The Extreme Right Debates A Coup

now that the Democrats have won a convincing victory in both House and Senate and the Bush administration is making conciliatory noises, the right's mad dogs are unwilling to drop their bone.

Which leads them into unforgiving territory - effectively advocating a coup to overthrow that democratic process and install their own dictatorship, all in the name of national security.

After all, if you're going to say things like

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this:

So let me be the first conservative to step forward and say what must be said.
Finally, after years of suspicion and accusations, we not only found the smoking gun, we found the bullets, the target, the secret plans, and the conspirators plotting to politically assassinate a President who is guilty of protecting out nation from terrorists. Unmasked and caught red-handed, the modern Democrat is a traitor. They should be treated no differently than the Rosenbergs; tried in a court of law, convicted, and suffer the harshest punishment. Death by firing squad, preferably. On TV, if possible.

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Then you end up, by neccessity, with people who sincerely believe something like this:

The choice is clear. Vote Republican, stay the course, and fight the war on terror over there. Vote Democrat, withdraw from Iraq, and fight the war on terror here. The choice is simple. If the dims win, they will try to impeach both Bush and Cheney. Conyers has the plans drawn up. That would make Nancy Pelosi President of the United States. I will proudly be one of the patriotic Americans to take up arms to throw off the yoke of fascism she represents. Hopefully I would be on the squads assigned to eliminate the left.

That's where the logical chain ends, at a rightwing coup to overturn the will of at least 55% of the American people in the recent midterms. Few - if any - of the uber-right's pundits will admit this, but they all know it is true.

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Could such a coup succeed? Well, that's another matter. It would have to be instigated at the highest level, probably that of the presidency. Then, though, the 30% who are hardcore supporters of illegal spying, legislation that severs America's ties with the rule of law and makes it possible to throw any American in the gulag, laws that allow martial law to be declared and the military to become a domestic law enforcement arm simply on the president's say so - then, those 30% are more than enough as long as another 30% simply accepts and does nothing. History, from Hitler's rise to Saddam's rule in Iraq, tells us that is usually exactly what happens.

That such a happenstance may be remote is debatable, but it is also beside the point. The extreme right are advocating exactly such a coup as a logical consequence of their rhetoric. They know it. It falls to those of us who actually love freedom and democracy on both left and right, rather than using it as a cover for totalitarian ideology, to throw it in the uber-rights' faces and make sure everyone else knows it too. That's the best way to make sure such a coup remains only a remote possibility.

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