The election broke their brains

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I was listening to NPR the other day and heard a group of European journalists talk about how they were trying to explain the insanity in the US to their readers.  They found it to be a difficult task.  I think that Frank Schaefer explained it very well the other day.

There is a group of angry white people who ...to paraphrase Bart Simpson - the election broke their brains!

John Hari writing at The Independent asks: How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?

The election of Obama � a black man with an anti-conservative message � as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.

When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view � to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation � has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

You have many say as much at the town hall meetings - "this is no longer my America " they say.  They may talk about socialism, fascism and Hitler but what they are really say is the country is no longer white and right.  Hari give us a rundown of the insanity:

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and � at the same time � that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence � here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper � can pierce this conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed � with a straight face � that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

And how else can you explain the health care debate?

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves � and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" � and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.

Yes, the health insurance industry is spreading the lies but why would people who already "socialized medicine" and even those with no health care at all be buying the lies?  A local congressman had a town hall last night and the front row was full of skinheads complete with their swastika tattoos.  When asked why they were there they said it was because the president was black.  Now most are not that up front but they are still part of that group of angry white people who's world came to an end last November.

Update:

Steve Benen explains how the lies are working.