There Are Places That Even NewsMax Won’t Go
I was beginning to think that the right-wing extremism we’re seeing knew no bounds. Let’s face it, when people start toting semi-automatic rifles and other guns at events attended by Obama while bearing signs calling for his assassination, it’s kinda hard to think they’d blanch at anything. Hell, just Sarah Palin alone is evidence that they don’t really have an internal filter.
So when I saw that NewsMax, a rabid ultra-right “news source” which rarely pulls any punches, had a column up which played up the possibility of a military coup d’état to unseat Obama, I was interested, but not in the least bit surprised. NewsMax is well-known for being utterly shameless in their bias; this is the kind of thing one would expect from them.
However, it seems that even they draw the line at hinting at a military coup. When I saw the mention of the article, I clicked through to the link, and discovered that the article had been taken down. The author, one John Perry, was still listed amongst their prominent bloggers, but it was clear that his latest blog post had been scrubbed. After left-wing blogs started pointing to it, NewsMax took it down.
Which is strange, when you think about it. Right-wingers have been advocating secession, and often made death threats against Obama, albeit veiled. They claim he’s a mass-murdering dictator, commonly comparing him to Adolf Hitler. They say aloud that he’s building concentration camps to pack with conservative critics, and many of them sincerely believe that he wants to eliminate the elderly. This article (reproduced in part below) did not actively call for a military takeover; instead, it more or less predicted one and opined on its effectiveness. Relatively speaking, it was fairly tame stuff. Okay, toward the end, it seemed to segue into calling for such a coup. But you have to read it carefully, which is more than they tend to expect the public to do.
But not only did NewsMax take it down, they soon started backpedaling even more: they scrubbed the columnist’s listing on their main page, and released a statement that he’s just an “unpaid blogger” with “no official relationship with Newsmax” other than that. Which is obviously false, as not only did they list him prominently on their front page, but he’s been writing weekly articles for them for a full decade.
The best guess out there is that NewsMax was aware of the FaceBook page which recently launched a poll asking if Obama should be killed; that got the Secret Service involved, and the page was quickly yanked.
The question is, have we reached Republican Rock Bottom?
Sadly, my guess is, no. This was probably just a special case, and we can expect voices on the right to keep on sinking further.
Here’s all of the article that I could find:
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.
America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it.
[…]
Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility?
Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.
Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.
Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don’t shrug and say, “We can always worry about that later.”
In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.
What he’s describing is basically what I imagined happened to Japan in the 1930s. It wasn’t bloodless. There were a few high profile assassinations of government ministers, then the military started taking over various ministries as the civilian ministers feared for their own safety.
Beyond that there’s already been a coup in America. Maybe two of them.
There was the November-December 2000 coup, when a conservative minority won the presidency with the help of a conservative supreme court.
There was November-January 2008-2009 coup. That’s when Obama originally pronounced that change in the economy begins from the bottom up, not the top down (the exact approach the problem required). That’s the last time I heard him say anything populist and progressive about the most material and germane of policy question (he’s still populist and progressive about immaterial things). It’s as if his Wall Street benefactors sat down with him and had an intervention and explained to him that they paid the piper and therefor they call the tune. Since then, change has happened from the top down, which is little different from before.
As a result the economy is very brittle, the livelihood of millions of people are still collapsing. If demand isn’t restored soon, by some method, we’ll have a double dip recession that will simply mean a redefining of what America is and means economically. We’ll simply be the Brazil of the northern hemisphere.
@Tim Kane
While I agree that 2000 had some . . . irregularities . . . 2009 is a bit more complex.
You’re not going to clean out 100 years of modern capitalism and be able to start with a functional clean slate. Allowing the old order to just fail a la Lehman and Wamu would result in mass dislocation of economic activity. The hole dug 2002-2008 is very deep and very dangerous — wages have been flat since the dotcom bust of 2000 yet house prices are still 30% or more above where they were then. This is a VERY precarious state of affairs, either wages have to rise, borrowing costs have to fall (more), or home prices have to come down. If the latter happens everyone who bought this decade is even more screwed than they are now. The PtB need a functioning BofA, Chase, etc to rally the economy around.
I initially went to Japan in 1992 to escape the bad US economy. I jumped from the frying pan into the fire as Japan continued to slide into malaise while the dotcom boom and rise of China as a trading partner juiced US productivity and restored the economy to a semblance of health. I came back in 2000 and jumped right back into the dotcom crash. I think I am a one-man GDP wrecking crew.
We’ll simply be the Brazil of the northern hemisphere.
We should be so lucky. Their external debt is only 15% of GDP.
The US of 1980-now was an experiment of falling domestic manufacturing, replaced by an unprotected, free-trade service economy. Whether we can continue exporting dollars as we are remains to be seen, if not, there will be a great restructuring of the economy. I am not particularly hopeful, though if we actually create a high-tech robotic economy plus get lucky with alternative energy R&D we would be able to produce our way out of the hole.