black helicopters

Dave Neiwert at Orcinus has been chronicling and examining the various activities of extreme right wing groups for some time. He writes in this post about racists on the internets hoping Senator Obama wins in November, then fails as a President so that white folks learn once and for all that we can't trust the darkies:

If you thought the far right went nuts in the 1990s -- when the Democratic president was a white Southern male -- just wait till there's a President Obama. Progressives should be bracing for it.

Remember all the black helicopter loonies from the 90s (Hank Hill's loony neighbor on King of the Hill, Dale Gribble, is a dead-to-rights satire of the type)? The end of the Cold War took away the bogeyman they needed to feed their wierd fantasies of manliness and glory, so they turned their energies to hating the Clintons, the U.S. Government, and the U.N., while Rush Limbaugh and others in the talk-radio echo chamber provided plenty of fodder. It was the crazy-ass rumor mongering that turned me off of politics in the 90s.

When a Republican took the White House and started a war in the Middle East, these loonies had a new, Islamic bogeyman and their mistrust of the government changed to lock-step approval of warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention in Guantanamo and ohter such threats to American civil liberties. They especially won't be happy if a President Obama manages to end the war and take away their new bogeyman. And, as Dave points out, it'll be much, much nastier than it was in the 90s.

The good news is that liberty held on in the 9th to win 5-4.