Bush's Brown Shirts

When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
~Sinclair Lewis

It has been almost three years since conservative Republican Paul Craig Roberts wrote The Brownshirting of America where he discussed how the Bush cultists resembled the brown shirted cultists of Aldoph Hitler.

Bush’s supporters demand lock-step consensus that Bush is right. They regard truthful reports that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in the September 11 attack on the US – truths now firmly established by the Bush administration’s own reports – as treasonous America-bashing.

William Norman Grigg points out the Bush brown shirts are now even closer to Hitler's brown shirted cultists.
The Reich Wing: Bush-Era Conservatism as Reductio Ad Absurdum

As the Iraq war ripens into the largest strategic catastrophe in our nation's history, dead-enders among the Bu'ushist faithful confront a sobering question. No, that question is not how to extricate our nation from the Mesopotamian morass, but rather how to deal with internal dissent.

It's really quite simple, sighed 35-year-old Hillary-Ann, a professional woman from California with sufficient disposable income to drop at least $1,200 to spend a week confined on a cruise ship with the editorial staff of National Review.

"Of course, we need to execute some of these people ... [a] few of these prominent people who are trying to demoralize the country," she commented with languid indifference as she waded waist-deep in the Pacific. "Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that's what you'll get. Then things'll change."

So what's with someone like Hillary-Ann? The same thing that drove the personality type that became Hitler's brown shirts. If you want to understand this phenomenon, and you should if you want to fight it, you need to read Robert Altemeyer's - The Authoritarians. And the price is right - all you have to do is download a pdf and read it. We all know what Hitler's brown shirts enabled so we all need to think about how to stop the Bush/Cheney brown shirts.