HUTAREE WILL BE HARD TO SPIN, WHICH DOESN'T MEAN THE RIGHT WON'T TRY
(now updated with a note about Norman Leboon)

(Sorry -- I just posted this and realized I buried Aimai's recent post. Check that one out, too -- she and I are seeing this somewhat differently, and I think she's asking very interesting questions.)

Even carazies like Michelle Bachmann and Steve King may hesitate before aligning themselves with these folks -- which doesn't mean that the right won't come up with some dandy talking points with regard to this story:

Nine suspects tied to a Christian militia in the Midwest are charged with conspiring to kill police officers, then attack a funeral in the hopes of killing more law enforcement people, federal prosecutors said Monday....

Members of the group called Hutaree are charged in the case....

Once other officers gathered for a slain officer's funeral, the group planned to detonate homemade bombs at the funeral, killing more, according to newly unsealed court papers....

These aren't people you want to embrace if you're a wingnut who's only sort of advocating terrorism and treason. And yet I'm sure it will not escape notice among the cynical fanners of right-wing revolutionary flames that their core audience is still rooting against the U.S. government -- check out this Free Republic thread:

I’m not buying this.

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These are b.s. charges.

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Innocent until proven guilty.

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its starting...

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Why arrest them? Congress is committing treason but the FBI is after these folks.

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Notice the underlying assumption that it is wrong to "resist the authority" of the US Gov't?

Voting the wrong way would be "resisting the authority of the US Gov't".

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If the FBI is going to start enforcing the law against “seditious conspiracy”, when will they arrest Obama and members of his administration?

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0bama DEFINES who the legitimate authority is,
and any opposition to this/him IS "sedition".

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Sounds to me like they were arrested for thought crimes.

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So, anybody who disagrees with the government is to be charged with sedition?

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Big Sis wants to out-do El Reno’s inferno.

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Funny this happens when the media and Dem's war against the Tea Party isn't sticking. Already seeing headlines calling the raids against Christian terrorist militia groups. How long does it take for the media to call a group Muslim terrorists? We're under attack by our very own folks.

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Just like the OKC bombing allowed them to demonize conservatives and talk radio, this will be used by the media to attack anyone who is anti-Obamunist.

That last two hint at what you're going to start hearing from Fox and talk radio and the loudest crazies in Congress: that there's less to this than meets the eye; that this is a marginal group that is completely unrepresentative of the militia movement, much less of conservatism; that the timing of this is awfully convenient and has a lot to do with Obama's failure to get a sustained bump in the polls for health care reform; that what these guys were doing is being used to smear all "patriots"; that the Obama administration's misplaced priorities make an attack in the U.S. like the Moscow subway attack increasingly more likely, because that evil fat lesbian Janet Napolitano has made targeting right-wing groups a priority (remember the memo?) ... in short, that the real problem here is the fact that this is a news story, rather than the fact that these people actually wanted to do these things.

None of this is going to affect the mainstream media's coverage of the story. It is, however, going to turn that MSM coverage into yet another grievance for the right-wing base. That's one tactic the right-wing media has to try to get Republican voters to the polls (after all, to the base, there's no difference between evil traitor Democrats and evil traitor media liberals). And if the anger leads to more violence? Oh well, whatever.

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UPDATE: Whoops! Never mind -- while the feds were going after Hutaree, there was also this:

A Philadelphia man has been arrested and charged with threatening to kill the Republican party whip in the U.S. House of Representatives, officials announced today.

The FBI says Norman Leboon, 38, told investigators he was the "son of the god of Enoch" and that he had posted a video on the Internet threatening the lives of Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia and his family....

So the same right-wing spin doctors who were about to say that the Hutaree plot was an isolated event and entirely unrepresentative of the right are now going to say that Norman Leboon is entirely representative of the left. That makes things much easier. (And no, I haven't seen evidence yet that Leboon is left-wing. But Fox et al. will say he is no matter what his politics are. And everyone in the Fox audience will believe that.)

And no, this isn't going to prevent the righties from saying that Janet Napolitano is inordinately fixated on right-wing groups, or that the Obama administration is thoroughly anti-Semitic. They're just going to say nothing about those matters for a few days (at least in this context), and then just start saying them again.

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NEVER MIND: It appears that Leboon is a Muslim convert. So the right is going to have to stop talking about the failure of the feds under Obama to go after the real enemy for at least a few days. And no amount of right-wing violence short of another Oklahoma City will be said to equal the horror and viciousness of MusloliberoMarxist violence. And no one on the right will say that, well, maybe what's really going on is that the government is taking threats from all sides seriously -- merely suggesting that would be conservatively incorrect.

And in the center it will be considered a wash -- Leboon as a lefty, Hutaree as righties. Everyone's guilty, so no one is guilty. Or the Internet is guilty. Yeah, that's the ticket.

I'd say there are spreaders of hate and poison and people who don't spread hate and poison. I see this in the jihadist movement and on the American right. This could change sometime, but I see much less of this on the American left.