Signs of the Lunatic Fringe

I do not consider myself a progressive; I think of myself as simply hardcore liberal. But I do appreciate the column by self-described progressive columnist Paul Begala over at The Huffington Post. I will copy it in here, and provide a link. He says exactly how I feel these days about these extreme views from the right. I will say it here as I said throughout George Bush's terms as president: I hated his politics and I hated his policies and I will always believe that the President of the United States should be smarter than me, and he most certainly was not. Our current president is a lot smarter than me, and I just have to hope that he can weather all the insanity going on with this minority of people out there who look crazy and have the potential to act crazy.

A SIGN OF THE TIMES
Paul Begala, CNN Political Commentator

The sign said it all. It was not some last-minute message some meth addict scrawled in crayon on a scrap of cardboard. No, this sign was professionally printed. White block letters on a blue background, the four-word message was in all caps. Someone had to have thought this through. Someone wrote it, edited it, planned it, designed it, ordered it, paid for it. Someone approved it, printed it, distributed it. And then someone thought this was a message he or she wanted to convey to the world. Thank goodness someone had the courage to take a photo of it, and then Huffington Post had the guts to post it on its home page.

The sign made me nauseous, made me embarrassed, made me wonder if at long last there is no decency on the far right. The sign said:

"BURY OBAMACARE WITH KENNEDY"

Oh, I get it. Sen. Kennedy is dead, and these slugs want health care reform to be dead too. That is so clever.

Fourteen days after Edward Kennedy was laid to rest in the company of his fellow American heroes in Arlington, right-wing hate-mongers decided to use his burial to make a cheap point about their opposition to health care reform.

What would they have done if liberals had printed signs that equated Ronald Reagan's burial with the hoped-for death of George W. Bush's plan to privatize Social Security? Or Bill Buckley's painful passing with the GOP's loss of the White House in 2008? Or the demise of my right-wing former colleague Bob Novak with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts? You can't imagine that, can you? Because, while we progressives have our moments of frustration and our occasional lack of couth, there is nothing I can think of that compares to the sick, savage sign that the teabaggers were waving in Washington.

The inmates have taken over the asylum. The ever-sunny Reagan is dead. The congenial Buckley is dead. The old-school conservative Novak is dead as well. In their place is the party of Joe the Shouter and Joe the Plumber and Sarah the Death Panel Screecher.

They hate Pres. Obama - even though he has bent over backwards to accommodate Republicans. They hate tax increases - even though the Democrats have cut taxes for 95% of Americans. They hate health care reform - even though Ted Kennedy fought his whole life to get them the same health care millionaires like him already had.

There was not, to my knowledge, a sign that said, "Let's Bury Medicare," even though Medicare is precisely the sort of single-payer, government-run, socialized health insurance the whack-jobs say they hate. Nor did I hear about a sign that said, "Let's Bury Tricare," although the military health system is as socialized as Britain's, its beneficiaries (including, according to Newsweek, Congressclown Joe Wilson of South Carolina) are very happy with their socialized health care. Nary a sign, so far as I know, decried the Bush prescription drug entitlement, even though it ballooned the deficit, enriched the pharmaceutical companies and furthered the supposed slide toward socialism. Nor, I'm told, were there any signs criticizing the $2 trillion Mr. Bush's unjust, unwarranted, unwise war in Iraq will cost our children and grandchildren. Nor ever a single sign about the Bush tax cuts, which helped squander the Clinton surplus. If this were about fiscal policy, the protests would have happened long ago.

These tea parties are, at least for some, more about hate than high-minded debate. Anyone who needed proof need look no further than the sign captured in the photo on the front page of the Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-begala/a-sign-of-the-times_b_284779.html


A collection of the signs at Saturday's DC gathering:





This child, as you can see, is the one who was holding the sign just above. A parent allowed a child to carry that sign, and to wear that t-shirt. This is a perfect sign that the right has gone off the deep end.











<-- I will never understand a parent allowing a child to carry something like this. An absolutely disgusting threat.

And my favorite sign, the one circled below, shows just how delusional these people are. They don't remember all of the spending during the Bush years? The enormous deficit that Bush and his party built up? That they squandered a surplus left by the Clinton administration? I'm sorry to have to say it, but they are delusional or stupid. Neither one is good for this country.

