Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid

"Can't you see?! They're after you! They're after all of us! Our wives, our children, everyone! They're here already! You're next! You're next! You're next!"

You may be excused if you confused this memorable warning from recently deceased Kevin McCarthy in the 1956 movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" with something from the Republican sound machine. It's easy to do.

Right-wing Republicans, a phrase once defining a subset but now merely redundant, have used fear of the "other" since their Know-Nothing Party predecessors railed against Irish Catholics in the 1840s.

Over the past 60 years they've scapegoated as dangerous and un-American, Jews, the "Red Menace," fluoride, Negroes, hippies, "effete intellectual snobs," feminists, Hollywood, mainstream media, secular humanists, stem-cell research, Murphy Brown, abortion providers, evolution, brown people, death panels, the homosexual agenda or anyone, like me, who calls them out for what they are -- a bunch of calculating, duplicitous fear-mongers.

See how it works. Mix a smidgen of truth with three parts guile, stir in a cup of irrationality, garnish with religious intolerance and xenophobia and serve with scalding rhetoric. Mmmm. Yummy! Republican gumbo.

This year they've hit on a new target, maybe their best one yet. Yep, they're serving up Muslims!

It's working well. One third of Republicans believes President Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim, and a majority believes he "sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world."

Yeah, and I'm the one a recent reader calls a "crackpot!"

The real purpose of all this fear-mongering is to give cover to the GOP's actual agenda -- doing what every right-wing party throughout history has done -- protecting the interests of the moneyed class. Getting government off their backs is the ultimate goal. In the words of Republican guru Grover Norquist, they want to shrink government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

Since the 1980s, we've witnessed the lethal results of conservatives water-boarding federal regulations on off-shore drilling, the financial sector, coal mining, food and product safety, environmental protections, toxic chemicals, tractor-trailers, power plants, you name it.

Can you imagine the damage callous, bottomline corporations will wreak with even less oversight? But that's precisely where Republicans intend to take us if they can successfully con enough average Americans, with fabrications of the president's socialism and Islamic inclinations, into ignoring their own economic interests and voting for them.

Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and the tea partiers want to "take back America!" and I'd be right there with my torch and pitchfork if they had the slightest clue who took it in the first place.

As opposed to the cultural boogiemen right-wingers conjure up, the evidence of malignant, buccaneer capitalism eroding American democracy is here already.

"You're next!"