Folks, Rushdooney is no threat. He commands a tiny sliver of a thread of an outlying theology rejected by mainstream and evangelical Christians because it's heretical! How many times does it have to be said? You give him such outsized influence compared to what he truly has.

You people just sound so utterly stupid when you rant on about someone who has zero chance of doing anything. It also shows a serious inability to make distinctions, the hallmark of the paranoid style so well documented by Hofstader.

Sarah,

Who exactly was arguing that we were "out of the woods" when it comes to the right wing?

Here's me, about six comments back: "If the Bush presidency reminds us of anything, it is how fragile democracy is, and how vigilant we must remain."

What I find increasingly disturbing is that several years ago, only a handful of voices in the wilderness were crying out to be heard on the real dangers posed by Bush and his ideological cohort. The rage was necessary. Today, there's a big audience for this rage. A cottage industry of authors has sprung up to decry the excesses of the right wing. And the rhetoric grows more shrill and paranoid by the day, even as the conservative movement sputters and a majority of Americans turns left.

It's time to move on to the next leg of the journey.

We decry the right wing for creating the dehumanizing narratives about "enemies" that allow them to hate and fear and kill remorselessly. And yet, a similar hysteria seems to be gripping the left. We are in danger of becoming what we hate.

I'm all for a robust defense of liberal ideals. Attack bad ideas. Let sunlight disinfect. Fight and fight to win. It's no less important now than it was two years ago, or six. But fear is the right's game.

You can add one part pyscho-babble to your potion, or sprinkle in some parallels with former totalitarian regimes, but it's getting increasingly hard to hide that the active ingredient in this snake oil is hate.

And I would never call mbf crazy.

Enjoy your weekends, all.

No H! Sorry I misspelled your name!

It can't be said enough.

"Folks, Rushdooney is no threat. He commands a tiny sliver of a thread of an outlying theology rejected by mainstream and evangelical Christians because it's heretical! How many times does it have to be said?"

Say it again, and again and again, please.

By the way, what sort of sliver do YOU command, while we're on the subject? Excuse me if I don't trust your judgment on this issue.

Call me paranoid. Fine. This is one subject I PRAY to be wrong about. Just because rank and file evangelicals don't know who Rushdooney, Rove, or any other sort of "behind the scenes" player is, doesn't mean that these guys don't hold sway with the puppet masters at these gawd-awful mega-churches.

What do I know? I'm just sick of hearing this trickle down Rushdooney drivel at Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas every year.

Raj, I agree with you completely that we are at risk of getting bound up in our own hate. Our audience at Orcinus is perhaps more given to this than most: many of our regular readers are people who (like both Dave and me, who are rural kids and have spent much of lives around the people we write about) have had enough contact with the extreme right to be very well aware of what they're capable of -- and interested in finding out what can be done to turn back the authoritarian tide.

That is, in fact, my brief there. Dave knows the history and the players that brought us where we are; I write more about the various ideas and tools that can help us look forward (I'm a futurist, after all), figure out what we'd rather have happen, and move on to create that. And, personally, I do get concerned about the way that our own fears sometimes paralyze us in place, and blind us to real opportunities for hope.

You said earlier that we're not going to lead the tribe out of wilderness without a strong positive vision. I spend a lot of blogging time poking at pieces of possible visions, and tossing out stuff I hope will help readers entertain a more optimistic view of the future.

Still, the old rule -- if it bleeds, it leads -- seems to hold at least as true for blogs as it does for any other news medium. The fact remains that there's nothing for the ol' hit rate like a good polemic. And I think that's dangerous, because if the left bloggers settle into an economy where rage, fury, and bad news are the only things that really sell, there's a real risk our new media won't serve the needs of democracy any better than the old one did.

Malkin: "Whatever your partisan leanings, an attack planned on the Vice President of the United States is an attack on America. Some of our fellow Americans, however, can't put their sneering hatred of the White House aside."

I don't hate the White House, I love the White House. It stands for leadership and the ongoing effort to realize the values of our great nation... until january 2000. Bush and Cheney have harmed our nation and comprimised our standing in the world. What's worse, they obtained war authorization fraudulently with bogus intelligence and they snookered the Amerian people to supporting their pre-emptive war of choice in Iraq. The Bush Admin's incompentence and criminal behavior should be investigated and impeached.

That said, if Cheney were a victim of the war he started in Iraq, and that event alone caused the US to change the course and find a political solution, wouldn't we all call that the turning point? In that context, I say: Better one Dick Cheney than 3000 American fighting men and women or 600,000 Iraqi civilians. Now to be clear, I'm not advocating his death nor celebrating the possibility. I'm simply saying that if it came to pass, and that caused a revaluation of US strategy and a politcal solution, then the peace would be a desirable result.