Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson writes an important column today (1/12/11) about right-wing rhetoric and the Tucson shootings.

Meyerson's point is that discussing certain symbols--like the Sarah Palin "cross hairs" map--makes little sense without understanding the paranoid worldview that is advanced by right-wing leaders and commentators like Glenn Beck. When folks like Beck and Erick Erickson use threats of violence in discussion flu vaccines and Census workers, it's an articulation of their worldview.

The primary problem with the political discourse of the right in today's America isn't that it incites violence per se. It's that it implants and reinforces paranoid fears about the government and conservatism's domestic adversaries.

Much of the culture and thinking of the American right--the mainstream as well as the fringe--has descended into paranoid suppositions about the government, the Democrats and the president. This is not to say that the left wing doesn't have a paranoid fringe, too. But by every available measure, it's the right where conspiracy theories have exploded.

A fabricated specter of impending governmental totalitarianism haunts the right's dreams. One month after Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, Beck hosted a show that gamed out how militias in Southern and Western states might rise up against an oppressive government. The number of self-proclaimed right-wing militias tripled--from 42 to 127, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center--in 2009 (and that doesn't count those that are entirely underground).

Meyerson adds that "the imputation of lurking totalitarianism, alien ideologies, and subversion of liberties to liberals and moderates has become the default rhetoric of the right.... That doesn't make Beck, Erickson, Rupert Murdoch and their ilk responsible for Tucson. It does make them responsible for promoting a paranoid culture that makes America a more divided and dangerous land."

I think Jim Naureckas' Erick Erickson/David Duke equation (FAIR Blog, 7/14/10) is overdrawn. Erickson was playing off remarks by King Samir Shabazz, the New Black Panther Party (NBPP)  member who stood in front of the largely African-American polling place in Philadelphia with a night stick in his hand. Shabazz is on record in another context saying that black men should kill white people, including children: "You want freedom, you're going to have to kill some crackers. You're going to have to kill their babies." So Erickson is not, as Jim says, "hallucinating" this kind of language--just exploiting it.

Erickson and the rest of the right-wing media establishment are trying to create a major scare by painting the NBPP as a black version of the Ku Klux Klan. But while there are certain rhetorical similarities, and these should not be lightly dismissed, the Klan actually killed black children. And while the NBPP is notorious for its hateful rhetoric--which deserves condemnation, to the extent that this marginal group warrants notice at all--there's scant evidence that its race-baiting language has ever been acted upon. The group seems to exist only to attract attention through its vile, racist rants.

So Erickson's suggestion that this creepy, powerless group  is actually likely to start "killing our kids"--and that the Obama administration is abetting this slaughter of white children--is simply politics. By linking Obama to violent black rhetoric, Erickson and his talk radio and Fox News allies are trying to turn this weak episode into a summer Swift Boat for the November elections. In other words, Erickson and his colleagues are engaging in racial rabble-rousing, much like the NBPP--but with a much more prominent platform and to much greater effect.

David Duke would not disapprove.

When he got a gig doing political commentary for CNN, hate-blogger Erick Erickson assured Howard Kurtz that he had realized that "I had to grow up in how I write." And Erickson convinced the New York Times that he had become a kinder, gentler pundit.

But hating is what Erickson does.  That's why it's unsurprising to find him on his blog (7/13/10) whipping up racial animus in the crudest possible terms, using the sort of rhetoric associated with actual brownshirts like David Duke. In the post, Erickson urged the Republicans to turn the New Black Panther "scandal" into the "21st century Willie Horton"--the ginned-up controversy being that the Obama administration failed to prosecute two members of a fringe Afrocentrist group for hanging around a polling place in a black neighborhood last November.

Look at the language Erickson uses to describe this:

The Democrats will scream racism. Let them. Republicans are not going to pick up significant black support anyway. But here's the thing: everyone but the Democrats will understand this is not racism. This isn't even about race. This is about the judgment of an administration that would rather prosecute Arizona for doing what the feds won't do than prosecuting violent thugs who would deny you and me the right to vote while killing our kids.

