Conservatives in America are increasingly prone to agree with William S. Burroughs’ quip that “A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what’s going on.”
It was opium that made Burroughs so distrustful, but for the Right it’s Janet Napolitano.
The former Arizona governor first hit the conservative radar when she took pride in strenuously avoiding the phrase “terrorism” in her Senate confirmation hearing. The agency now favors the phrase “man-caused disaster” over passing linguistic judgment by calling anyone a terrorist.
Add that to the White House move to replace “Global War on Terror” with “Overseas Contingency Operation,” and Republicans began to remember what Orwellian means.
But that was all prelude to Napolitano’s latest move: a report from her department telling local police to be on the lookout for “right-wing extremists.”
The document, which reads like a relic from Janet Reno’s Justice Department, came out one week before conservatives held tea party rallies across the country to protest rising government taxes, spending and debt.
The premise of the advisory is that militias and other fringe groups are using the bad economy, along with white, male rage over the first black president, to gain new recruits.
Police were told to be on the lookout for abortion foes, opponents of illegal immigration and those who “favor of state or local authority” over federal control. Veterans who may have picked up skills for causing “man-caused disasters” in the service were also on the warning list.
If pro-life, anti-amnesty, federalist veterans are the new threat, then American Legion halls across the country better get ready for a visit by the ATF. Marines may also want to tamp down that “God and country” stuff. Sounds a little nativist, you know.
Imagine if George W. Bush’s administration had issued a similar advisory before the Iraq war protests in 2003 warning local police to be on the lookout for “left-wing extremists.”
If Homeland Security warned that Islamist groups were using outrage over the war to recruit pacifists, environmentalists, and pro-choice advocates to their movement, it’s doubtful that NBC and CNN would have done a flurry of stories about the rise of a new threat as they’ve done in this case.
Rather, the national media would be discussing whether it was the spirit or the letter of the First Amendment right to assembly that Tom Ridge had broken.
To be fair, though, many in the press corps have been preoccupied breaking down the minute-by-minute details of the arrival of first dog Bo Obama.
But while Washington is talking about Bo, conservatives across the country are getting anxious about a return to the days when Reno and the Clinton administration went after “right-wing extremists.”
Like Reno before her, Napolitano seems to be destined to do battle with libertarians.
It was the 1993 massacre at Waco that first showed the zeal of former prosecutor Reno for a heavy hand at home. When white supremacists killed 168 people in Oklahoma City two years later, the Clinton administration argued that the crackdowns had been merited.
The remainder of the Clinton years saw a push for gun control and a focus on prosecuting scruffy militamen and kooks printing their own currency in the hills of west Texas. Much as Bush promised to smoke out jihadis abroad, the Clintons set their sights on domestic terrorists.
Reasonable people who happened to dig the Second amendment or detest abortion felt like they were being unfairly lumped in with a very small group of real bad guys. Just as is happening now, ammunition sales jumped and red-state worries about loss of liberties surged to the fore.
If the new Homeland Security secretary has the cooperation of Attorney General Eric Holder, a former Reno deputy, in targeting domestic threat, expect the relationship between libertarians and the federal government to become even more strained.
When Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has his finger to the political wind because of a primary challenge from a sitting U.S. senator, starts talking seriously about defending state sovereignty, as he did this week, you know something is cooking out in the heartland.
The president, who wisely distanced himself from Holder’s comments about America being “a nation of cowards” on race, knows it’s unwise to give the Right fodder for conspiracy theories.
Napolitano, though, may not give him the opportunity to de-escalate the conflict.
