On Sept. 29, the right-wing magazine Newsmax published and then scrubbed from its Web site an article by John L. Perry titled, “Obama Risks a Domestic Military ‘Intervention,” in which Perry provided at point-by-point rationale for the the idea that U.S. military officers could launch a coup against the nation’s elected government.

(Media Matters grabbed the text of the Newsmax article, which you can view here (PDF), and we posted the text in a Web page. Go here.)

According to the Newsmax rationale, military officers could legally launch a coup against the government because, unlike enlisted personnel who swear to “obey the orders of the president of the United States,” officers swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

This loophole in their oath-swearing, according to Newsmax, provides military officers with a legal basis for overthrowing the government.

The article then provides a laundry list of outrages that could form the basis of a rationale for a military coup:

• The citizenry is scared of Pres. Obama’s policies that are changing the country so that it “may not be recognizable as America by the 2012 election.”
• The economy is “ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation [and is] is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.” (This is typical Newsmax/Fox disinformation. As everyone knows, all the financial outrages Perry listed were caused by the greed and incompentence of Republicans, particularly George W. Bush and his GOP-controlled Congress.)
• Pres. Obama is “waging an undeclared war on the intelligence community” — by which he means the investigation into torture of detainees by CIA and other intelligence officers ordered by Bush, Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and other top Bush administration officials.
• The “dismantling” of the missile defense system is leaving us unprotected — even though the administration has announced it will be replaced with a more efficient and targetted system.
• “They can see the horror of major warfare erupting simultaneously in two, and possibly three, far-flung theaters before America can react in time.”
• “They can see the nation’s safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before.”

The Tea Bagger rhetoric — including a jibe at the president for having “bonded with his twin teleprompters,” which could also be said about all his immediate predecessors as well as at such right-wing leading lights as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and every bikini-model newsreaders at Fox — lends a discordantly trivial tone to what amounts to an argument for the most profound act of high treason ever committed against the United States.

The folks at Media Matters flagged the Newsmax article on Wednesday. On Thursday, the article was removed, without comment, from the Newsmax Web site. However, a Newsmax representative released this bit of non-contrition to Media Matters and other outlets:

In a blog posting to Newsmax John Perry wrote about a coup scenario involving the U.S. military. He clearly stated that he was not advocating such a scenario but simply describing one.

After several reader complaints, Newsmax wanted to insure that this article was not misinterpreted. It was removed after a short period after being posted.

Newsmax strongly believes in the principles of Constitutional government and would never advocate or insinuate any suggestion of an activity that would undermine our democracy or democratic institutions.

Mr. Perry served as a political appointee in the Carter administration in HUD and FEMA. He has no official relationship with Newsmax other than as an unpaid blogger.

Of course, if the Newsmax writer hadn’t intended to promote the rationale for treason, he wouldn’t have written it, and if Newsmax hadn’t endorsed it, they wouldn’t have published it.

And he may be an “unpaid blogger” but he was described as “a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents [and] a regular columnist for Newsmax.com.” Elsewhere we learn that he has been writing a weekly column for Newsmax since 1999, a year after it was founded.