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Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane

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Dave Neiwert and John Amato in this book give us a great look at the Republican Party's mass mobilization of 2009 against the Obama administration, with lots of details about the Tea Party movement. Two things about this book strike me as particularly notable. One is that it shows, as clearly as I've seen done yet, how the Tea Party movement is both a normal part of the Republican Party but also a new phase in the long-term radicalization of the Party. The other is that it gives readers not familiar with the sometimes strange and even cult-like way of talking about politics among rightwing "populist" conservatives a good introduction to that language.

Regular readers of John Amato's "Crooks and Liars" blog, of which Dave Neiwert is the editor, will have seen a lot of the particular events described in real time. Dave is a genuine journalistic expert on the Radical Right and writes about it regularly. But even for those who have followed the Radical Right at "Crooks and Liars" and other news sources, there's real value in seeing a book length description of various events and personalities, which allows the writers to focus at some length on major themes while also making the chronological narrative clear.

In the chapter called "Bloodying the Shirt", they offer some insight into a favorite habit of conservatives, especially of the far right, that can often be disconcerting to those not familiar with it. They tell the story of anti-abortion fanatic and Christian terrorist Scott Roeder who murdered Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider on May 31, 2009. Bill O'Reilly had run reports on Tiller and framed them in inflammatory terms. But, of course, when Roeder struck, O'Reilly indignently tried to distance himself from any kind responsibility for contributing to the atmosphere that encouraged a Christian terrorist like Roeder.

Amato and Neiwert talk about the reverse accusations that people like O'Reilly often make when confronted with such challenges: they make the critics into the problem, not their own actions or incitement. Amato and Neiwert explain this by Southern whining in the late 19th century about the "bloody shirt" tactic. Citing historian Stephan Budiansky, they explain that pro-Reconstruction Congressman Ben Butler made an issue out of a Northerner whipped on the back by Ku Klux Klan thugs, and legend arose that he had waved a bloody shirt of the man's on the House floor.

Though there is no evidence for Butler ever having made that particularly dramatic gesture, conservative white Southerners made "waving the bloody shirt" a favorite slogan to use against any criticism of violence and lawlessness committed by anti-Reconstruction whites. The idea is to frame the criticism itself as reprehensible, rather than the actual heinous acts being criticized. We see Republican conservatives using a variation of this tactic today, and not only in response to criticism of violent acts. As the authors point out, Republican pundits used it to fend off criticism of the Tea Party.

The book traces the rise of the Tea Party with heavy support from Republican Party front groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and the de facto Party channel, FOX News. It's tricky to characterize a relatively amorphous "movement". But there has been extensive media coverage and well as a good deal of opinion polling probing the ideas and perspectives of those who identify with the Tea Party. It's hard to see how one reasonably interprets this available information in any other way than to see the Tea Party movement as a Republican Party mobilization of its base.

But the fact that the movement was ginned up by the Republican Party does not mean that it is nothing but Party astroturf (fake grass roots). Dave Neiwert and other close observers of the Radical Right have been pointing out from the beginning of the Tea Party that far-right activists from the Patriot Militia, xenophobic anti-immigrant, and other militant fringe groups have used the Tea Party to raise their own profiles and to mainstream more of their own ideology. In their chapter, "The Brakes Fail", they detail some of the ways in which Tea Party activists have proved to be something a loose cannon for the Party in some instances.

The Republican Party has undergone an extended process of radicalization. From whenever one dates its beginning, anyone capable of recognizing the radicalization can see that by the time the Party made torture one of its core values, the radicalization process was quite far along. The reporting and analysis put together in "Over the Cliff" show how the Tea Party can represent both an intensification of the radicalization process and at the same time be not some nonpartisan political insurgency, but rather the face of the Republican Party out of power.

I would pick nits with a couple of historical points. They write that the rise of the Tea Party movement in 2009 "was when the craziness reached depths previously unseen in American politics." But we haven't yet reached nearly the level of craziness of the South in the run-up to the Civil War. I'm not sure some of the far right hysteria during the early years of the Franklin Roosevelt administration or during the period of McCarthyism wasn't worse than now.

