And where are the rational people who'll stem this tide? Certainly not at Fox News, which is making money hand over fist pushing the worst of it. Certainly not in leadership positions in the GOP, where everyone is apparently terrified of not being loony enough. And maybe for good reason. John McCain has been running to the right just as fast as his old legs can carry him, but he's struggling to get far enough fast enough to suit the loonies. (He's even had to bring in Sarah Palin to boost his popularity with the tea-baggers.) And David Frum was just fired for daring to suggest that the right-wing has gone too far.
This is the French Revolution all over again. Leaders in the early years of the revolution eventually found themselves heading to the guillotine for being too moderate. Well, when extremists lead, no one can ever be extreme enough. Leaders jump to the front of the mob to avoid being overrun. If you hesitate, if you express caution or concern that the movement is going too far, you're denounced as a traitor, an appeaser,... a moderate! Fanaticism feeds on itself in this way. The most fanatic lead, when all the lemmings head in the same direction.
So what's going on? (What isn't?) Here's Bob Herbert in the New York Times talking about "An Absence of Class":
A group of lowlifes at a Tea Party rally in Columbus, Ohio, last week taunted and humiliated a man who was sitting on the ground with a sign that said he had Parkinson’s disease. ...
In Washington on Saturday, opponents of the health care legislation spit on a black congressman and shouted racial slurs at two others, including John Lewis, one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was taunted because he is gay.
These people were angry, you see, because a health care reform bill passed in Congress by majority vote (by Congressmen who'd long run for office on a platform of health care reform) and was signed into law by a President who'd campaigned on that very issue and who was also elected by majority vote not long before. OK, after nearly destroying our country in the previous eight years, Republicans lost the election in 2008. Is losing an election really a valid excuse for this kind of behavior?
And Republican leaders from Fox News on down just promote and encourage this kind of thing, when they're not actually participating in it themselves.
For decades the G.O.P. has been the party of fear, ignorance and divisiveness. All you have to do is look around to see what it has done to the country. The greatest economic inequality since the Gilded Age was followed by a near-total collapse of the overall economy. As a country, we have a monumental mess on our hands and still the Republicans have nothing to offer in the way of a remedy except more tax cuts for the rich.
This is the party of trickle down and weapons of mass destruction, the party of birthers and death-panel lunatics. This is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry. ...
The toxic clouds that are the inevitable result of the fear and the bitter conflicts so relentlessly stoked by the Republican Party — think blacks against whites, gays versus straights, and a whole range of folks against immigrants — tend to obscure the tremendous damage that the party’s policies have inflicted on the country. If people are arguing over immigrants or abortion or whether gays should be allowed to marry, they’re not calling the G.O.P. to account for (to take just one example) the horribly destructive policy of cutting taxes while the nation was fighting two wars.
If you’re all fired up about Republican-inspired tales of Democrats planning to send grandma to some death chamber, you’ll never get to the G.O.P.’s war against the right of ordinary workers to organize and negotiate in their own best interests — a war that has diminished living standards for working people for decades.
I must agree with Paul Krugman, in "Going to Extreme," that I thought some of this was funny at first. Seeing these people make complete fools of themselves had its enjoyable side. And surely the American people would be smart enough, reasonable enough, sane enough that they'd overwhelmingly denounce this kind of thing, right? Don't tell me we've become such complete gibbering idiots as to let this kind of behavior pass!
I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law. But a few days later, it doesn’t seem quite as entertaining — and not just because of the wave of vandalism and threats aimed at Democratic lawmakers. For if you care about America’s future, you can’t be happy as extremists take full control of one of our two great political parties.
To be sure, it was enjoyable watching Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican of California, warn that by passing health reform, Democrats “will finally lay the cornerstone of their socialist utopia on the backs of the American people.” Gosh, that sounds uncomfortable. And it’s been a hoot watching Mitt Romney squirm as he tries to distance himself from a plan that, as he knows full well, is nearly identical to the reform he himself pushed through as governor of Massachusetts. His best shot was declaring that enacting reform was an “unconscionable abuse of power,” a “historic usurpation of the legislative process” — presumably because the legislative process isn’t supposed to include things like “votes” in which the majority prevails.
But this is America we're talking about, my country. Our fundamental principles include reasoned debate instead of violence, and the democratic process of deciding our society's rules together. We need a reasonable opposition party, not a group of nihilists determined to burn down the whole nation if they don't get their way. (And considering that they've had their way for years and years now...)
