In the Reactionary Heart of America

No, the ultra-right that wants to wipe out Barack Obama’s America aren’t hiding any more in the valleys of the Bible Belt; the American ultra-right is no longer hiding in the villages where book stores don’t rise up (because the Bible is more than enough) and where you can’t go to the supermarket to buy a drink – but you can brandish all the weapons you want. No, the ultra-right that wants to reclaim America no longer travels on buses where they’re half wrapped up in the Tea Party; they don’t shout their rants where the Democrats went to the wall, in those popular assemblies that hatched the upside-down Revolution.

Forget the folklore of the three nostrils of those on the extreme right. If you want to find out where they’re hiding, today, the ultra-right – who, 50 days before the vote, are going all out with billion-dollar strokes of funding – you just have to push into the heart of the Big Apple. Cross the traffic of Times Square, head toward 47th Street and finally, and at the intersection of the avenue pompously dedicated to all the “Americas,” raise your eyes all the way up there to the Rockefeller Center offices, which are now transformed into the refuge of “Fort Fox.” Yes, the ultra-right is hiding here.

In the corridors of The New York Post, they give birth to headlines like the one that ran just yesterday, “Truth Hurts” – the headline that ran under, of course, was a still shot from the fateful video that unmasks Mitt Romney’s mockery of 47 percent of Americans. “The truth hurts,” says the boldfaced title – but do we really understand who’s being winked at? Does it hurt Romney or, as Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid suggests, that hypocritical other half of America who just doesn’t want to look the reality – exposed by the billionaire candidate – in the face?

Here it is, the shameless ultra-right, the ultra-right ready to ride the gaffe that all the pollsters swear could sink the hopes of the Grand Old Party, the ultra-right of facts rigorously separated from opinions, since the latter are not affected by the former.

They all call it the “gaffe” not just because it was discovered through the third-party video. Everyone’s calling it a “gaffe” because among that 47 percent, there are many, many people who were and are still ready to vote right. Barack Obama tells a joke that 47 percent, four years ago, was exactly the number of Americans who voted for John McCain. And the statistics say that 47 percent don’t pay income taxes because three quarters of them still pay payroll taxes: The rest are either retired or earning less than $20,000 a year. Not to mention those 7,000 millionaires – as Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center mischievously recalled – who with a little trick and a tax credit, also don’t pay anything at all in the end.

For heaven’s sake, the race is still “too close to call” and the next spin of the wheel of polls can change everything, even if in the first poll after the video, one-third of independents weren’t going to vote for him any more. But the ultra-right that’s betting its billionaire double-breasted suit on Romney and his wealthy benefactors, like brothers Charles and David Koch who have bet only half a billion dollars on this election, seem to have shifted into fourth gear to go at full speed, at their own risk and our peril, around every little curve that separates us from now and Nov. 6. They’re wiping out, in a desperate race, all those militants who humbly set themselves in motion two years ago, leading Republicans to take back Congress with the slogan of the Tea Party coming from down low.

Today the ultra-right doesn’t care about the base and really thinks that it’s just a question of money and commercials. It’s running its fingers through the hair of even Peggy Noonan, the former darling of Ronald Reagan, who in her Wall Street Journal blog drowns all her sorrows over the billionaire candidate. She rebukes the almost certain “Republican defeat in a year the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose.” Oh God, we wonder, Peggy, how do you divide America in two and also admit to not being able to conquer the other half?

“That’s not how Republicans win. How do you say, ‘I can’t conquer these people’? You must have a lot more respect and even much more affection – you can’t exclude, you must invite everyone to be there. In 1984, Reagan opened his arms wide: ‘You come, too, join in, let’s make this journey together.’” Together? The ultra-right, who’s dividing America in two and plans to retake the White House by buying one-half, doesn’t know the joke that the other right is likely to play on them. There’s not only the old guard of Peggy and other notables who are now biting their nails and wondering why they threw an inexperienced billionaire in there instead of a safe used one, like Jeb Bush, for example. Kay and Ron Rivoli, the husband and wife singers as well as the soul and animation of the Tea Party Express, have flooded the email of tens of millions of supporters: “We continue to receive many letters from discouraged people, but it is the media who want to discourage them because they don’t want them to vote! But in fact, there is still hope and that hope is called Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.”

Maybe. But it’s the despair of the appeal that’s betraying the desperation of the challenge. It’s the same desperation that drives Jenny Beth Martin to take up her computer and blog. She’s the woman from deepest Georgia who launched the Tea Party Patriots, the organization that during the primaries had turned on the then-unknown star Rick Santorum. “Too many supporters are furious with the Republican candidate: they say that he’s not fighting for our values. They’re furious with the leadership in Congress: they’re spineless. But …”

But? “But we must not forget that our goal remains sending Barack Obama home.”

Here it is, the old right is holding its nose and preparing to vote Mitt. But the ultra-right that divides instead of joining is divided even internally. There’s even that great old man among conservatives, precisely Super Rupert Murdoch, who with 50 shades of chance has deployed behind Mitt and Paul his Fox, his Wall Street Journal, his New York Post and his radio stations that all across America have revived the screamers on the right – the Rush Limbaughs, the Laura Ingrahams. Yes, even he is forced to defend a candidate he doesn’t love. The old Shark, who on the longest night 12 years ago when George W. Bush and John Kerry* were swinging in that infinite swing, was so excited to finish – and as recalls the biographer Michael Wolff, completely drunk – even he, today, tried to avert the bitter chalice of Mitt Romney from the Republicans. And now he’s instead trying to get the rest of America to drink.

Yes, the ultra-right who wants to chase the first black president out of the White House is united by only one color: that of money. The poor are poor, and so they can take care of themselves, says Mitt. And Super Rupert, who would never have said those things, is even holding his nose: He, too, is the Great Polluter. From his own London, the premier conservative David Cameron let it slip that “for the sake of my people I support Barack Obama.” But the ultra-right advances anyway, turning its weakness into strength and its lies into the truth that the liberal Media Matters are forced to dismantle, vivisecting them every day on the web.

How will it end? Indeed, all is not lost. The ultra-right could still, as suggested by the wise Peggy, evoke the inclusive ghost of Ronald Reagan. But then, you know who is the ideologue of Paul Ryan, the deputy candidate for Mitt, right? [It’s] Ayn Rand, the source that became the wonderful beacon of conservatives with those writings with illuminated titles, such as The Virtue of Selfishness. That’s the stuff that in the Bible Belt, at one time, would have wound up directly at the stake.

*Editor’s Note: Al Gore ran against George W. Bush in 2000, not John Kerry.