The Age Of The Lunatics And Bigots

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I used to joke that the Republican party was an example of the lunatics taking over the asylum.  Well thanks to the media it would appear that they have taken over the country.  We are talking less than 20% of the population and that is probably high but they are loud and loud mouthed lunatics make for really good Tee Vee.  And yes a majority of this very vocal minority has been driven to lunacy because we have a black president.  Don't get me wrong - this does not surprise me - but it is sad they are the ones we see on the Tee Vee news.  And I'm not talking about FOX, that's their job to pander to the lunatics and if it was just FOX it wouldn't be a problem.  Yes, Glen Beck gets 3 million viewers a day - BFD, that's less than 1% of the population.  Yet these lunatics are the ones driving the debate.  Polls show that between 50 and 60 percent of the population are in favor of a public option health care plan.  Are we going to get one? No, because a very vocal one or two percent are on the Tee Vee 24/7 shouting socialist, fascist or communist.    Of course many of the Democrats were just looking for an excuse to oppose it.  As Digby said today:

Democrats Believe that the best way to show strength and leadership is to punch hippies.

Hippies are of course progressives.

First there were the "birthers" and then the "death panel" crowd and this has morphed into what may be the craziest paranoia of all, the "indoctrinators".  Joe Gandelman has a great rundown of some of the reactions but perhaps the best is from Tim Rutten in the LA Times:

While it long ago crossed the borders of reason and civility, the
hysteria over healthcare reform is -- at some level -- understandable,
because wellness and infirmity are really just stand-ins for those most
terrifying of issues, life and death.

But there is no similar
way to rationalize the bizarre controversy now raging over President
Obama's plan to deliver a brief televised address on Tuesday to the
nation's grammar school children.

According to Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan, Obama will "challenge students to work hard, set
educational goals and take responsibility for their learning. He will
also call for a shared responsibility and commitment on the part of
students, parents and educators to ensure that every child in every
school receives the best education possible so they can compete in the
global economy for good jobs and live rewarding and productive lives as
American citizens."

Sounds innocuous. Who, after all, could be
against good study habits, personal responsibility and productive
lives? As it turns out, quite a number of people who seem to believe
that Obama intends to induct their children into -- well, it's not
quite clear what they're afraid of. The Web and talk radio are abuzz
with various attempts to organize a boycott of Tuesday's speech. One
group is urging parents to demand that their children be excused from
watching the president and be sent instead to the school library to
read the Founding Fathers. (The theory, one supposes, is that a good
dose of the Federalist Papers will inoculate the young against Obama's
attempts to subvert the republic through good grades.)

On
Wednesday, Fox News devoted a substantial portion of one of its
prime-time newscasts to a discussion of whether Obama is, in fact,
trying to seduce schoolchildren to some darkly obscure personal agenda.
The sole guest, a spokesman for the libertarian Cato Institute,
reported that "we've gotten a lot of calls from people asking, 'How do
I keep my child from being indoctrinated?' "

Republican politicians are encouraging this lunacy and as Rutten says they are playing with fire.

Miller has identified precisely the process at work in the healthcare
hysteria and, increasingly, elsewhere where the GOP thinks it can shove
the Obama administration into a ditch. Republican officials such as the
Florida state chairman are playing a dangerous game with an unhinged
segment of public opinion that regards Obama not as an elected official
with whom they disagree, but as an illegitimate usurper of the
presidency.

That paranoid fantasy is what's really behind the
"birther" movement and the allegations that the president is -- take
your pick -- a secret Marxist or a secret Muslim.

It's the kind
of fanciful anxiety that produces comments like this, posted on a
conservative website this week: "Barack Obama and his left-wing Chicago
machine regime are putting into place laws and institutions which will
insure that there will never again be free elections in America."

These are the people who are stockpiling ammunition and keeping their children at home next Tuesday.

There are Republicans who want a Democratic president to fail at any cost and they are encouraging a minority that wants a black president to fail at any cost. They are being assisted by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and yes NPR who give the lunatics air time.  I left out FOX because as I said earlier that's what FOX does.