Could it Happen Here?

Andrew Sullivan has for years chronicled the statements of various news media, entertainment, and political figures. Some of them are brilliant and some are outrageously moronic. From these statements he has created six archetypes:

The Hewitt Award - named after the absurd partisan fanatic, Hugh Hewitt, is given for the most egregious attempts to label Barack Obama as un-American, alien, treasonous, and far out of the mainstream of American life and politics.

The Malkin Award - named after blogger, Michelle Malkin - is for shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric. Ann Coulter is ineligible - to give others a chance.

The Moore Award - named after film-maker, Michael Moore - is for divisive, bitter and intemperate left-wing rhetoric.

The Poseur Alert is awarded for passages of prose that stand out for pretension, vanity and really bad writing designed to look like profundity.

The Yglesias Award is for writers, politicians, columnists or pundits who actually criticize their own side, make enemies among political allies, and generally risk something for the sake of saying what they believe.

The Von Hoffmann Award This award is given for stunningly wrong political, social and cultural predictions.

A recent "Moore Award Nominee" was Bette Midler, for making the following statement:

If you look around at the rest of the world and what this kind of behavior has done, like in Rwanda, where the demagogues got on the radio and fomented all that hate between the Tutsis and the Hutus and the devastation that happened from that, I mean, it's terrifying. And that could happen, you know, you could turn on a dime. That could happen here.

I think Andrew's being too hard on Bette by calling her statement"divisive, bitter, and intemperate left wing rhetoric." In case he hadn't noticed, gun sales are soaring, and I heard on NPR this week that ammunition sales have had trouble keeping up with demand.

This is not a blip in the market triggered by a sudden growth in enthusiasm for target practice and sport shooting. The people buying these guns are right-wingers who are, at best, afraid that gun ownership will be restricted under the Obama administration. At worst, these people are girding themselves for something they perceive, which is far more sinister: a coming conflict in the United States between leftists/socialists/fascists/whateverists and "real Americans" over Jesus, guns, the "homosexual agenda," and the indoctrination of our youth by the Obama administration's minions across America (including ACORN).

Protestors against the Obama health care reform plan showed up at his town hall meetings armed with assault rifles (unbelievably no arrests were made). Teabaggers in DC carried placards that stated, "We are unarmed...this time." A census worker was lynched in eastern Kentucky, the word "Fed" scrawled across his body. A law-abiding physician was gunned down in his church by an anti-abortion terrorist. Another terrorist shot up a Holocaust Museum and killed a guard at point-blank range.

Are these all isolated incidents? Or do the individual actors in these horrific scenes have a real connection to a movement that seeks to undermine the Obama presidency by any means?

Perhaps it's both: no movement wants to embrace publicly a murderer who kills an innocent human being to make a political point. But you can bet that the rank and file of that movement privately praise these law-breaking terrorists and secretly wish for more. A person I know, a hard-core Fox News-watcher, has predicted Obama's impeachment after the 2010 elections, when the GOP will return to power. This person hasn't come right out and said it, but I believe no tears would be shed if Obama were assassinated. There might even be a celebration.

So I don't believe Bette is being at all divisive, bitter, or intemperate. What she's being is justifiably worried that the same mob paranoia that drove Rwandans to murder their neighbors, combined with right-wing media talk show hosts who call for the failure of the president and call him a racist, a hater of "white culture," might incite the "dim-witted and ignorant" masses in the conservative movement to commit more and more violent acts of terror to usurp power from a freely elected government.

Sullivan, who has for months been devoting a lot of his time calling out Bush/Cheney -- and now Obama -- for perpetuating a torture regime in the US -- should not think what happened in Rwanda couldn't happen in America. No one ever believed we'd become wholesale torturers of innocent people, either. But we did, and we are.