What has been really striking has been the eliminationist rhetoric of the G.O.P., coming not from some radical fringe but from the party’s leaders. John Boehner, the House minority leader, declared that the passage of health reform was “Armageddon.” The Republican National Committee put out a fund-raising appeal that included a picture of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, surrounded by flames, while the committee’s chairman declared that it was time to put Ms. Pelosi on “the firing line.” And Sarah Palin put out a map literally putting Democratic lawmakers in the cross hairs of a rifle sight. ...
For today’s G.O.P. is, fully and finally, the party of Ronald Reagan — not Reagan the pragmatic politician, who could and did strike deals with Democrats, but Reagan the antigovernment fanatic, who warned that Medicare would destroy American freedom. It’s a party that sees modest efforts to improve Americans’ economic and health security not merely as unwise, but as monstrous. It’s a party in which paranoid fantasies about the other side — Obama is a socialist, Democrats have totalitarian ambitions — are mainstream. And, as a result, it’s a party that fundamentally doesn’t accept anyone else’s right to govern.
In the short run, Republican extremism may be good for Democrats, to the extent that it prompts a voter backlash. But in the long run, it’s a very bad thing for America. We need to have two reasonable, rational parties in this country. And right now we don’t.
There's a lot more of this kind of thing, and it seems to be coming from almost every Republican politician. Here's TPM - Talking Points Memo - with more of this "incendiary rhetoric":
One of the most vicious screeds came from Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) after Sunday's vote:
Today Americans are reacquainted with the danger of an arrogant all powerful government, a deadly enemy within, a clear and present danger in Washington. ... But freedom dies hard in America. I do not believe that the majority of Americans will submit passively to the gold chains of socialism.Conservative congressmen Michele Bachmann and Steve King have each called for revolution. Bachmann called on supporters to disobey the health care law. In the days before the weekend's vote, King called tea partiers to shut down Washington by packing the city's streets.
Former Alaska governor and conservative darling Sarah Palin used Twitter, entreating supporters, "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!"
Oh, sure, Republican leaders are quick to say they don't "want" violence. No, of course not. How could anyone be so foolish as to mistake all this gun talk, all this revolution rhetoric, all these wild claims of "tyranny" as actually meaning what they seem to say?
Erick Erickson, right-wing blogger and CNN correspondent, disingenuously assures us that none of these people really want to promote violence, even as he proclaims that "Some of those Americans will now conclude that, like with the founders, if King George will not listen, King George must be fought."
Riiiight... "King George," elected in a democracy only a year and a half ago - on this specific promise of health care reform - must be "fought." Er, no doubt you mean just that Republicans will run for office in the next election and try to do better than last time, right? Of course, this is on top of non-stop "birther" lunacy and other attempts by the right wing to claim that President Obama is not legitimately our President, for one loony reason or another. (I can't decide which is crazier, that Obama is a "foreigner" because he was born in an exotic place like Hawaii or that ACORN stole the 2008 election! Yes, I've heard them both.)
The thing is, none of this is new to the health care issue. This has been building since we Americans had the gall to elect a Democrat to the White House. And not just a Democrat, but a black man! All of those fears that the far-right has been stoking for decades have seemingly come together - suspicion of foreigners, fear of racial minorities, hatred of "liberals." Well, Republicans have been pandering to racists ever since 1964, and more recently have welcomed religious fundamentalists and "culture warriors" as shock troops.
But where extremists used to be in the fringe, even in the GOP, now they control the party. After kicking out all the moderates, there are only right-wing fanatics left. And although they dominated in Congress for 12 years and controlled the White House for eight, they still have a victim mentality. Someone is always out to get them. Nothing is ever their fault. It's all some giant conspiracy by their enemies. (Frankly, it's a lot like the thinking of Islamic terrorists. And those kinds of people don't need any encouragement to become violent.)
As TPM puts it, this is "the undying shame":
Thankfully, no one has been injured or killed. But this didn't come from nowhere and it can't be pawned off on a few cranks. Everything that's happened over the last five days has grown from a pattern of incitement going back almost a year -- wildly hyperbolic statements, coded appeals to menacing behavior, flippant jokes about bringing firearms to political events and all the rest. Now Eric Cantor (R-VA) is going on the attack, claiming that who's really to blame here is the Democrats for making a big deal about these acts of violence against them.
No one who is even remotely honest can pretend that anything about this is bipartisan in character. The Right and yes the national Republican party has been stirring this pot for months. We all see this. Cantor's behavior is shameful beyond imagining. It's time for a truth moment for the national Republican party. Incitement matters. They have to take responsibility for what they've done: which is nothing less than a campaign of incitement for which they're now unwilling to take any responsibility.
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