Out-foxing the news fixers

There’s been an interesting couple of articles over on The New York Times recently which look at the growing extremism in the US Republican Party, something I commented on last month.

Columnist Frank Rich provides a detailed takedown of what he describes as the “Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers” and the corrosive effect that they and their message are having on what passes for political discourse in the US.

Another writer, Paul Krugman takes a wider ranging view of reaction to the murder of Dr George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, followed in short-order by the incident at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in which a security guard was shot dead by a white supremacist and Holocaust denier.

Both point to what seems to be an increasingly worrying trend that incidents like this are on the increase following Barack Obama’s election as President, and that the right-wing media, including the Faux News Channel, bear some responsibility for this.

What’s worrying in the middle of all this is that having been trounced at the elections in November the Republican Party is currently leaderless, rudderless and clueless, as exemplified by the recent fiasco over whether Gingrich or Palin should speak at a fund-raising dinner – if they can’t get their guest lists sorted out you have to wonder whether they ever will re-discover the plot ahead of 2012, or whether they have already written that off and are concentrating in 2016.

Unfortunately nature abhors a vacuum, and so into that breech have stepped a whole swathe of unelected, possibly even unelectable, voices like so-called comedian Rush Limbaugh and actor Jon Voight, who told Faux News Channel and others that his devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama“.  

This is exactly the kind of swing to extremism that the British Labour Party suffered after its humiliation at the hands of the Conservatives in 1979 – and by the time the next election came round in 1983, the Party was riven with divisions as it lurched to the left under Michael Foot.

Labour’s manifesto for the 1983 elections included abolition of the House of Lords, leaving the EEC (the fore-runner of the EU) and abandoning the UK’s nuclear deterrent, prompting one senior Labour MP to describe it as “the longest suicide note in history“.

It took the reality check of the Conservatives Party’s 1983 landslide to set Labour back on the road to electoral respectability, although it took them another 14 years to actually achieve their goal of regaining Number 10.

There’s no doubt the electoral roller coaster that is American politics plays out much quicker than the UK one, but one wonders whether the Republicans are already paying the price for allowing the extremism of the election campaign to get so out of hand, as evidenced in the Al Jazeera video I posted a few days ago. 

Frank Rich is already alarmed that no-one is reining in the “hard-core haters”:

The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.

Hang on a minute, did he say McCain had guts – in classic sports broadcasting terms, let’s see that again…

So that’s having “the guts and clout to step up” eh Frank? We can clearly see McCain is embarrassed because he knows his campaign has been based entirely around Obama’s race and background, and now one of his base supporters has come out and said it and he’s got to agree with her without agreeing with her, knowing that if he gets the next few statements wrong, his whole campaign is doomed to be filed in a garbage bin marked “flip-flopper”.

So he fumbles, he humms, he errrs, and he comes out with something so remarkably anodyne that it can be read any which way you like; the only decisive thing he does is to get his microphone well away from the loony old trout.

McCain didn’t “step up”, he fell over, tried to stand up, managed to get his foot out of his mouth and then ran like hell, and in doing so he showed all the leadership qualities of a concussed bee.

What was needed was for McCain to walk slowly and silently back to the centre of the stage and then to deliver a quiet but stinging rebuke to anyone in his party who dared to make the rest of the campaign about race, to make it clear that the election should be about policy, and not about fearmongering – then he should have gone away and slapped down anyone on his campaign team who disagreed.

That would have been leadership, that would have been “stepping up” but he blew it, and so set in motion the course of events that lead us to where we are today, with right-wing extremism on the rise in the US effectively being encouraged by a leaderless and ineffective Republican party and egged on by loud-mouth shock jocks like Limbaugh, Beck and O’Reilly who really are the perfect examples of the inverse ratio between the size of the brain and the size of the mouth.

Someone needs to step up and provide the same kind of reality check as the Labour Party got in 1983; the problem is that if the American Right waits until after the 2012 election, how many people are going to die in the meantime?

What a weiner

US self-styled shock jock Michael Savage has been placed on a list of prople banned from entering the UK, and of course, for the neo-cons of the US, it is final clinching proof that Britain is no longer a free country.

Reports of the UK’s demise are, as usual, exaggerated, especially by these blinkered fools who are still in denial about losing the 2008 election just because their man had fewer votes than the other guy.

Michael Savage, who for obvious reasons hides from his real name of Michael Wiener, has broadcast controversial views on immigration, Islam, rape and autism, causing great offence in America.

According to a BBC profile, he once described autisic children as “brats” in needs of discipline, and said the Qaran was a “book of hate”; during a show on MSNBC he told a caller: “You should only get Aids and die, you pig”.

Weiner/Savage later apologised for the Aids outburst, but claimed his comments on autism and Islam were taken out of context. Ahhh, where have we heard that before?

Weiner/Savage has threatened to sue the British government for defemation, while one of his supporters evokes Churchill in describing the decision as “beyond shameful”. Oh dear, the US right and their love afair with Churchill, something I have commented on before.

The BBC website reports:

Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain, told BBC Radio 5 Live that people should be free to enter the country, regardless of their views: “If they step over the line and break the law, it’s at that moment the law should be enacted, not beforehand.

That’s very considerate of you Inayat – unfortunately if we apply the UK’s legal standards to individuals like Weiner/Savage, it’s very likely they have already broken the laws on incitement (even if they were not in this country at the time), which means there is a good chance they might do so again if they were allowed in.

By banning them now, the Government is actually saving taxpayers like me millions in legal costs, not just in terms of what happens if the law is broken, but in extradition hearings and the cost of the policing of the inevitable protests against these people as well.

Everyone talks about the huge power of the media, and as a member of the media, Weiner/Savage must remember the old adage that with great power comes great responsibility; there are ways of making your point, but doing it through incitement and insult goes way beyond the bounds of what I consider to be responsible.

So, anything which stops my taxes being wasted on irresponsible publicity-seeking potty-mouths like this is very welcome indeed.

What’s probably eating Weiner/Savage and his fans more is that his name, and a number of far right and neo-nazis, now sits proudly alongside  a number of extreme Islamic preachers, some of whom are considered to have supported terrorism.

Now there’s equality for you!!!