WHEN ISIS FIGHTERS COME OVER THE MEXICAN BORDER, THEY'LL BE WEARING GUY FAWKES MASKS!!!1!

How desperate is the right to scare the crap out of heartland voters in advance of the November elections? Well, this is at Breitbart now (the story is also linked at the Drudge Report):

EXCLUSIVE: FEDS FIND ANTI-ISRAEL AND PRO-PALESTINE 9/11 MESSAGE TO AMERICA ON BORDER FENCE

NOGALES, Arizona -- On September 11, 2014, individuals or a group in Mexico hung a message to America over the U.S.-Mexico border wall condemning American support for Israel and declaring support for Palestine. U.S. federal agents discovered the banner draped over the primary border fence in Arizona’s Yuma Sector in a restricted area that could only have been reached from Mexico.

Now, here's how you know that what you're reading is utter claptrap:

The message also contained an image described by authorities as an anarchist symbol.

Yeah, right -- ISIS (or Al Qaeda or Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood or whoever the hell else the wingnuts think is coming over the border to establish a medieval caliphate in Texas and Arizona) is hanging out on the other side of the border with Black Bloc throwbacks who yammer endlessly about 1999 and the Battle of Seattle. Wow, that's really plausible.

The leaked incident report reveals that U.S. Border Patrol agents discovered the banner in the early hours of September 12, 2014, indicating that the banner had been draped over the border wall late in the night on September 11th.

Look, I don't know whether there's is an actual incident report -- we're shown an image of one, but who the hell knows if it's real?



Conveniently, there's no photo of the alleged message. We just have to take reports of its existence on faith.

Hey, maybe it actually existed -- maybe there's some group of politically disgruntled Mexican youths who put it up and, like politically disgruntled youths the world over, they're not happy about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Oh, and also: anarchy!

Otherwise, I assume someone's just making stuff up, and doing it in a way that resonates with the fear centers in the reptile part of the right-wing brain. (Remember, these folks think gay marriage leads to sharia law, so it's no surprise if they think anarchism and jihadism are natural allies.) Is this rube-terrifying story a clumsy Breitbart fabrication? Or is it a clumsy fabrication on the part of an Obama-hating Border Patrol agent? There certainly seemed to be a lot of scary-sounding rumors during the peak of the child-refugee crisis this summer, many of them sourced to agents of the Border Patrol -- horrific diseases showing up in medical exams and so on. I figure at least some of these guys have the TV locked on Fox and the radio locked on whatever station broadcasts the most toxic talk, so why wouldn't they spread this sort of disinformation on behalf of the True Patriot cause?

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The right really wants the voters to be terrified of ISIS between now and November. The right also wants to divide the country by party in the face of a foreign threat -- the exact opposite of what used to be considered patriotic. You can see the "respectable" part of this campaign in what Lindsey Graham is doing:

"It is our fight," Graham [said]. "... They're intending to come here. So I will not let this president suggest to the American people we can outsource our security and this is not about our safety."

"Our strategy will fail yet again," he said. "This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed here at home."

And it's working:

Nearly 70 percent of Americans say they lack confidence that the U.S. will achieve its goals in fighting the terrorist group ISIS, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll....

The poll -- conducted before the latest execution emerged -- showed that a combined 68 percent of Americans say they have "very little" or "just some" confidence that Obama's goals of degrading and eliminating the threat posed by ISIS will be achieved. Just 28 percent said they had "a great deal" or "quite a bit" of confidence. Still, 62 percent of voters say they support Obama's decision to take action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, while 22 percent oppose it.

Martin Longman (aka BooMan) says that Graham "is a grown man who still wets his bed every night when he goes to sleep." I don't agree with that characterization. He's not a bedwetter. He's just cynically trying to induce bedwetting in others. And he's getting the job done.