Maureen Farrell at BuzzFlash.com

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Are Wingnuts Getting Nuttier? The Attack of the Kooky Conservatives

by Maureen Farrell

During the 2000 election campaign Gov. George W. Bush promised to "change the tone in Washington." God knows the tone needed to be changed -- particularly since members of Bush’s own party were responsible for an unnerving barrage of bile-laced invective against Bill Clinton. Representative Dan Burton called our 42nd president a "scumbag," George Will said that there was "reason to believe that [Clinton] is a rapist" and an all-knowing Ann Coulter reported that Clinton "masturbates in the sinks."

"We're now at the point that it's beyond whether or not this guy is a horny hick," Coulter also warned. "I really think it's a question of his mental stability. He really could be a lunatic. I think it is a rational question for Americans to ask whether their president is insane." Coulter’s strident assertion that "if you don't hate Clinton and the people who labored to keep him in office, you don't love your country," was tiny taters, however, compared to the paranoid rumors propagated though right-wing smear jobs. Or perhaps you haven’t heard how Hillary, despite being a lesbian, was having an affair with Vince Foster, who, like others, became the target of the Clintons’ insatiable murder lust? Oh yeah. And then there was that whole impeachment thing, too.

So, no, it’s no secret that wingnuts everywhere were not merely unhappy campers during the Clinton years, but were rabidly frothing at the mouth. They hated our last duly elected president and wanted him gone -- and would do or say anything to achieve that end. But you would think now that the wacky right is in power and is the driving force behind Bush’s presidency, they would be happy, right?

Think again.

David Brock, who discussed the pathological inner workings of right-wing propaganda machine in Blinded by the Right, said that given the right’s willingness to partake in the most extreme and deceitful vindictiveness, there was always more to the story than just plain old Clinton loathing. "I'm not a psychologist," Brock told BuzzFlash in March, 2002, "but you have some kind of psychological phenomenon going on where that deep level of emotion and hatred has to do with themselves more than it has to do with anything the Clintons said or did."

Tucker Carlson, who Rep. Barney Frank has said is "filled with hatred" is nevertheless one of the saner, more principled right-leaning pundits. While he often makes Crossfire viewers want to hoist him by his own bow tie -- particularly when he dismisses solid news and information as "conspiracy theories" -- the fact that Carlson deems Bill O’Reilly a "thin-skinned blowhard" who has "no sense of humor about himself" shows that the boy-faced pol has, at the very least, some pointed insight. (This summer’s Al Franken/Bill O'Reilly spat aside, porn star Jenna Jameson also gave credence to O’Reilly’s blowhard status when she reported that after being grilled by O'Reilly about pornography, he actually asked her to send him some of her X-rated videos.)

Moreover, Carlson spotted the "insane" inner workings of the Bush people early on. His 1999 Talk magazine interview with George W. Bush, which depicted an uncensored Dubya swearing like a sailor and mimicking death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker, was, according to Salon, "the most damaging profile of [Bush] yet written." Drawing "a very, very hostile" response from the Bush campaign, the article prompted Karen Hughes to call Carlson a liar.

"And so I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this," Carlson told Salon. "And she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she'd heard -- that I watched her hear -- she in fact had never heard, and she'd never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane."

"I've obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives," Carlson added, "but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness."

And sure enough, though Clinton remains a favorite target, we’re now at a point where conservative crazies are attacking conservatives like Carlson. After a recent Crossfire segment on telemarketing, for example, Carlson gave out what he jokingly said was his home phone number, which, in actually, was the number of Fox News’ Washington bureau. "I thought it was funny," Carlson said. "Fox did not think it was funny." And so, Rupert Murdoch’s empire struck back.

"Last night, Fox responded by posting on its Web site my unlisted home phone number, the phone number where my wife and four small children often answer the phone, as they did last night, during dinner, when the first of several hundred Fox viewers called to scream obscenities at them into the phone," Carlson said.

"You know what my definition of an operation that would scare the dickens out of little children and a mother living at home. . . ?" co-host James Carville replied. "This is a pond scum operation that would do that, that would terrify children, that would put something like that up there for the bunch of nuts that watch that thing to call and harass you." [LINK]

Of course Murdoch’s pond scum operation is but a river in a sea of muck -- and anyone who disagrees with the power-mongers or their propaganda puppets runs the risk of being Dixie Chicked. "If I keep speaking my mind, will I be deported?" former Reagan supporter Neil Young asked, in the midst of war fervor. And who can forget what happened to Michael Moore during his Oscar "fictitious times" acceptance speech? "We live in a time when we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons," he said, prompting a chorus of boos, though few can argue with Moore’s insight now.