The Right Wing Mindset

It's kind of like they've lost their minds. I had mentioned Roger Kimball in my post yesterday. Here is a rebuttal to his diatribe about Obama the Leninist, copied from Damon Linker's blog at The New Republic (a link to his blog is now available to the right here on my blog site):

The Meltdown of the Conservative Mind

Roger Kimball has been a strident, highly polemical right-winger for a long time. But he's also very smart and highly literate. He writes with authority about art and philosophy, literature and politics. He knows a lot about history. And the quarterly he co-edits with Hilton Kramer (The New Criterion) has published erudite commentary and criticism on culture and the arts for more than a quarter century.

What, then, are we supposed to make of this astonishing post? Not only does Kimball endorse the view, expressed repeatedly by right-wingers over the past couple of weeks, that Obama deserves the blame for a stock-market collapse that began and accelerated months before Election Day 2008. And Kimball does not merely suggest, like many other (so-called) conservatives, that we can already, fewer than six weeks (!) after Inauguration Day, judge Obama to be an incompetent president. No, Kimball goes much further than these comparatively level-headed expressions of dissent to suggest something far more sinister. Yes, it's true: Roger Kimball -- accomplished intellectual and cultural critic -- believes that Barack Obama is a Leninist.

Now in fairness to Kimball, I should note that he's merely endorsing a tirade by that paragon of political and economic good sense, financial guru and CNBC loudmouth Jim Cramer. But Kimball not only endorses Cramer's vulgar and philistine analysis (I mean: "analysis"); he also provides readers of his blog with an informative quote from Lenin himself on the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat to impose "a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists." You know, just like Obama! It's perfectly fitting, then, for Kimball to conclude his post by quoting Article II, Section IV of the Constitution on the requirements for impeaching the president and by calling on "some clever legal talent to show how deliberately sabotaging the United States economy [sic] counts as Treason, a high Crime, or at least a Misdemeanor."

Here is Andrew Sullivan's incredulous response to Kimball's suggestion:

Obama's predecessor secretly invoked the power to suspend the First and Fourth Amendments for seven years, authorized the seizure and torture of American citizens, launched two decade-long wars of attrition, doubled the national debt, presided over the worst financial bubble since the 1930s, provided the weakest level of economic growth in decades, and left the US in the grip of the steepest depression since the 1930s. But after five weeks, it's Obama who should be impeached?

Well put. But I think something more needs to be said in response to Kimball. Something more needs to be said because Kimball's post raises important questions about just how far the American right is going to go in marginalizing itself during the Obama era. Are its leading intellectuals going to engage in constructive, thoughtful, informed debate about the policies proposed by the president? Or are they going to become indistinguishable from populist rabble-rousers like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin -- men who routinely confuse venomous, paranoid ranting with thinking? Because here's the thing: If Roger Kimball really believes that Barack Obama is a Leninist who deserves to be impeached for deliberately sabotaging the American economy (presumably as a prelude to imposing communism), then he has definitively demonstrated that he has a reckless, irresponsible mind and a temperament ill-suited to serious intellectual engagement in our public life.

The right can certainly afford to have a few cranks running around. (The left certainly has its share.) But how many is too many? When will sensible citizens conclude that the right simply should not be trusted with political power -- not because its policies diverge from what the American majority prefers, but rather because the right is in the grip of a form of ideological madness that renders it incapable of governing -- or even thinking -- responsibly? Five-and-a-half weeks into the Obama administration, I fear we might not have to wait very long for an answer.


(This is Denise again) I find it absolutely amazing that just five short weeks into a new administration that these idiots could call Obama the worst president ever, especially after what we have had to go through these last eight years. It's one thing for people to hate Obama because they see things differently, that they are afraid of new big government because that is what they think of when they think of a Democrat. But it is something completely different to call Obama the worst president when we have just finished two terms of a man who cared nothing for the Constitution and recreated his own idea of what the president could do. Trampling the Constitution became de rigueur for George Bush. That he will most likely not be held accountable for his crimes is despicable. History will certainly tell where Bush stands against his predecessors; he's already been dubbed one of the worst by many historians. How he compares against Obama is years away to be properly analyzed. But only insane people would have the nerve to judge him after only five weeks in office.