If you’ve ever gone to FreeRepublic.com or lurked around Usenet, you know that it tends to attract the nastiest, nuttiest, and most virulent of right wingers. Along with the race baiting scumbags and creepy and vicious crypto anarchists, you have a broad selection of folks who consider anything not endorsed by Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage to be liberal propaganda.

It’s not unusual to encounter quotes such as "The Islamic community has a cancer growing inside it, which hates Jews, hates freedom, and hates Western Society. The disease of Islam must be rectified. It’s kill or be killed."

Charming, is it not? The fruitloop who said that also came up with these howlers: "Because of the peace movement, we had the Holocaust," and "The Democratic Party is keeping the Ku Klux Klan alive, and if we’d listened to Southern Democrats who wanted peace in the Civil War, we’d still have slavery."

Well, the country has nasty crackpots. We all know that. We just read the words of the speaker, and think of the bitter old guy in the dirty T-shirt who raised pigeons and wrote strange plays about Der Fuehrer in the move "The Producers." You just remind yourself that the bottom 10% of everything, including society, is going to be pretty slimy.

And the internet is full of nasty crackpots.

Except this wasn’t on the internet where this got said. It was at the University of Southern California.

And it wasn’t uttered by a sour drunken loser lurking in some filthy apartment with only his birds to keep him company.

No, these charming words oozed from the lips of one Shawn Steel, who, up until two months ago, was the Chairman of the California State Republican Party.

The initial action of the state GOP was to say that they were studying the incident to make sure the words hadn’t been taken out of context. It’s pretty hard to imagine how the phrase "the disease of Islam" could be anything but a smear against Islam, and the GOP must have realized that, because the party went on to hurriedly say that the remarks, if accurate, would be condemned.

According to the Sacramento Bee, where the story was reported on April 21^st, GOP spokesman Rob Stutzman said "We want to make it clear it clear that he does not speak for the party anymore."

Fair enough. He did quit his post two months ago. He’s free to speak as a private citizen, just as I’m free to describe him as a slimeball for doing so.

But it’s pretty unlikely that he developed these types of opinions in just the past two months. Most people, when they veer to the fringes of the ultra far right and fall in with the ranks of the haters, join the GOP, rather than leave it.

How do you become the top non-elected official in the party in the largest state in the Union when you express views more at home in the meeting places of the Ku Klux Klan or the World Church of the Creator?

Go to the various well-funded right wing organs for the answer. Go to Faux News, or Michael Savage, or Rush Limbaugh. Log in to Newsmax or World News Daily or Jewish World News.

The whole party apparatus is one throbbing circulation system of such stuff. It’s well organized, and centrally planned.

Steel didn’t learn it from skinheads and bible bangers; he got it from the mass orifices of Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and Richard Scaife. It was repeated on a hundred radio talks shows, and whispered at chamber of commerce meetings and in causal conversations after church.

It spreads throughout the American right, but it doesn’t spread from the bottom. It spreads from the top, a poison astroturf.

As disease breeds on weakness, this type of "philosophy" breeds on ignorance. How ignorant of American history can a man be to compare the ante-bellum Democrats with the Democrats of the second half of the twentieth century? Doesn’t he know that the racists and haters of the south all abandoned the Democratic party in the 1960s and have been the GOP’s most reliable voting bloc ever since?

The same diseased mentality is the one that believes it is tough, manly, and oh, so American to be against peace, against democracy, against freedom, and even against clean air and water. Peace didn’t create Hitler. Unfairness and poverty and desperation created Hitler, the same types of leadership that the GOP seeks to impose today. Hitler gained power because a British prime minister was willing to toady to an amoral opportunist who attacked defenseless countries for political power and loot, and Steel indirectly cites that, even as he cheers the British prime minister today who is willing to toady to an amoral opportunist who attacks defenseless countries for political power and loot.

David Duke called Judaism a "gutter religion" and after an indecent pause, the GOP condemned him. Steel called Islam a "diseased religion" and the GOP will condemn that; but again, after an indecent little pause.

In the meantime, the threats against liberals and Democrats will continue to rise, and the media will cower, afraid of having their patriotism questioned, as America slowly, shamefully buckles before this tide of brownshirts and other thugs.

The sad thing about Steel isn’t that he was so ugly. He, by himself, is a vicious little man and doesn’t matter. The sad thing is that he has become so typical of the American right. And that makes him significant.