An evangelical Christian hate group called “Repent Amarillo” is reportedly terrorizing the town of Amarillo, Texas. Repent fashions itself as a sort of militia and targets a wide range of community members they deem offensive to their theology: gays, liberal Christians, Muslims, environmentalists, breast cancer events that do not highlight abortion, Halloween, “spring break events,” and pornography shops. On its website, Repent has posted a “Warfare Map” of its enemies in town...
According to a new exposé by the Texas Observer, Repent set out earlier this year to destroy a discreet club of swingers they discovered in town. On New Years eve, the harassment began, with Repent members, almost exclusively young men, showing up in military fatigues and bullhorns, blaring Christian music at the swingers’ club building. The swingers, made up of “regulars” of middle aged, working class couples, were then stalked at every following visit to the club. Repent not only took video of each member, but obtained the swingers’ license plates and dug through their trash, informing neighbors and coworkers of what was once private...
...A community theater attempted to open “Bent,” a play about the persecution of homosexuals during Nazi Germany. But the day before opening night, Repent members helped shut down the play by calling in fire marshals to complain about the theater’s permit. Staffers at a nature preserve were featured on local news defending themselves against Repent accusations that their site represents something related to witchcraft...
Note the line above that they are "Led by a man named David Grisham, a security guard at a nuclear-bomb facility called Pantex..." who poses absolutely no security risk whatsoever. I'm sure.
That's why McCain and Palin lost the last $election. The prospect of Holy Warriors chasing down Chase executives out for a night on the town isn't one the Company appreciates. The same goes for the most vocal elements of the tea party crowd. They're 'Merikan Taliban. Digby:
I'm getting a few lectures about how wrong it is for me to be so hard on the tea partiers because they are mostly good-hearted folks who hate the bailouts/outsourcing/corporatism just like the rest of us. But that argument makes me feel the same way I felt when people told me that Bush wasn't really that bad or that Rush is just an entertainer or that the rush to war with Iraq made sense. It's an awful lot like being told you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes. I know what I see.
What I see of the tea partiers are a group that used to be called John Birchers or Buchanan Brigades or Perot voters (or when the Republicans are fully empowered, "the GOP base".) When they say they hate the Republicans it's because they are embarrassed by them for being losers, not because of any ideological differences they have with them...
they are organized around nothing more than the destruction of liberalism and their political vehicle is the Republican party. They can be very powerful. All the rest is a smoke screen.
Digby links to a good comment by Amanda Marcotte, but it looks like the serve at pandagon.net is being attacked this morning. I'd recommend you try to follow that link later. The quote from Hullabaloo:
...Their complaints about the federal government need to be understood in terms of right wing speak, where very few beliefs are stated straightforwardly, but usually bundled up in a bad faith argument designed to give the intended audience a belief that the person is speaking from principle instead of prejudice. In other words, they flit around from one right wing argument about the feds and spending to another, because that’s not really what’s motivating them. That’s just the cover story...
Right wing populists shut up and get behind Republicans when they’re in office. They only do this shit when Democrats have power, especially if the sitting President isn’t a member of their perceived tribe. What that says to me is that even as they preen around about how they’re not loyalists to the Republican party, that is in fact what they are. And the reason is that Republicans do the work of telling the right wing populists that they’re the only real Americans. And that’s what matters to them more than anything else.
Their violent actions are never terror either. Even though they're the kind of actions the police $ecurity state uses to excuse the increasing surveillance and disinformation we live under. Even though that somehow never seems to block the violence here or in the middle east, it is moderately effective in convincing the eloi "we" won in Iraq.
Another curious point is that what drives the rightwingers to violence the most are points the fringe left realized a long time ago. In the case of Bedell, it was the realization that 9-11 was likely another Operation Northwoods. Stack wondered
...Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self- serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in...
[tip o'teh tinfoil to Erin for sending me Stack's original letter]
Now that's pretty heady for a rightwinger to realize. They don't react the way they're 'pozed to, and they go half-cocked and do stuff. Unfortunately, as lefty as a paragraph like that reads, they're still too conservative everywhere else for the main$tream to accuse them of being bomb-throwing hippies.
So they're called lone wolves, and their justifiable grievances are called moon battery and fanaticism.
The more docile Tea Party faction gets assimilated by the Reptilians, and the Kos 500 by the Oborg DINOcrats.
Both of course are owned by the same Companies.
So quietly the drift towards a bank$ter-run version of the society Orwell had nightmares about continues.
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