Emotions and power

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Those in power or wish to be in power use human emotions.  Perhaps the two strongest emotions are fear and sex. Religious hegonomists have long used sex but the political hegemonists use fear.  And as we all know the neocons and the Bush/Cheney administration have used fear with success.  Now the fear factor is not really working all that well now but the few right wingers still around are still driven by it.

Glen Greenwald: The paralyzing fears of the Right. The latest thing that is terrorizing those on the right are 17 Chinese Uighurs.  They have been imprisoned at GITMO for seven years in spite of the fact that the Pentagon does not consider them a threat.  The Island of Palau has agreed to take them (for a price) and the wingers have wet their collective pants.

Writing on Michelle Malkin's blog Hot Air today, war-supporting tough guy Ed Morrissey is petrified about this development and, as a result, he has announced that he is now too fearful to consider visiting that island:

Of course, with a recidivism rate for released Gitmo detainees of around 14%, odds are that a couple of the Uighurs might not be quite as cuddly as Obama promises. Hopefully it will work out all right for Palau and its tourists, but if I were making decisions on expensive South Pacific vacations, I�d start looking elsewhere.

It's hard to put into words how inebriated with irrational fear someone has to be in order to be so scared of 17 Uighurs -- who were never guilty of anything -- that they would avoid traveling to whatever place this handful of persecuted individuals is located.  But this is the right-wing movement at its core:  its leaders cynically ratchet up fear levels as high as possible to justify whatever they want to do (invade Iraq, torture people, spy on Americans with no warrants) and their adherents (along with plenty of others) become more and more paralyzed by their fears of anything Muslim. 

These of course are the same people that were indignant with DHS listed right wing extremists as a terror threat.  But are they afraid of the the man who killed Dr Tillman or the white supremest who opened fire at the holocaust museum today.  No they don't - the powerful are very good at directing the fear.  It's those Muslims and brown people you need to be afraid of.  And don't forget the people who aren't Christian - not evangelical Christians.