Right-wingers: Kill all State Department diplomats

By Heraclitus

Let's face it, when you're looking for humorously wacky right-wing bloggery, it's not going to get much better than Hugh Hewitt's pronouncement that "Senator Santorum is now available for a seat on the SCOTUS should one become available." It's turgid, pompous, and crazy, but ultimately completely irrelevant. You can laugh at it because it's so obviously blind to the political realities of the world. But at the same time, it's relatively harmless. Justice Santorum may be the two scariest words in the English language, but we're never going to have to say them in earnest. Meanwhile, he's proposing something that in no way requires breaching the laws of god or man.

Unlike, say, calling on Hamas to "blow up State." State? Michigan State? Is this a rabid Wolverines fan speaking? No, it's someone named Pam Atlas, blogular toady of the ineffably execrable John Bolton. She's also a member of Pajamas Media (and -- gasp! -- she has a quote from Ayn Rand on her website. There is, as I'm sure you're all aware, no surer sign of a pygmy intellect and a gruesomely stunted emotional life than admiration for Ayn Rand). Glenn Greenwald reports. Here's the quote from Atlas herself.

Back to terror funding our enemy. Do they really believe by feeding the crocodile, they won't get eaten?

While those have been the Israeli and American demands of the Palestinian Arabs since Hamas won legislative elections in January, two diplomatic sources yesterday who requested anonymity said the State Department would be willing to accept a government that included some Hamas members if a majority of the cabinet agreed to the terms laid out in the 2003 road map document signed by both sides as well as America, Europe, Russia and the United Nations.

Accepting Hamas? Perhaps Hamas will blow up State. Someone has to.

“We are looking at creative ways to get around this,” one diplomat said. “I would not call this ‘Hamas lite,’ but if we could get a government of negotiators instead of terrorists we’d take it.”

First, kill all the diplomats (before they get us killed.)

Subtle. Decent. Sane. Today's conservative punditry.

But, actually, Atlas didn't come up with this little idea on her own. As Greenwald also notes, Pat Robertson has called for the same, while interviewing the author of a book critical of the State Department.

"I read your book," Robertson said. "When you get through, you say, 'If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that's the answer,' and you say, 'We've got to blow that thing up.' I mean, is it as bad as you say?" Robertson said.

Memo to Pat Robertson: if you detonate "a nuclear device" in Foggy Bottom, it would kill more than those Satanic diplomats.

Here's Greenwald on the relative centrality of these whackjobs to today's GOP, and especially to the Bush White House and political ethos.

For some reason, journalists are eager to talk endlessly about the handful of foolish right-wing extremists who march around wearing swastikas and Nazi costumes. That gets the media excited, despite their total isolation and lack of consequence.

[I would actually say that the media focuses on them precisely because of "their total isolation and lack of consequence." It makes them easy targets for a press that wants to engage in virtuous-sounding but utterly empty and worthless rigtheous indignation. Our media isn't "liberal," it's cowardly and dishonest. -- Heraclitus]

But right-wing hate-mongering that is fueled by religious extremism (Christian and Jewish) is infinitely more dangerous and significant in the U.S. A strong argument can be made that religious fanaticism constitutes a significant motivating force for much of our foreign policy and certainly for the support of many people for those policies, including -- to one degree or another -- the President himself. Yet that topic makes the media very uncomfortable and it is therefore almost never discussed. It ought to be.

********

The point is that Pam Atlas, like Ann Coulter, is the exposed id of the Bush movement. She continues to be embraced by the right-wing blosophere because, for many of them, the sentiments she is expressing -- as extreme and attention-seeking though they may be -- are not at all objectionable to them because the same sentiments motivate them. There have been enormous amounts of ink spilled on the so-called "Angry Left" and the allegedly rabid liberal bloggers (mostly based on the fact that some delicate pundit received e-mails with bad words in them), but the pulsating and ever-increasing hate-mongering in the right-wing blogosphere has been all but ignored.

Greenwald's right, and his point is certainly worth thinking about (I know, I know, absurdly and lamentably anti-climactic ending, but I'm exhausted [like Blind Willie McTell, in the song that just came on, I feel like a broke down engine], and I think the quotations speak for themselves).