Rachel Maddow Can't Confirm Anything in Her Militia Member Smear on the Tea Party Movement

This Rachel Maddow segment pretty much sums up the total journalistic amateurism at MSNBC. She's spends five minutes stretching to find some kind of connection between the Hutaree militia and the "right wing extremists" (read tea partiers) who've been marching in anti-ObamaCare protests in D.C. And to top it off, her "expert" is the completely asinine hack Dave Neiwert, who argues that Americans freaked out over a few men with "turbans" on September 11, while the "real threat" to the United States is "right wing domestic terrorism." These people are bad.

I'll be the first to condemn the militia movement's extremism. I want nothing to do with them, and I can't name a single conservative blogger or tea partier -- and that by now includes dozens, even hundreds, of leaders in the conservative movement today -- who would even deign to associate with potential domestic terrorists. Meanwhile, the Obama administration keeps close ties with Code Pink fanatics who're serving as a direct link to the Taliban insurgency. This White House refused to condemn the Fort Hood attacks as domestic jihad, and the "system worked" when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up a plane over Detroit. But hey, I better watch it: That's RAAACIST!!!

And for comparison, see my earlier entry, "The Left/Right Divide: Which Side Would You Choose?"

In any case, TPM-Muckraker's working hard to generalize and normalize the militias, "For Hutaree, Militia Ethos Extended To Family Life."

But see tonight's New York Times, "Militia Members Draw Distinctions Between Groups."