frito_kal Linked to this op-ed piece in the Baltimore Chronicle. A wide-ranging and sometimes thought-provoking indictment of American culture and attitudes, the piece ends up being something that puts be in mind of Ted Kaszinski's Unabomber Manifesto. Before I begin, let me remind my loyal readers of my bona-fides: remember, I am not some mindless drone in lock step with the U.S, Government. I worked hard to get someone other than the current occupant of the White House elected, give a goodish amount of time and energy to causes this administration would blanch at, and have actually gone to jail for taking part in direct actions involving causes near and dear to my heart. That said, the frightening ramblings of "W.R. McDougall" have caused me to put on the ole' boxing gloves. Or maybe to take them off.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to refute the paranoid arguments in the letter one-by-one. However, the slight sprinkling of truth the letter contains doesn't mask the gaping holes in logic and fact that the delusional writer propagates.

When I was in college, I worked a summer internship in the editorial department of the Atlanta Journal/Constitution. This was 1996, the season of the Olympics, the Southern Church Burnings, several abortion clinic bombings and the Presidential Election. Not a day went by that we did not receive at least three letters filled with the kind of vitriolic assertions this writer insists on making. Like the Washington Post, we refused to publish garbage like this on the grounds that extremist rantings without at least a modest threshold factual reality did not meet the requirements of publication.

Naturally, after several days we usually got angry calls accusing us of being part of the liberal/conservative/Zionist or other conspiracy (depending on what kind of extremist the writer was). This is the difficulty in arguing with fundamentalists regardless of what color their stripes are: from within the complex reality they have constructed to view the world from, it is impossible to argue against it.

So what are we left with? A series of hard facts.

Is George W. Bush too corporate? I suspect he is, and fully fifty percent of the country agrees with me. Remember, this guy lost the popular vote.

Is he completely correct to pursue an aggressive military campaign against terrorism? I think he is.

Is the war on drugs a failure? By most accounts it is. Is it some conspiratorial attempt to prop up drug cartels? Absolutely not. Indeed, it is a policy that comes closer and closer to being changed with each passing election cycle.

The Palestinians as poor, put-upon victims of the evil American and Zionist machine? Please. The anti-semites who regularly make this kind of argument love to ignore the fact that Arafat rejected an offer that gave his people 98% of what they were asking for in September 2000 and began a systematic campaign of violence targeting civilians.

Is Sharon too violent in his responses? Sometimes, but if one's people are being randomly murdered in the streets, I find it hard to think that any leader would not be pushed to extremes. Besides, every time he pulls his forces back, more Isrealis are butchered.

Speaking of the anti-semitism in McDougall's diatribe, let us not forget his indictment of the Federal Reserve and the "money men" pulling the strings. Again, the writer here uses a fun-filled variety of code-words familiar to any student of racist literature. The world view comes right from any number of Mien Kampf clones: the American people have been duped by the evil Jews and their money grubbing puppets. The part of the argument that remains implicit is what we should do with those bastards when we "wake up."

The argument the writer makes stems from the same political ideology as The Turner Diaries and ought to be regarded with the same grain of salt (keeping the writer in mind when the next clinic is bombed, of course). I wonder if his follow-up to the Post will accuse them of being an agent of the dreaded ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government, the secret cabal of Jews who run the country yet have failed to invite me to any meetings).

As to McDougall's thoughts about the FBI's assassination of JFK... well, I guess we have to give him that. ;-)