Wolcott notes affinity between Daniel Pearl's murderers and US wingers

http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2005/12/headhunters.php

Civilized people were appalled, disgusted, and sobered by the vicious execution of Daniel Pearl, and the beheadings that followed. But many of the warbloggers are not civilized people. It is clear that despite their sincere protestations of horror, rage, and pity, the execution of Daniel Pearl aroused them on some primitive, subconscious level. They got off on it. It functioned as death porn to their seething, frustrated psyches. (Frustrated, because the war in Iraq simply hasn't gone the way they thought it would or should. They have been denied the glorious clearcut victory they craved.) The beheading ritual tapped into their sadistic impulses, and excited their own fantasies of torturing their foes. When rightwing bloggers and posters conjure that under Islam, Democrats--which they've come to call dhimmicrats--will get what's coming to them (i.e., the business end of a butcher's blade), it's as if it's a horrible fate that couldn't possibly happen to them*--because it's a death wish directed outward. The Islamic terrorists serve as proxies and stand-ins in this imaginary theater of cruelty, enacting what they (the warbloggers) would like to mete out to us (their domestic adversaries). Sometimes the punishment they seek is more Jacobean, as when Michael Fumento greeted Cindy Sheehan's threat to tie herself to the fence in Crawford, Texas to protest the 2000th military death in Iraq with the sentiment, Good, let her lash herself to the fence: "Leave her there and maybe the crows will do the world a favor and eat her tongue out."

It's no accident that it is the rightwing bloggers and pundits who have been avid about defending the use of torture against suspected terrorists. Nor is it an accident that many of them pooh-poohed Abu Ghraib, sluffing it off as no more harmless than fraternity hazing. But what their decapitation odes reveal is that what they'd really like to do is permit torture closer to home. Domesticate it. Trivialize it. Completely destigmatize it as a tool of the state.

I don't worry about this being actually implemented, though I worry fractionally more every day. I'm interested in it more as a pathological rash afflicting the more rabid warbloggers. It's a sign of impotence, this lurid fury of theirs. It bugs the hell out of them that those of us who opposed the war have turned out to be right. It thwarts the hell out of them that Ward Churchill still has tenure, that they couldn't convict Sami Al-Arian down in Florida, and that their latest purple-finger festival fizzled out so soon. If postwar Iraq swirls down the drain, they'll be looking for someone to blame, and since they never blame themselves for anything (a bedrock neoconservative trait), they leaves nobody here but us chickens. I dread to think of the imaginary punishments they'll devise for us appeasers, turncoats, and traitors; I'm sure they'll be quite vivid. I may have to quarantine myself from these sites to preserve my serene disposition.

If I recall correctly, during the lead-up to the war in Iraq, Sylvia Mathews (or a similar figure) appeared on a C-SPAN interview in which calls were taken. One caller, a man from South Carolina, basically chortled over the fact terrorist attacks were likely to take out people, like Mathews, who worked in cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. And the caller gleefully said something like "And when you hear that plane coming towards the building" before the host cut him off with the admonition that personal attacks were not permitted.

Wolcott is generally pretty good at separating the fools and liars from the truth-tellers, and he's got something here.

and hatred. I was listening to Thom Hartmann this morning. Half-listening while I worked, and I caught a fearful, angry voice. I knew he was a winger from the fear in his voice. Then another one called in, more fear and so quick to rage. So fearful they can't even allow the other to speak.
Amazing.
They love bush because he gave creepy people legitimacy, if only temporarily. Probably for the first time in their lives. So their rage will increase as bush loses power.
And then they'll lose and have to go back to the cracks and hide their fear and rage until they feel it's safe to display again.

Good article, thanks for posting.