RIGHT-WINGERS TO AMERICA: BURN, BABY, BURN

I tried to make the point yesterday that, in their actions on the economy, Republicans in Congress are like the financial fat cats in the run-up to the economic meltdown: they simply don't care about the possibility that their actions might cause great harm to a lot of ordinary citizens, because they assume they will emerge unscathed no matter how bad things get. They assume even a cataclysm is worth risking if the risk brings the potential of great gains for themselves (wealth for the fat cats, power in Washington for the Republicans), because they assume they'll escape harm even in the worst cataclysm.

I see the same thinking on the right in non-economic areas as well. I'm reading Dave Weigel's post about the obsessive quest of Fox's Megyn Kelly to gin up outrage over the case of a couple of knuckleheads from the tiny fringe New Black Panther Party who failed to intimidate any voters, or at least any who've come forward with firsthand claims of intimidation, while attempting to look menacing at a polling place in 2008. Weigel's post includes a clip showing angry town-meeting participants alleging dark Justice Department conspiracies to quash this case and suppress all prosecutions of nonwhites, despite the fact that there's a DoJ injunction against one of the knuckleheads, and the fact that the allegations of sinister behavior are coming from agenda-driven operatives with no firsthand knowledge of the outrages they allege.

And then I read about a vigilante group in Utah that's distributing what purports to be a list of illegal immigrants in the state -- pointedly including, in addition to alleged names addresses, the due dates of pregnant women, as reported on Keith Olbermann's show last night. (Can't allow those "anchor babies" to born in this country!)

So Fox is whipping up anti-black hysteria in a trivial case, and anti-immigrant demagogues have driven a group of Utahns to take the law into their own hands. In the latter case, if the list is eventually published, how long do you think it's going to be before there's mob violence against some of the people listed, possibly including the pregnant women? In the case of the New Black Panthers, how long before that backlash, or whatever follow-up phony racial story Fox has up its sleeve, goes beyond words?

The right doesn't care if America burns. Fox et al. assume they'll be above it all, unsinged.

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By the way, Sarah Palin has tweeted her approval of Kelly's New Black Panther reports. If you're wondering whether Palin is going to go Southern Strategy on us in the next couple of years, I think there's your answer.