And I did a big double-take at a quote they include from Chip Berlet on the ideology of "producerism", which is the description they apply to the Tea Party brand of "populism" that tries to rally working people to oppose Big Government and unfavored races (African-Americans and Latinos in the Tea Party case), while defending Big Business and the very wealthy doing what they want, the public interest be damned. They quote Berlet saying, "Producerism begins in the U.S. with the Jacksonians, who wove together intra-elite factionalism and lower-class Whites' double-edged resentments." This is a very misleading, ahistorical characterization of Jacksonian democracy and the Jacksonian movement. In fact, the group that the late historian Richard Hofstadter and others agree was the first significant element to promote the "paranoid style" in US politics, aka, crackpot extremism, did arise during the Jacksonian era. It was the Anti-Masonic Party and was bitterly opposed to Jackson and his reforms. That claim of Berlet's is a real whopper.

But those are sidelines in Amato's and Neiwert's analysis of the contemporary right wing in the United States. Now that primary results are rolling in and Rand Paul has become a star of sorts among our leading pundits with his Bircher-theocratic brand of "libertarianism", Over the Cliff is a valuable resource for understanding daily politics in the US at the moment.

With the incredible about of noise generated by the extremist fringe recently, reading Over The Cliff was a breath of fresh air. A detailed and factual account of just how unhinged the right wing has become in recent months. Certainly not for the faint of heart and, in many cases will be preaching to the choir, nonetheless this book is a valuable source of good information on a movement which has tried desperately to disrupt our democratic system of government. Both Amato and Neiwert (who is no stranger to investigative journalism) offer clear and concise information and numerous details that make this book not only a fascinating read, but a compelling one. It will doubtless cause howls of dismay and threats - but sometimes the truth is very uncomfortable. My only advice is to read it for yourself and judge.

At 11 p.m., the night of November 5, 2008, John McCain, representing the pro-business, conservative America, conceded defeat in his bid for the presidency of the United States. The country was suddenly transformed, especially conservative and right wing America that believed that it would never have happened. Their candidates and their philosophy were soundly rejected by the electorate, and they too were transformed. Their mass paranoid hysteria had begun. Authors John Amato and David Neiwert, of the blog "Crooks and Liars," explain how it started, and how it took on a life of its own.

The authors explain how a racist America accelerated quickly into overdrive. Blacks were beaten and killed because of an elected black man. There was a spike in hits on white supremicist websites and right wing blogs. Three police officers were killed in Pittsburgh by a man who believed that Obama would take away his guns.

The Republican reaction could have been an honest analysis of why they lost, but denial was a more soothing way to think. It wasn't that conservatism was bad or weak, it was because conservatives had lost their way. They turned on one of the most conservative administrations in history and its leader, George W. Bush for not having been conservative enough. It spawned a right wing movement called the Tea Party whom the Republicans thought they could use and control. However, it turned out the the Tea Partiers started pulling party strings instead by their support of ultra conservative candidates.

The College or Right Wing Pundits offered courses in hysteria, paranoia, guilt-by-association, disinformation and falsehoods as they spawned an irrational hatred for the president that went far beyond his actions, real or perceived: He wasn't an American citizen; he was a secret Muslim, a terrorist sympathizer, a Marxist, and a communist with a small "c." We were going to be attacked by terrorists. He apologized for the United States; he was ignoring the will of the people, and he was taking away the citizens' constitutional rights. This was the pablum that fed an extremist fringe that had to find rationalizations for a lack of popular support. Glenn Beck, Dick Morris, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Aaron Klein, Michele Malkin, Fox Television, and others are churning out books and stories daily on "taking back America."

In spite of this mass and mainstream media blitz, the right wing and white supremicists blame the "lamestream media" for giving Obama a pass and for not having investigated his "shady background and associations," even though it was Fox News, the fair and balanced network, making news rather than reporting it when it came to Tea Party coverage and outright advocacy by stirring the crowds. Amato and Neiwert hold a special place for Fox News when they show time and again how their news coverage cropped speeches and events to misinform the public, and advocated for the Tea Pary platform. Fox also took special vengeance on those who critized their network. Relentlessly employing the term "socialists" and "czars," they made van Jones, Cass Sunstein and Anita Dunn frequent targets, as well as others. The authors were pointing out that they weren't attacking these people as much as they were attacking Obama. Even a once respected Lou Dobbs of CNN began stirring the paranoid pot by demanding that Obama produce a birth certificate that had been validated many times over.

This right wing has also perfected what the authors called "waving the bloody shirt" response, in which the truth is inverted where the bully becomes the victim and vice versa. A charge of racism becomes an attack on their integrity, and agitation toward racial warfare. How dare you make the charge even though their signs show Obama in "black face" like the Klan would have done.

And in Sarah Palin they find their true hero. Ignorant, sexy, acultural and full of self-pity, her anti-intellectualism is a celebration of her integrity and credibility. She's the soccer mom, and the joe six-pack, with lipstick. (?) Well, something like that.

