’ve been told that Democrats are buying the election with promises of “free stuff” offered to the slothful and unproductive half of the population that pays no federal income taxes and refuses to “take responsibility for their lives” – Romney’s 47 percent.

They’ve also been told – by everyone from NRA president Wayne LaPierre to Mitt Romney himself – that Obama plans to ban gun ownership in his second term. (Two elaborate conspiracy theories have blossomed around this point. One holds that Fast and Furious – which, in reality, is much ado about very little – was designed to elevate gun violence to a point where seizing Americans’ firearms would become politically popular. The second holds that a United Nations treaty on small arms transfers (from which the United States has withdrawn) is in fact a stealthy workaround for the Second Amendment.)

And they’ve been warned in grim, often apocalyptic terms of what’s to come in a second term. The film, “2016: Obama’s America,” offers a dystopian vision of a third-world America gutted by Obama’s supposed obsession with global wealth redistribution. His re-election would bring something far worse than mere socialism – it would be marked by Kenyan anti-colonialism, in which America’s wealth is bled off as a form of reparations for centuries of inequities between the global North and South.

We’ve seen undercurrents of this already in the Tea Party Movement.  We’ve also seen actual acts of terrorism–like the bomb found along a parade route in Washington State–that indicate that many elements of the right are taking these things seriously.  We also see that legitimately elected politicians  repeat and spin these same paranoid memes.  Republican Reps Steve King (R-Iowa), Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Allen West (R-Florida), and others have been repeating complete nonsense and legitimizing it by asking for congressional investigations.  The media also gives these folks air time to spew what amounts to tin foil hat hypotheses.  Remember the judge in Texas that was preparing for all out civil war based on an Obama re-election? Read the rest of this entry »