Fringe Whackery Of The First Order Has Become Unremarkable On The Left

30 Dec, 2003 by John Hawkins

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Here’s one more example of left’s slide into paranoia and delusion that appears in a column written by Kurt Nimmo on the wildly popular (16k+ readers per day) Smirking Chimp website….

“Bush’s fraudulent terror alerts endeavor to convince America that “sufficient threat” exists to such a perilous degree from a largely mythical al-Qaeda that not only is “covert disruption” necessary — as the FBI memorandum sent to local law enforcement alludes — but a wholesale decimation of the Bill of Rights is also in order. PATROIT II — with its specification that troublemakers shall be deported — wasn’t craft on a whim by legal clerks with nothing better to do at the Justice Department. It will be enacted and used in due time.

Sooner or later there will need be a real “terrorist event” in America, lest Bush earn the same reputation as Aesop’s wily sheep herder who cried wolf. No telling when exactly, but chances are it will go down late next summer, about the time usually obeisant Democrats get desperate about the idea of taking back the White House, not they actually stand a snowball’s chance in hell of doing so.

Gen. Tommy Franks was not talking through his helmet — these guys actually believe democracy is a “grand experiment” that has exceed its shelf life. So stay tuned for a “casualty-producing event… that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event.”

Martial law is rarely kind to dissenters.”

So there you go. The terror alerts are just to keep people frightened, Al-Qaeda is largely mythical, Bush is going to engineer a terrorist attack and impose martial law, and then it’s off to the gulags with all the liberals.

I want you to think about this folks. Kurt Nimmo writes this nutty column and sends it in to the Smirking Chimp, a popular, “mainstream” leftist website. They look at it and decide that it’s appropriate to post. So they put it up and it’s read by thousands and thousands of liberals. Out of all those people, only 4 bother to comment and none of them takes Nimmo to task for his insane assertions. Furthermore, there aren’t going to be any left-wing blogs that go, “Woah, those Smirking Chimp guys are way out there, maybe I shouldn’t be linking to them.” In fact, you’re probably not even going to find any significant left-wing websites that will slam the Smirking Chimp for running this column.

That’s because this sort of jeremiad is fast becoming almost totally unremarkable on the left. To most Americans, what Nimmo is writing here is “fringe whackery of the first order”, but on the left it’s just another alternative viewpoint that doesn’t even raise an eyebrow anymore. That’s actually kind of scary…