Dave Neiwert at Orincus writes about the policies, ideals, and history of the right and our abused soldiers. Lets hope that our politicians treat our veterans with the care and respect they deserve – including counseling, good medical care, and helping them rejoin society.

The far right, by appealing to people’s baser instincts and especially their fears, has a long history of encouraging working-class people to reject progressive values on purely visceral cultural grounds.

So far this century, we’ve seen a real growth of far-right rhetoric, and the march of its agenda, manifesting itself in such shapes as the Minutemen — who are in fact almost direct descendants of the ’90s militias — and various cultural eugenicists posing as “immigration reformers” and twisting the national debate on immigration in truly perverse directions; Christian “Dominionists” who want to turn the United States into a theocratic state; and most of all, a real culture of totalism fueled by an increasingly ugly tide of eliminationist rhetoric.

The incidents of domestic terrorism coming from the far right have meantime been bubbling along at a low level, present like background noise that everyone pretends not to notice: the anthrax killer, William Krar, one abortion clinic bomber arrested mid-plot, while another was caught after his bomb misfired.

the extreme stresses under which we are now placing these soldiers [our soldiers in Iraq], especially in the form of multiple tours and forced reenlistment, is eventually going to produce a bumper crop of damaged citizens, some of whom are going to be extremely vulnerable to the “stab in the back” meme that’s become a major note in the right-wing drumbeat on the war.

It’s definitely worth reading the whole thing.