Palin embodies her lies and divisiveness in what is called sucker populism, or producerism, which is a ploy of the wealthy to keep the middle and poorer class believing that their industry and invention alone will help them win the lottery of joining the exclusive club at Millionaire Acres, that their enemies are the "lazy entitlement oafs at the bottom, and the superwealthy such as George Soros. The wealthy are the staunchest advocates of this brand of populism as they become its chief beneficiary while the ordinary working stiff bears the heavier tax load and tells himself, like Thumper, "if I only work harder." The right wing are the "thumpers" who have the most to lose, yet are the staunchest advocates of losing out-- true sucker populism.

This book was an easy read. Amato and Neiwert amassed hundreds of documents and dozens of hours of news coverage, cropped and whole, to show the disparity of accurate news reporting and the distortions and disinformation that has been coming from the Drudge Report and Conservative News Daily. The authors "blame" the progressives for attempting to rebuild what a previous administration took eight years to ruin, instead of remaining vigilant and reactive to the rise of right wing fantasies that fill the airwaves and the Internet. This is a new generation of Father Coughlins and Joe McCarthys who are instilling hate, fear and paranoia. The error is considering these people so far from reality that their message will not succeed, but the Nazi Party started in the same small way.

This account will also help you remember all the occasions of news reporting slight-of-hand, and propaganda that is being fed to a public that firmly believes that concentration camps, black helicopters, martial law, and socialist style government awaits their fate. The same people who claimed that administration critics of two short years ago were committing treason, are now advocating armed insurrection and sedition.

This book should not be taken lightly; it should only be taken home and read, and taken seriously.

The right wing continues as you read this.

John Amato and David Neiwert have painstakingly chronicled the events leading up to and following the November, 2008 election. By rendering the facts without spin they have laid bare the raw ferocity of the cognitive dissonance among the Republicans, the Tea Party, and the fringe right wing. This book should be required reading in every political science class from now on.

This book tells an important story about the resurgence of the extreme right in recent years, loaded with underreported facts that it links together into a strong narrative. The problem is, it's also loaded with loaded language -- unnecessary epithets, cheap shots, appeals to ridicule and other miscellaneous editorializing, such that a moderate conservative, for example, might be goaded to ignore its message and write it off as untrustworthy liberal partisanship. This is a shame. I wish I'd been the authors' editor, so that I could cut out the gratuitous nastiness and let the facts speak for themselves.

I have no complaints about the content of the book. I thought I had been made aware of the most egregious examples of the Professional Right's noise machine. However, this book had dozens of examples of which I was previously unaware and I found those examples nothing short of vile. If you're looking for lots of fact-rich content detailing the Right's pseudo-hysteria, this book has lots of examples for you to use.

Still, I found the organization of the book to be distracting. One topic seemed to veer off into a side tangent, with another tangent, and then another, with little warning or explanation. Personally, I would have preferred some sort of overarching organization instead of the scattershot approach used by the authors.

I also prefer my fact-based content to come with citations, you know, within the book itself. That is not the case here. The paperbook comes with an insert which tells me that the source notes are available online with a web address. But I don't understand why the authors or the editors couldn't have simply used footnotes like any other compilation of facts.

Had the organization or the citations been better for me, I would have rated it higher.

This is an amazing read. I bought it on my iPhone Amazon Kindle and thank goodness I did, I have been taking notes, highlighting and talking out loud at my iPhone. It is very rare a book makes me shout at it, but the information gathered in "Over The Cliff" is flabbergasting. The first few chapters are a shocking read, the things these militias were, and still are, doing before the election even began are tantamount to treason and the fact that the news media didn't even report on it makes me sick.

The book points out Dr. Tiller was killed and it all could have been avoided if certain state officials had followed the law. Fox News Channel is not only fueling the flames, they start the fires in the book the analogy is stirring the pot. "Over the Cliff" in great detail points out all of these facts, in great journalistic detail, so much so that I sometimes glaze over when reading the verbatim rantings of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly. Some may say it is a left leaning book, I disagree, the authors are just reporting the facts from '09 and before. I highly recommend this book and please share it with everyone you know.

My favorite section entails how O'Reilly and Beck work their viewers up and then say they are liberal nuts when they go and shoot someone, when said individual is clearly a conspiracy theory, racist, paranoid, delusional, and a far far Right leaning psychopath.