Today, concern over rampant wingnut nuttiness has extended to the CIA, which is asking for an investigation into the White House for allegedly outing an agent simply because this administration was angry with her husband. And now that a senior White House official is admitting that two top administration officials committed a felony by disclosing the identity of Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s CIA agent wife in retaliation for Wilson’s Niger yellowcakegate admission, it’s becoming increasingly clear that vindictiveness isn’t merely the province of low-level gutter snipes. "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official told the Washington Post. [LINK]

"If I thought I had seen dirty political tricks as nasty and vile as they could get at the Nixon White House, I was wrong," John Dean wrote, adding that the leak was smarmier than anything Nixon ever did. "Nixon never set up a hit on one of his enemies' wives," he reminded.

As Bush’s poll numbers slide, the pathological behavior is bound to worsen. "Where once the administration was motivated by greed, now it's driven by fear," Paul Krugman wrote, adding that "everything suggests that there are major scandals -- involving energy policy, environmental policy, Iraq contracts and cooked intelligence -- that would burst into the light of day if the current management lost its grip on power. So these people believe they must win at any cost." Saying that "the members of this administration [will never] simply lose like gentlemen," because "that's not how they operate," Krugman foresees "probably the nastiest [campaign] of modern American history" ahead. In other words, fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Finally, a recent editorial in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard showed just how dangerously deluded the right can be. "Of course, The Weekly Standard and other magazines were hard on Clinton," Hugh Hewitt wrote, "but they kept their critiques closely aligned with objective fact." The Standard, which made Clinton-bashing part of its standard fare, was hardly objective, and continues to be less than fair and balanced. "As tawdry as Schwarzenegger's words from 1977 are, compare them to the Starr Report," the magazine reminded in August 2003. "Arnold will have to do far more inventive things with his Cohibas than smoking them if he's to surpass the shock factor of the late nights and Easter Sundays in the Clinton Oval Office." Right. Gang-banging a woman in a public gym and then bragging about it in a national magazine (using incredibly sexist language), while discussing "fags" and pothead tendencies is less distasteful than a private dalliance with a willing partner, who is later bullied and threatened into telling her sordid tale. Thank God we can count on the Weekly Standard to be objective.

And despite Hewitt’s claim that "other magazines" also "kept their critiques closely aligned with objective fact," the record does not bear him out. Perhaps he’s forgotten that the Wall Street Journal ran 64 editorials on Vince Foster’s death? Or that they actually published an 800 number on their editorial pages -- so that WSJ readers might order the Clinton Chronicles, a tape which accused the Clintons of committing various murders?

Never mind, of course, that if all things were equal, you’d repeatedly see mean-spirited musings regarding Cliff Baxter’s suicide and Paul Wellstone’s plane crash on esteemed mainstream editorial pages, the Standard takes umbrage to the fact that some, like the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, have said that "Bush aides" had "impugned the patriotism of any Democrats" who opposed the creation of the Homeland Security Department. "This sweeping and damning charge is backed up by one alleged bit of evidence -- the now famous ad that ran against then Georgia Senator Max Cleland that did not challenge the senator's patriotism, but did attack his judgment," Hewitt wrote. [LINK]

So, ok, maybe the ad didn’t mention "patriotism" outright, but surely, if Hewitt were being intellectually honest, he would admit that the ad implied plenty by featuring photos of Cleland alongside Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein? Or, of course, he could simply ask Cleland about the ad’s overall effect. "The charge that somehow I was unpatriotic, when really I had helped write the law on the homeland security legislation, all those lies that occurred in the campaign -- that was a trauma that was unexpected for me," Cleland said. "I thought I had done a good job for the people of Georgia. I thought they knew me as someone who had served and sacrificed for the country, as someone who was willing to defend the country 35 years ago. . . . But the White House and the media image makers turned me into some kind of villain."

Which brings us back to wingnuts’ delusions. Hewitt finally concluded that the problem with many liberal editors is that "ideology has poisoned their purpose." Yes, and the Weekly Standard, Fox news and other right-wing sources are always objective and motivationally pure. Could it be that Murdoch’s minions actually believe the "fair and balanced" schtick?

Is it just me? Or are the wingnuts getting nuttier? It's the attack of the kooky conservatives -- and the craziness never ends.