Crackpots United

Some more evidence that the GOP is being taken over by fringe groups and fascist extremists from Mother Jones. Assorted nuts and tea baggers got a friendly welcome from GOP legislators on the steps of the Capital last week when they showed up to protest the painful progress being made on relieving America's healthcare crisis. Their placards are messages are sinking to new lows in our political debate--many of racial content insulting to the President--which already takes place at an elementary level. Their latest frenzy is truly laughable if not so ridiculous. The tea baggers have embraced the fringe political theories of a former KGB analyst, Dr. Igor Panarin, an academic and alleged expert on the United States. He holds forth on a weekly radio show and television appearances from Moscow about his pet theory that the United States will collapse around the year 2010 and splinter into separate regional states as did the Soviet Union in 1992. According to Dr. Panaran, who is a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the US will break up along regional, ethnic and cultural faults. His reasoning for the breakup:

A whole range of reasons. Firstly, the financial problems in the U.S. will get worse. Millions of citizens there have lost their savings. Prices and unemployment are on the rise. General Motors and Ford are on the verge of collapse, and this means that whole cities will be left without work. Governors are already insistently demanding money from the federal center. Dissatisfaction is growing, and at the moment it is only being held back by the elections and the hope that Obama can work miracles. But by spring, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

The veterans of the Grand Army must be turing in their graves upon hearing this agitprop. Of course the Civil War is the great subject of revisionist history in Texas. There the tea baggers sponsored Panarin to speak at the Houston Hilton. The fringe right media have also cited Panarin's opinions from the Drudge Report to Chuck Baldwin, a perennial also ran of the Conservative Party. The small detail that Panarin puts the locus of Hispanic unrest in the southeast rather than in the northern portion of Mexico annexed by the United States after the Mexican War ought to tell you something about the quality of his analysis.