Bush Derangement Syndrome on steroids

What do the Kos Kids and homegrown Islamist terrorists have in common? Read on to find out. Above, business-gift notepad from the family firm trips the light fantastic in the late-afternoon kitchen.

"We're going to find that the guy who leads [a cult] is arrogant, narcissistic, hubristic," says University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson [via Arts & Letters Daily].

"He's going to believe he's 100-per-cent right. And he's going to be completely opaque to counter-evidence." What gets lost, continues Peterson, is individual integrity. "The way to become resistant to totalitarian ideology is to understand that you have individual responsibility for your life."

The Toronto Star article was trying to understand what motivates alleged terrorists like the Toronoto 17 arrested last week, but the quotations of researchers who study boys as a societal class made us think of something closer to home, the cyberterrorist community of the blogosphere's top lefty blog, Daily Kos, a hotbed of counter-evidence-free Bush haters. We'll get to that in a moment, but first a couple of quotable quotes from the Star article to set the scene. "The group is the anchor" says Fred Mathews, director of research and youth justice programs at Central Toronto Youth Services:

Anything that removes kids out of the dominant culture and puts them on the margins amplifies the effect of that group affinity, group belonging and group norms . . . It costs a lot to step outside of group norms. The cost of isolation. And that's one of the hardest things for a human being to face, the threat of isolation.

Lionel Tiger -- the Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University who coined the term "male bonding" way back when -- explained what makes the terrrorists tick way back on September 28, 2001 in Slate, notes the Star:

The terrorism of Bin Laden harnesses the chaos of young men, uniting the energies of political ardour and sex in a turbulent fuel.

It's the great unifying theory of this blog -- The Importance of Being Noticed, the Darwinially driven dynamics of bonding within groups through honor codes among peers -- rearing its lovely head again. As we wrote here last August in the wake of the London subway bombings perpetrated by homegrown angry young men:

The importance of being noticed makes the world go 'round, from al-Queda types who intimidate through cold-blooded murder of innocents to impress their "brothers," to internet hackers who wreak havoc amongst online innocents to impress their own fellow travelers. On the good side, each one of us seeks, through our accomplishments, to earn a place of honor among our peers. The real issue is, whom do we select as our peers.

Enter stage left Markos Moulitsas and the Kult of Kos, flush with gushing MSM coverage of last weekend's first YearlyKos convention in Las Vegas, attended by the likes of Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, Arianna and other beltway and big media types. "For those of you lucky enough not to know what the Daily Kos is," explains Roger de Hauteville of Maggie's Farm," it's the exemplar of a stripe of endless vitriol masquerading as political action that infests the blogosphere at the far left hand margin of the internet world":

The US doesn't win wars; anyone we beat wasn't worth defeating. We were on the wrong side anyway. We're not prosperous, we're slaves to money. Well fed? It's a conspiracy to make us fat. Long lived? Social Security's going broke. Good news? Karl Rove planted it to trick us. I will log on to dailykos, and he will tell me why everything -- no matter how good manifestly it might be -- is bad, and tell me how I can blame it on The Other. And we will chant it together.

It's Bush Derangement Syndrome on steroids. "They also aim to come up with a core message about the Democratic Party, and what it means, that will compete successfully with the GOP's ideas of national security, limited government, lower taxes, and 'moral values,'" wrote a breathless Bill McGibben in a New York Review of Books piece on the occasion of publication of Moulitsas's Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics in April. Like the folks at MoveOn, who hosted houseparties recently to come up with three "progressive" "ideas" all could buy into, the Kos Kids don't seem to have any ideas beyond Bush hatred and "taking back" the country. It's all about power, with "a core message" as an afterthought, a far cry from the conservative message, honed through decades of thoughtful debate and research. From the NY Review:

On every front they're eager to wrest control from the well-connected, Ivy-educated Washington Democratic elite, arguing that it is out of touch with the larger body politic . . .

They favor a broad, economic populist message, emphasizing issues like improvements in Social Security, much-expanded health care, and fairer taxes.

Can you say visionary? No, we couldn't either. But that's the point. The real "core message" of Daily Kos, as with homegrown Islamicist terrorists, is membership in the cult and loyalty to the dear leader.

Comments

[Tara]

Yeah, I can't wait for Kos to be quoted regularly in the pages of the NY Times.

Markos couldn't contain his joy over the deaths of 4 of his fellow citizens in Fallujah.They were contractors whose bodies were burned and hung from a bridge by the Islamo-Fascist savages and he said he felt nothing for them because they were there to wage war for profit. "Screw them." he said.

Yeah, I want Kos to be featured in the MSM on a daily basis.

Let the American people see what real insanity has infected the Democrat Party up close and personal.

http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2004/4/1/144156/3224#16

[Teresa]

The scary part is that all they need is a charismatic leader (like Bill Clinton) and a majority of people seem to turn off their brains and go with the "feeling".

When you have a leader with enough of that "certain something" you don't need a message - people seem to fall for it in droves. Lucky for us - the Dems don't have a leader like that at the moment.

[carter]

your logic is a bit off base. a lot of conservatives think this is a bad presidency. perhaps it is worth finding out the reasons why.

kos is a democratic site, so there are liberals there, plain old democrats, and moderates. the popularity of commenting that you draw an outrageous analogy on is no different than anywhere else. it is a very popular site, to it is far more extensive, so it is easy to find examples of anything you want.

your analogy in effect applies to everybody and everything, even your site, and your posts. you don't see this, I suggest, because rather than just consider where you might agree with some policy views of someone on Kos, where you might disagree, and why, it seems that there is more emphasis on finding ways to attack it.

why the blind loyalty to an adminstration that has vastly increased governmental power, vastly increased govermental secrecy, (harry truman "secrecy, and democracy don't mix), spent recklessly (do you know the actual defitic numbers? go to the CBO,then compare to our actual growsth the past few years, and our total defense spending as a % opf GNP in comparasion with past decades), read the Constituiont differently than most leading REPUBLICAN scholars (let alone democrats), which is a nice way of saying it (consider the facts here), etc?

[Teresa]

Carter - the issue here is not if the Republicans like Bush, it's that the liberals HATE him. To the point of wanting to do anything just to make him look bad. Even if it means wreaking havoc on our economy, putting our military in grave danger, or even putting our fellow citizens in danger.

And before you say it, I don't agree with everything the President does or says. There are some things on which I vehemently disagree. None of them were mentioned in your liberal talking points.

No, the point here is that the Kos crowd has an unending litany of bad things to say about our country - continuous, unrelenting criticisms. With the only assumption being - everything will be fine if we can get Bush out of office.

But there is NEVER ever any suggestion on how to make things better, other than getting rid of Mr. Bush. No plan, no ideas. And never ever one word of good. (how depressed these people must be to live in this great country and not see one single good thing about it!)

Without a clear idea of where they want to go as a party, liberals will never get anywhere. They seem to have all kinds of ideas of what they don't want - but not a single idea of what they do want and how to achieve it. How can you get somewhere if you don't know where you want to go?

[Bird Dog]

off-topic, but, re earthworms, just wanted to say that great minds think alike.

[Sissy Willis]

Good dog. :)

[goomp]

The Kos crowd is disoriented like many of those who think they are liberal. A world where responsibility for doing one's part to keep the USA the freest and most honorable country in the world is not part of their world. Complaining that life is not a perpetual round of pleasure without resposibility is their bag.

[Laura Lee Donoho]

You nailed the Kos crowd Sissy.