Is This Arguable?

This is apparently what Muslims look like in Norway.

DougJ over at Balloon Juice has a point to make:

Conservofascism

by Ol' Dirty DougJ

Can we start honestly talking about what the west is facing now from the far right?

You’ve got teatards threatening to destroy the American economy, Fox Newsers hacking and blackmailing everyone in sight in the UK for who knows how long, and now it looks like a crazy right-wing terrorist (andapparent Pam Geller fan) killed nearly 100 people in Norway yesterday.

To top it all off, we’re told over and over again that both sides do it.

I’m not advocating that we start dropping freedom bombs or torturing people, far from it. But the rising tide of home-grown right-wing extremism in the west scares me a lot more than anything going on in the Middle East

And Andrew Sullivan joins in, too.

The Republican refusal to countenance any way to raise revenues to tackle the massive debt incurred largely on their watch and from a recession which started under Obama’s predecessor makes one thing clear. They are not a political party in government; they are a radical faction that refuses to participate meaningfully in the give and take the Founders firmly believed should be at the center of American government. They are not conservatives in this sense. They are anarchists.

// snip

Coming from abroad, this country seems as if it is beyond dysfunctional. It looks like a banana republic on the verge of economic collapse. Now that Nixon’s dream has come true and the GOP is fundamentally the party of the Confederacy, it was perhaps naive to think they could ever accept the legitimacy of this president, or treat him with respect or act as adults in the governing process.

But this is who they are. I longed for Obama to bridge this gulf in ideology. But he cannot bridge it alone, especially when the GOP is determined to burn the bridge entirely, even when presented with a deal so tilted to the right only true fanatics could possibly walk away from it. And so the very republic is being plunged into crisis and possible depression by a single, implacable, fanatical faction. Until they are defeated, the country remains in more peril than we know.