Absolutely, positively, and about damned time!

when the going gets wierd, the wierd turn pro.

hunter s. thompson

I agree, the dems cannot hesitate to strike back or ignore any of these attacks - that was what appalled me during the last campaign, the scrambling to deny or "correct" or apologize after an attack instead of meeting it head on and firing with everything they had. I hope they have learned that lesson. I was shocked by the blogger/Edwards mess and really sad when the ladies resigned but I completely understand it too - who wants to live with death threats? It's all so out of control.

Good evening, Chet.

The Southern Poverty Law Center offers the model for cataloguing, monitoring, and tracking hate groups. What is being proposed in your article seems at first blush far more ambitious, if only because the source of these hate attacks appears more ubiquitous. Actually, it is not: the so-called "Right-Wing Authoritarian Followers" comprise maybe about a quarter of the population of this country, but the overwhelming majority of them are dormant unless harangued into action.

We have seen this before: huge numbers of RWA-F lie dormant until a Social Dominance-Oriented/Right-Wing Authoritarian (SDO/RWA) "double high" (as such a person is called in the literature) draws them to action. In historical terms, we saw this with a certain group of evangelicals who were brought to bear by Jerry Falwell; we saw it with Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum (with the Equal Rights Amendment); and we saw it again several times in the '90s, and one last time quite starkly with the thugs who laid seige to the facilities where Florida election officials were trying to commence a recount of the 2000 Presidential Election votes.

The RWA Followers are not dangerous unless and until they are bid to action by a small core of leader types, generally either financially well-off, themselves (as with Melton Scaif), or capable of generating large amounts of money (as with Pat Robertson, Sun Myung Moon, and Paul Weyrich).

As far as mitigating their influence is concerned, to some extent, it is a matter of open exposure. The RWA Followers are actually rather immune to public humiliation, but some (not all, but some) of the SDOs that set them in motion are fairly sensitive to the limelight, especially when it turns against them and they cannot cloister themselves against awareness of it.

To the extent that wide-ranging exposure of their action is not enough to slow them down, though, the next step is to move against them in the courts. This includes suits alleging torts, particularly torts of interference with business relationships. It also include suits alleging defamation. Finally, it also include an all-out effort to bring civil RICO charges to bear on them and their lieutenants.

To this last point, there will come a time when we must clarify in our own minds that this isn't "just politics"; this is, instead, an organized criminal enterprise that has spanned well more than a decade and used hundreds of millions of dollars to the purpose not of benefiting the democratic experience of these United States, but instead of interfering with and degrading it.

The Dark Wraith has spoken.