MF

Mick Farren has always has a bad case of BDS, but I didn't know it was so deep. In the cover feature (!) of this week's LA City Beat, Farren looks at the conspiracy movement* that claims President Bush will not leave office quietly, but instead will declare martial law, put millions into FEMA concentration camps and kill many others.

I assumed Farren was writing the piece to show his sense of humor--you think I'm a nut, but at least I'm not crazy. But no. He never comes around and endorses this insanity, but over and over, he implies it's possible. And even when he doesn't go all the way, he constantly makes outrageous accusations en passant.

Here's a representative paragraph (I could have closed my eyes and stuck in a pin):

The observation has more than once been made [in the Huffington Post, on MSNBC and in Farren's house] that the Bush/Cheney administration is an alliance of fools, fanatics, and crooks. Would it be possible that the crooks sold the unthinkable to the fanatics? KBR/Halliburton has already given Bush and his neocon cronies a hugely expensive and hugely profitable war in Iraq. Would it be that hard to pitch an equally profitable, black-budget domestic fascism to the neocon ilk of Paul Wolfowitz, Max Boot, or John Bolton? They already have a philosophical contempt for the masses, and a fetishized worship of power. Perhaps the gulag was commissioned, but enough of the fools (and maybe the Pentagon) had enough vestigial humanity to shy away from a complete plunge into totalitarian horror, leaving those who like that kind of thing in need of a sufficiently grandiose excuse.

Remember, Farren isn't just some guy in his pajamas ranting into the night, he's a paid journalist. And even if he doesn't entirely endorse the lunacy of the conspiracists, his own lunacy isn't much better.

Alas, he's not alone. In fact, Farren attempts to bolster his case by quoting two mainstream (i.e., widely read and published in respectable media sources) journalists, Naomi Wolf and Joe Conason:

Wolf: “Beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable – that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realize.”

Conason: “For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country."

This hyperbole seems to be par for the course among quite a wide stretch of pro-Dem pundits these days. Look at Paul Krugman's latest (and hardly worst) piece in the New York Times: "...I can’t think of any precedent [...] for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention." Oh I can, since what's going on today is pretty much how politics has been run in America for as far back as I can recall. (Krugman then goes on to talk about stuff so mild that, lies or not, it's barely worth noting.)

Is this part of the Michael Moore-ification of the Democrat's base? (I realize there are radical rightists involved here, but I'm talking about people who are taken seriously as journalists and pundits in papers and TV channels around the country.) Nothing is too harsh, nothing is too silly? How can one hope for a rational conversation about, say, the Iraq War if its most visible opponents actually think like this.

*I thought about it and decided to embed one of the many conspiracy videos available on YouTube. I realize it's hateful nonsense, but I'm pretty sure PJGuy readers can handle it.