The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged
By FRANK RICH
NY Times Op-Ed: February 27, 2010
No one knows what history will make of the present - least of all
journalists, who can at best write history's sloppy first draft. But if I
were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most
significant of February 2010, I wouldn't choose the kabuki health care
summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I'd
put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the
tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal
Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with
the dark afterlife of an omen.
What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself
than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass -
or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would
be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a
"Tea Party terrorist." But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing
anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under
the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create
instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed
politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were
publicly empathizing with Stack's credo - rather than risk crossing the most
unforgiving brigade in their base.
Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack's
crime. "It's sad the incident in Texas happened," he said, "but by the same
token, it's an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that
is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it's going to be a happy day for
America." No one in King's caucus condemned these remarks. Then again, what
King euphemized as "the incident" took out just 1 of the 200 workers in the
Austin building: Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran nearing his
I.R.S. retirement. Had Stack the devastating weaponry and timing to match
the death toll of 168 inflicted by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in
Oklahoma in 1995, maybe a few of the congressman's peers would have cried
foul.
It is not glib or inaccurate to invoke Oklahoma City in this context,
because the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air. Two days before Stack's
suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow's chilling, months-long
investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the
McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the
mists of history. The Patriot movement. "The New World Order," with its
shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the
Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.
Barstow confirmed what the Southern Poverty Law Center had found in its
report last year: the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right
that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a
comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the
diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a
few self-styled "patriots" to sow havoc.
Equally significant is Barstow's finding that most Tea Party groups have no
affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party's ham-handed efforts to co-opt
them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why.
They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of
George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington, and if they hate
Obama more than the Republican establishment, it's only by a hair or two.
(Were Obama not earning extra demerits in some circles for his race, it
might be a dead heat.) The Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government
agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on
entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of No
holding forth in Washington - a party that, after all, is now positioning
itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is
the Party of No Government at All.
The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is
real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the
natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed
2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other
leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers.
Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the
overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P.
guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often
impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the
right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party's counterconservatism.
The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate
entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that
none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently
pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee "unless the party
wants to lose at least 44 states" (as it did in Barry Goldwater's 1964
Waterloo). But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that
ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the
peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea
Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate
conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P.
Congressional minority.
In the days after Stack's Austin attack, the gradually coalescing Tea Party
dogma had its Washington coming out party at the annual Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC), across town from Capitol Hill. The most
rapturously received speaker was Beck, who likened the G.O.P. to an
alcoholic in need of a 12-step program to recover from its
"progressive-lite" collusion with federal government. Beck vilified an
unnamed Republican whose favorite president was the progressive Theodore
Roosevelt - that would be McCain - and ominously labeled progressivism a
cancer that "must be cut out of the system."
A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right
organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views,
which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an "idiotic" and
"irrational" threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. At the
conference's conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman
Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment
conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy
Rabinowitz describes Paul's followers as "conspiracy theorists,
anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the
obsessed and deranged."
William Kristol dismissed the straw poll results as the youthful folly of
Paul's jejune college fans. William Bennett gingerly pooh-poohed Beck's
anti-G.O.P. diatribe. But in truth, most of the CPAC speakers, including
presidential aspirants, were so eager to ingratiate themselves with this
claque that they endorsed the Beck-Paul vision rather than, say, defend
Bush, McCain or the party's Congressional leadership. (It surely didn't help
Romney's straw poll showing that he was the rare Bush defender.) And so -
just one day after Stack crashed his plane into the Austin I.R.S. office -
the heretofore milquetoast former Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, told the
audience to emulate Tiger Woods's wife and "take a 9-iron and smash the
window out of big government in this country."
Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk
radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to
it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota
congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted "people in
Minnesota armed and dangerous" to oppose Obama administration climate change
initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is
positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry - no mean feat
given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A
state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that "the tree of
freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots."
In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic
politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent
revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before
McVeigh's
mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and
Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the
far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.
In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a
once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied
with Beck's 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising
militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion
disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that "another civil war" may be in
the offing. "I don't see us being the ones to start it," she told Barstow,
"but I would give up my life for my country."
Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin's memorable
final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention
earlier this month: "I will live, I will die for the people of America,
whatever I can do to help." It's enough to make you wonder who is palling
around with terrorists now.
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