Is there anything more incendiary, more irresponsible than publicly hallucinating about "violent thugs...killing our kids"?

It's obvious from the context of his statement that by "you and me" he means "white people," and "our kids" are "white kids."

Yet it's not about race--and certainly not about racism.  It never is.

The right-wing Newsmax site has a notably positive profile of CNN anchor John King. Why would they take such a liking to a member of the dreaded Liberal Media Establishment? Newsmax's Ron Kessler gives his reason:

When contributor Erick Erickson of RedState.com leaves out a point that might buttress his conservative arguments, King gladly supplies it.

Octavia Nasr has been a Mideast correspondent for CNN for 20 years, and was their senior editor of Mideast affairs. Until yesterday.

On hearing of the death of a Hezbollah leader, she posted the following on her Twitter feed:

Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot.

This expression of sympathy offended some, who were outraged that a journalist would say anything like that about anyone associated with Hezbollah. Nasr explained in a follow-up on CNN's website:

I used the words "respect" and "sad" because to me, as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman's rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of "honor killing." He called the practice primitive and nonproductive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam.

This was interesting background--the kind of depth one might expect from a reporter with a few decades of experience in the region. But CNN decided that this was not good enough. An internal memo explained that CNN thinks "her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward."

Now it can't be that errant Twitter messages are the problem at CNN; they recently hired Erick Erickson as a commentator, even though he had called retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter a "goat-fucking child molester." And it can't be that CNN has a problem with opinionated journalists; after all, they spent several years defending Lou Dobbs' hateful, inaccurate anti-immigrant rants.

Nasr was not fired for anything she uttered on CNN's airwaves. And it's hard to imagine that Nasr has a "credibility" problem based on her message. CNN, on the other hand, does have one, since this decision seems to raise serious questions about exactly what sort of policy exists at the network to handles such  questions about "credibility."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald (7/8/10) notes that, oddly enough, there are an astonishing number of cases of people working in the  "liberal media" who got into hot water for being perceived as too far to the left.  It's hard to think of many examples of corporate media careers that were ended by being too far to the right.

UPDATE: The website of Time magazine (7/6/10)--which, like CNN, is owned by the Time Warner media conglomerate--features a column by ex-CIA officer Robert Baer about Fadlallah's passing. He calls him a "central figure in modern Middle Eastern history," and notes that the Reagan administration was wrong about his actual role within Hezbollah:

In the 1980s, Fadlallah was at the top of the Reagan administration's enemy list. The White House mistakenly believed he was the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group the U.S. was at war with at the time.

And:

The problem is, there never has been a shred of evidence that Fadlallah was responsible for the Marine bombing, other than his preaching against foreign occupation. But in that sense, he was no different from Lebanon's other Muslim clerics who also did not want foreign troops in the country. Fadlallah was with near certainty not involved in Hezbollah's terrorist attacks in Lebanon. In fact, he complained privately about the Iranians--through their proxy, the Islamic Jihad Organization--taking hostages in his country, believing it was un-Islamic.

Baer's Nasr-esque conclusion should provoke considerable alarm, though:

But at the end of the day, he was an independent Arab voice, a Shi'a Muslim courageous enough to stand up against Iran. In that sense, we should regret his passing.

I understand the difference between a reporter (Nasr's former role) and a columnist (Baer's current gig at Time)--though a shorter version of Baer's column appeared as an obituary for Fadlallah on the Milestones page of Time's print edition (7/19/10).  So will Baer's column attract similar outrage? If not, why not?

FAIR has a new Action Alert out on CNN's newest political commentator: Red State's Erick Erickson. For some indication of why this is perhaps the creepiest move by a cable network since MSNBC hired Michael Savage--and for an email address to communicate your feelings--click here.  Please leave copies of your messages to CNN, or comments on the alert, in the comments thread here.