Don't know about you, but I am almost physically repelled by the trash-talking, partisanship (sedition?) and mendacity of the Limbaughs, Becks, Malkins and Hannitys. And I am beyond exasperated at the way their vile nonsense spills over almost unchallenged into the supposedly liberal mainstream media. Luckily, a few straight shooters - including John Amato and David Neiwert of the Crooks and Liars website - have the stomach to track the foolishness that passes for journalism these days, and the wisdom and talent to write cogently about it.

"Over the Cliff" is a painstaking survey of the way certain rightwing media stars have used the election of Barack Obama to rile up the right. From the Birther "controversy" to the Tea Party's racist-tinged paranoia, Beck, Hannity and Limbaugh have not only reported and encouraged, but taken an active role in organizing and fomenting. Not happy to simply show up at Tea Party event to report on what goes on, Fox and others endlessly promote these activities, raising their visibility and providing free promotion time. Most worrisome is the way that these rightwing mouthpieces routinely play to their audiences' latent racism, xenophobia and paranoia. Scarily, Fox's efforts to stoke fears that Obama will take away their guns, put them in concentration camps and give the country to the communists has gained a foothold. Amato and Neiwert do a great job of documenting the links behind the swill emanating from TV sets and the shrill rant and undemocratic antics of the extremist mobs that attended town halls during the health care debate, shouting down representatives and making wild, unsubstantiated claims. A world in which Bill O'Reilly comes off as a moderating influence has truly gone far astray.

"Over the Cliff" is a great primer on the way the extreme right operates today. Use selective or spurious reporting to manufacture phony outrage, rile up ordinary citizens, then play the victim when one of them takes you seriously and guns down an abortion doc or threatens the president. Speaking of which, the book documents countless threats to president Obama that never seem worthy of coverage by the MSM.

A troubling book, but one that should be read by all who believe in civil discourse, facts and democracy.

I never thought that I would write the feature line above about the radical right, but in this case it is true. While not exactly keeping his cool, he is one of the tamer and more level headed of a group on a certain network that consists of talking heads that see conspiracies everywhere, claim that we are being taking down the road to Marxism....no wait, that's fascism....or hold on, it may be communism. In reality they don't really know where the country is headed....it just isn't good.

That is the short version of what is contained in this excellent book. The authors lay out the players on the radical right, what their agendas are and how they go about duping the people. It is written in concise language and uses quotes from the various pundits (and politicians) own mouths to demonstrate the dishonesty that is going on.

Sadly, I am afraid this book may be preaching to the choir. The far right radical nut jobs are not going to read this book and see themselves, and most other sane people already know that the far fringe is frothing at the mouth. Still an excellent read that should be read by all middle of the road and independent to see how one side is trying to hijack the country. It helps separate the wheat from the chaff on a number of issues.

I am very grateful to PoliPointPress for sending me a copy of Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane. You see, I watched it all happen, but I didn't write it all down. Luckily, authors John Amato and David Neiwert did, so there now exists a permanent record of the post-2008 craziness without which the upcoming Rally to Restore Sanity would be unnecessary.

Not only do Amato and Neiwert provide documentation of the journey over the cliff; they also contextualize and explain the reprehensible far-right GOP tactics used to attempt to discredit President Barack Obama during his first year in office: the "birther" attacks, the health care town hall disruptions, the "czars," and the Tea Party--a "grassroots" movement that one could say sprang fully formed from the head of Dick Armey.

And let's not forget Fox News. While many of the tactics described in Over the Cliff are standard operating procedure for the GOP (e.g., drumming up racial prejudice and culture wars), the fact that, as the authors put it, "Fox had declared war on the Obama White House from the day of the president's inauguration," is a postmodern addition to the American Right's list of vile deeds. The book discusses the "greatest hits" of falsehoods deployed by Beck, Hannity, and O'Reilly, as well as others of their ilk, and--in doing so--does us all a great service.

Once you've read Over the Cliff, you can no longer say that any of the atrocities against truth and democracy it outlines didn't happen. The book tells the real story behind each GOP fabrication, thereby exposing the ultimate insanity of the party's actions. In the face of that insanity, any progressive-minded American can only be inspired to fight back, which is what Amato and Neiwert want us to do.

Over the Cliff ends with this entreaty:

The millions of ordinary people who elected Barack Obama president need to be called back to the fray, engaged anew, and empowered to take the nation down another road, one that guides us far away from the cliffs of fear.

What beautiful words to read as we approach November 2, 2010. So, please read, think, and VOTE. Let's not allow this election to end in a cliffhanger.

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