"We are seeing the biggest power grab by politicians in American history... the potential to basically create the equivalent of a dictatorship... Look, it absolutely moves it towards a political dictatorship."
Echos can be heard right here...
"...the process to turn the U.S. into a totalitarian state is accelerating under our new comrade Obama..."
The new world order needs "boots on the ground" and "dirty hands" to carry out its dirty work! Who will be the storm troopers of the new regime? Vegans? Greens? Naw...
From CNN:
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The religious group most likely to say torture is never justified was Protestant denominations -- such as Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians -- categorized as "mainline" Protestants, in contrast to evangelicals. Just over three in 10 of them said torture is never justified. A quarter of the religiously unaffiliated said the same, compared with two in 10 white non-Hispanic Catholics and one in eight evangelicals.
Kevin Drum gets it and succinctly presents it:
When the subject has anything to do with sex, the right in America is the party of moral absolutes. We know what's right, we know what's wrong, and even if there's a price to pay we can't shirk our responsibility to set a proper example and do the right thing.
But when the subject is torture, suddenly it's all about carefully weighing the costs and benefits. Having an honest debate about how far we should go to protect ourselves. Understanding the context of what happened. It's just not possible to flatly say that waterboarding and sleep deprivation and stress positions are barbarisms unfit for use by a civilized country. It's much more complex than that.
Funny how that works, isn't it?
The religious right, paranoid about the Obama Nation, but ambivalent about torture, are the perfect storm troopers - they constitute one of the strongest demographics amongst the "authoritarian followers" personality type.
Dr. Bob Altemeyer, in his on-line book The Authoritarians, identifies two personality types: the more or less docile, passive authoritarian follower and the more or less outgoing, aggressive authoritarian leader. These two are very distinct and separate personalities, but were meant for each other. The follower type, individually a rather nice guy or gal, has a strong need to become absorbed into a group identity and to serve the group with unquestioning loyalty. The leader type tends to be a sociopath who has a strong need for power and dominance regardless what it takes to achieve it . A marriage made in heaven!
And heaven has something to do with it. In America there is a very strong correlation between the authoritarian follower personality type and fundamentalist religious ideology. This is not a necessary relationship, since the same personality dynamic can find expression in extremist left-wing, secular ideologies also. But here in America, at this time, it tends to be expressed in the phenomenon of right-wing fundamentalist political activism.
Is it really Obama we have to fear? Or is it the fear-mongers themselves?
http://notes-from-offcenter.com/2009/04/23/neo-conservative-absurdity/
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/30/religion.torture/index.html
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/04/moral-relativism
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
