There was a fascinating example of far-right ideology on “Hardball” yesterday, when Chris Matthews asked Melanie Morgan — unhinged, even by contemporary far-right standards — to respond to how right Dick Cheney was about Iraq before he became Vice President. C&L has an excerpt, which is worth watching, if for no other reason because Morgan helped highlight a twisted worldview for a national television audience.
After Matthews asked Morgan to explain why 1994 Cheney was right while 2002 Cheney was wrong, Morgan refused to engage and suggested Iraq was somehow involved with 9/11. She also attacked the host for bringing up the subject.
Matthews then asked Naomi Wolf to weigh in.
Wolf: It gets back to what I was saying earlier about the nature of lying. Let’s not forget that they got us into this war on the basis of a series of lies…. This weaving out of lies was a pretext for an invasion that served their own political purposes. In the wake of the invasion, they were able to terrify the American people, subjugate the American people, drive through a series of laws that dismantled key checks and balances, allowed overreaching executive power, and completely eviscerated what the founders set in place, thus weakening America.
Morgan: Keep attacking, keep attacking Naomi, because you’re going to look great in a burka. You’re going to look super in a burka.
Perfect. Wolf makes a substantive point about American laws, institutions, and traditions, so Morgan insists Wolf’s criticism will lead to radical Muslims seizing control of the United States, forcing women into burkas. This, in effect, encapsulates too much of the left-right debate of the last eight months.
Indeed, Glenn Greenwald explained the broader dynamic perfectly the other day.
Every now and then, it is worth noting that substantial portions of the right-wing political movement in the United States — the Pajamas Media/right-wing-blogosphere/Fox News/Michelle Malkin/Rush-Limbaugh-listener strain — actually believe that Islamists are going to take over the U.S. and impose sharia law on all of us. And then we will have to be Muslims and “our women” will be forced into burkas and there will be no more music or gay bars or churches or blogs. This is an actual fear that they have — not a theoretical fear but one that is pressing, urgent, at the forefront of their worldview.
And their key political beliefs — from Iraq to Iran to executive power and surveillance theories at home — are animated by the belief that all of this is going to happen. The Republican presidential primary is, for much of the “base,” a search for who will be the toughest and strongest in protecting us from the Islamic invasion — a term that is not figurative or symbolic, but literal: the formidable effort by Islamic radicals to invade the U.S. and take over our institutions and dismantle our government and force us to submit to Islamic rule or else be killed.
This description may sound hyperbolic, but a surprising number of high-profile conservative voices actually believe that we’re this close to an invasion and the replacement of our constitutional system with a radical Muslim theocracy. If you disagree — about the nature of Islam, or the war in Iraq, or the president’s national security policies, etc. — then you are necessarily helping advance the Islamists’ drive for international hegemony.
It’s precisely why Morgan, instead of responding to Wolf’s substantive points, quickly leapt to her reflexive conclusion: criticizing the president will contribute to the downfall of the United States and the imposition of sharia law.
Morgan probably didn’t intend to be helpful, but she captured the gist of this worldview surprisingly well.
