“While the rest of us may be worried about violent Mexican drug gangs on our border, or about terrorists who are going to be released from Guantanimo, the Director of Homeland Security is worried about ‘right-wing extremists.’”
Yeah, this report would annoy me less if the foreign terrorists and the War on Terror itself had not been benignly redifined so recently. It reminds me of shortly after 9/11 when I heard naive libs say things like, “Muslims aren’t the only terrorists. What about the KKK, the IRA, and Tim McVeigh?”
It couldn’t have been more possible to be out of touch back then. As the years pass, it will get easier and easier to fall back into making no distinction between common criminals and the guys who bombed the World Trade Center in ‘93.
I have far more respect for people who disregard militia groups and foreing terrorists altogether. But to fear the former and soften on the later is lunacy.
A conservative columnist wrote a good article about 10-12 years ago, about "Defining Deviancy Up". That's part of the phenomenon you're describing: Minimizing the derelictions of terrorists and social deviants (like homosexuals), criminals and "political activists" who are actively trying to destroy the society is called "defining deviancy down". Blowing up the supposed faults of Middle America ("discovering" that every third white heterosexual father is a secret pedophile or perv, or a religious or ethnic bigot, for example) and magnifying them to decry them -- Frankfurt School destructive criticism -- is "defining deviancy up".
Articles like these are the Left's hatesmiths at work, twisting words and thoughts into weapons of ideological warfare against the fairest, most open, most clement society the world has ever seen.