I'm serious. I listened to the news this morning on the radio, and I started to wonder if I hadn't gone through some kind of a time warp, back to the 1950s. The House Homeland Security Committee is actually holding hearings on whether members of a certain religion have become too radical -- and what the U.S. government can do about it.
Richard Nixon used to say that the Jews were part of the Commie Radical Conspiracy, and J. Edgar Hoover thought that black religious leaders, including the Rev. Marting Luther King, Jr, were linked to the Communist Party, but it's been a while since the U.S. government officially investigated an entire religion on the grounds that it might contain radical elements.
Of course, as Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) notes:
Yet, since September 11, 2001, there have been at least 78 terrorist attacks around the world which did not involve Muslim perpetrators. During the same period, there were 45 incidents connected to Islamic radicals.
Same thing in the United States. Timothy McVeigh? Not a Muslim.
Here's Rep. Dan Lundgren (R-Calif.) telling us all about this particular scare:
I think moderate voices in this country are intimidated by the radicals. If we hide this and pretend that it doesn't exist, we're ignoring reality.
It's funny -- I could make that same argument about the Republican Party. The moderates (if any are left) are intimidated by the Tea Party and anti-tax radicals. Now we have a HUAC-style investigation of the Muslims.
And then in Wisconsin, one of the birthplaces of the modern labor movement in America, the state Legislature is stripping public employees of almost all collective bargaining rights. Forget wages and benefits, which the unions have already agreed to open up for discussion. This is about the most central tenet of organized labor -- the right to collective bargaining. It's as if all the victories we've won in the past half century (or more) are going away. With a Democrat in the White House.
It's funny: I was drinking beer with my neighbor the other night and talking about tax policy (you wonder why I have so many friends) and he told me he'd given up any thoughts of socialist revolution or radical change: "I'd just take the 1950s," he said.
Because in the 1950s, the rich people paid taxes.
So now we've got the worst of both worlds: We have 50s-era witch hunts and union busting -- and we don't even have 50s-era taxes. What the fuck?