Political LARPers

I stumbled into NewsRealBlog accidentally today and feel a little bit like I walked into a LARPer convention--there's a lot of craziness, but the crazies take it VERY seriously, and to outsiders, it's bemusing, befuddling, laugh inducing, and simultaneously scary.

The first article I saw was one where the author took William Kristol (editor of the The Weekly Standard) to task for, get this, not being conservative enough because he doesn't support Glen Beck's craziest theories. Not that he doesn't support Beck generally, but because he didn't support Beck one time. In the article, he writes the following, which while unrelated to Kristol, was my first inkling that there was something ridiculous (to use the analogy above, it's like when approaching LARPers you suddenly realize that the crowd that looks like they're partying are really wielding plastic swords and wearing capes...the moment you realize it's ridiculous and crazy):

We pointed out at the time that the steering committee of the largest coalition against the Iraq War — that is against toppling Saddam Hussein — included on its steering committee the Muslim Students Association, an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2003, we laid out the facts in an 80 page booklet edited by John Perazzo and me, called Who Is The Peace Movement? ...

Everything we know about the collaborations of the Communist left with the Soviet police state, about the collaborations of the New Left with the Vietnamese and Cuban Communists, and about the committees of leftists in solidarity with the communist dictatorship in Nicaragua and the Communist guerillas in El Salvador told us that the current left would be in bed with the Islamic Nazis who now confront us. In 2005 I published a book — Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left — which described this uniting of domestic forces with the external threat, and four years later our Frontpage editor, Jamie Glazov followed it with United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror. ...The unholy alliance between Islamo-Nazis and the American left described in these pages is the gravest threat our country has ever faced.

OK, so besides the fact there's more right ring buzz-words in here than in a random right wing generator, it's kind of ridiculous on it's face. Why? Here's why--the first paragraph argues that anti-war protestors were really the Muslim Brotherhood in disguise. He does this to support Beck's claim that "Islamo-Nazis" have taken over Iraq. Did you catch that? Group A is against invading Iraq. The US does it anyway. Group B then takes over Iraq. The conclusion, the group that was against invading Iraq, thus setting up the ability of Group B to take over Iraq, is really the same group--Islamo-Nazis.

I dug around the site a little more because I was bored and found a debate between two people over if gays could be conservative. The one who argues that they can be is the more well reasoned of the two, but in order to gain more right-wing "street cred" feels the need to call the President the "Radical-in-Chief" as well as include lines like the following:

How is it that fighting such admirable patriots as Tammy Bruce and GOProud’s Christopher Barron can strike you as a higher priority than than taking on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Anwar al-Awlaki, and Barack Obama?

So, even the "open minded" libertarian leaning writers on this blog feel the need to lump the President in with Ahmadinejad, al-Awlaki and other anti-American forces. Not to mention the rampant fear mongering against Muslims that takes place throughout the debate. (Not to mention how sad it is to see someone who thinks the best way to gain acceptance is by casting aspersions on someone lower on the totem pole. It reminds me of in Junior High when the kid who was ALMOST the class dork tripped the class dork to impress the "cool kids". Seeing this gay Republican fear monger against Muslims just seems pathetic to me.)

Why does it matter? It doesn't really, I don't think, other than it's a small window into the mindset of people whose thought processes are so far removed from mine it's difficult to fathom. It's like finding life that breathes nitrogen here on earth--sure you can imagine it, but when you see it, it's just shocking.