Which is to say, mainstream Republican politics. Let me explain.
About that now-famous Barney Frank clip, in which a maniac health-reform opponent accused the (Jewish) congressman of supporting “a Nazi policy” and was rebuked and humiliated by Frank in turn:
It turns out that this woman is a Lyndon LaRouche cultist. And so now, right-wing pundits like Michelle Malkin are feigning innocence and shifting blame by arguing that LaRouche is a man of the left. Nice try.
LaRouche abandoned Marxism decades ago and has long been known as an antisemitic agitator and far-right conspiracy theorist. Yes, he happens to oppose neoconservatism and globalization and war, but also environmentalism (he believes Al Gore is bent on population-control genocide). In other words, LaRouche’s views are a hodgepodge, nicely illustrating how the kookiest fringes of the left and right basically converge in the end. (In the ’90s, Alexander Cockburn, editor of the lunatic-left webzine Counterpunch, openly declared himself an ally of the far-right militia movement. Now these types, people with actual ties to the Viper Militia of Arizona, are out in force brandishing guns outside the health care town halls. Anyway…)
The point is this: Malkin can try to walk the GOP away from the LaRouchies, but the fact is that GOP rhetoric on health care is all but indistinguishable from that of the LaRouchies. The “death panels” lie was first propagated not by some fringe nobody, but by Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican candidate for vice president. RNC chairman Michael Steele, given the chance to disavow the “death panels” canard, has declined to do so. So this is mainstream Republican politics. It’s the equivalent of, say, Cynthia McKinney taking over the Democratic Party, rather than leaving it.
It’s also telling, as Keith Olbermann observed last night, that the reaction from Rush Limbaugh, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade to the Barney Frank incident was to bash Frank and express sympathy for the crackpot. That’s where their ideological gut led them, before they knew about her LaRouche ties.
A final note: Here on the Upper West Side, during the apex of the Bush-Cheney years, you’d see LaRouchies setting up information tables and handing out literature on Broadway all the time. Down with Bush, stop the war: that was an easy sell. Funny, you don’t see them around here now with their Obama=Hitler posters.
4 Comments
I'm beginning to genuinely despair over this whole affair….because I'm not so sure these are fringe politics anymore. They seem to be awfully popular with mainstream America. I'm not sure Obama and his allies (and I include myself in that category) can rein in an argument that's spiraled so badly out of control – and hence fear that we've already lost.
This is Mike West, by the way. 🙂
Despair? Hell yeah. The worst are full of passionate intensity, as Yeats warned.
For a comprehensive list of examples of LaRouche supporters disrupting health care town hall meetings, check out:
http://contemporaryantisemitism.blogspot.com/2009/08/lyndon-larouche-holocaust-imagery-and.html