As the Righties ratchet up their Terror Talk, let us consider the idea that right-wing ideology is organized around a driving engine of spite

"The organizing principle behind right-wing rhetoric is simple human spite: The political ideology of its rhetoricians is that somewhere in America, at all times, someone is stealing their parking spot or taking the last jelly donut, and someday there'll be hell to pay. Someday, as it were, a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets."
--Gavin M., in a Sadly, No post today on the rising tide of terror talk emanating from the Bush Terror Gang

Howie has already made note of the new campaign of Terror being talked up by the lying scum of the Bush administration and its Friends & Cronies (LLP).

By now, of course, it's hard for any minimally aware citizen to believe that the Bush administration's War on Terror^TM (sorry, but ever since Paul Krugman tacked the trademark symbol onto "War on Terror," I can't resist) has any serious Terror-related objectives beyond:

(a) spreading Terror (on the ground and in the atmosphere),

(b) raking in those big Terror-driven big bucks for the Friends & Cronies, and

(c) squeezing out every possible ounce of political advantage obtainable by playing the Terror card.

In his Sadly, No commentary today, Gavin M. takes note of the New Terror Chorale and detects behind it the guiding hand of what he calls the Spite Caucus. It's a brilliant insight that I think we've all stumbled up against:

If something happens between now and November '08, we can naturally expect a sustained shriek of 'we told you so' from the right-wing high-chair-thumpers, with immediate shrieky-hooting demands to shred the Constitution and surrender America into despotism, George W. Bush variety (i.e., 'tin-pot'). It's a mistake to note that these folks are always saying contradictory, illogical things, and to assume from it that they have no principles. They do. It's just too simple for us to see, much of the time.

Their constant claim, since roughly the end of Truman's last term, that America is engaged in an historic battle-of-wills against a powerful enemy, that the present emergency demands drastic measures, and so forth, is only a rationalization, a trick picked up from the exigencies of World War II, that sets them free to support 'drastic measures'--which are what they're really attracted to. The organizing principle behind right-wing rhetoric is simple human spite: The political ideology of its rhetoricians is that somewhere in America, at all times, someone is stealing their parking spot or taking the last jelly donut, and someday there'll be hell to pay. Someday, as it were, a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.

The Spite Caucus isn't particular about its methods. The more that 'liberals' revere, for instance, the Bill of Rights, the more they attack it under one pretense or another, but ultimately for that reason alone. It gives them the joy that a jerky twelve-year-old gets from jumping up and down on another kid's sand castle--a Sandschloßspringenfreude. They support torture in part because it is torture, but also (and ultimately more importantly) because they imagine 'liberals' helplessly enraged by the manly drastic-methods that our enemies have regrettably forced us to use against them, through no fault of our own. If disaster follows, then disaster, after all, is what they were seeking. They thrive--with intermingled outrage and glee--on any chaos or tragedy that doesn't touch them personally. Their horror at 9-11 is identical with their exuberance at the leveling of Fallujah or the attack on Beirut.

But the point is that such people attract leaders who are either like them in spirit, or who know how to manipulate this most easily-manipulated of American constituencies. Because truly, the right-wing yellers may be the least of our troubles. If there's an emergency claim of executive power brewing (and here we have to ask: given what we know about this administration, where does the line of paranoia properly fall?), nobody will believe what's happening until the dust settles. And 9-11 has taught us that dust can take a passing long time to settle, as it were.