Shock troops for an American liberalnacht. The essential Orcinus writes:

Digby's warning on this point is, as always, on the money: the faction to watch here is the returning veterans of the Iraq war. I've contended since early in the conflict that the war would prove to be the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Finishing School: the extreme stresses under which we are now placing these soldiers, especially in the form of multiple tours and forced reenlistment, is eventually going to produce a bumper crop of damaged citizens, some of whom are going to be extremely vulnerable to the "stab in the back" [dolchstosslegende, in the original German] meme that's become a major note in the right-wing drumbeat on the war.

If all that falls into place, we will actually be reproducing the conditions that existed in Italy and Germany in the post-World War I vacuum: a motivated bloc of angry returned veterans, molded into totalist thinking over a long period, and organized into lawless packs of street thugs eager to expel the "traitors" who had stabbed them in the back. These factions, known respectively as the Blackshirts and the Brownshirts, became the foundations of real fascism.

So, what's not to like?

So it's going to be up to progressives to seize this bull by the horns. They're going to have to anticipate an increasingly violent political environment, and understand that their most effective strategies in defusing it lie in turning the violence into a moral victory (particularly when it's demonstrated that far-right factions are the instigators) and in undermining their appeal by working hard to champion the interest of the same working-class people the extremists depend upon for recruitment.

Agreed, agreed, agreed. Read more…

The only thing - ostensibly - stopping the Democrats in congress from stopping the war is fear of right wing memes and their power. Hopefully, illustrating some of these memes will show how ridiculous they are.

The current phrasing of the Dolchstoss (stab in the back) meme (more on the definition below) is "undercutting the troops". Note "cut" in the root of the verb. Other phrasings include "undermining" the troops and "not supporting" the troops.

Just last week, right-wing propagandist/enabler Chris Wallace served up some Dolchstoss for Dick "Dick" Cheney: Read more…