THESE ARE UGLY TIMES

The response of Republicans [and some craven House Democrats] to the Paris attacks is not merely ignorant and despicable, it is deeply troubling.  This is what fascism looks like when it begins.  The response is also, at least at first glance, somewhat puzzling.  It was, after all, not the United States that was attacked, but France, a country the Right routinely disparages and ridicules.  Why the hysteria?  I suspect it is simply a momentary displacement of the domestic hatred of anyone not reliably White and Christian that has risen, like a pestilential smog, from the heartland of America.  When even Antonin Scalia feels called upon to observe, in response to a Republican mayor, that the internment of Japanese-Americans was wrong, you know that a rough beast is indeed slouching toward Bethlehem.