Fed Up

Me and most of the country. Just a few shorts from the recent news to highlight what a mess we're dealing with.

First, some background: before they were teabaggers, they were already crazy. This piece by Adam Gopnick lays out the latest stage in the longevity of the loony right:

As it happens, I’ve been doing some reading about John Kennedy, and what I find startling, and even surprising, is how absolutely consistent and unchanged the ideology of the extreme American right has been over the past fifty years, from father to son and now, presumably, on to son from father again. The real analogue to today’s unhinged right wing in America is yesterday’s unhinged right wing in America. This really is your grandfather’s right, if not, to be sure, your grandfather’s Republican Party. Half a century ago, the type was much more evenly distributed between the die-hard, neo-Confederate wing of the Democratic Party and the Goldwater wing of the Republicans, an equitable division of loonies that would begin to end after J.F.K.’s death. (A year later, the Civil Rights Act passed, Goldwater ran, Reagan emerged, and we began the permanent sorting out of our factions into what would be called, anywhere but here, a party of the center right and a party of the extreme right.)

Reading through the literature on the hysterias of 1963, the continuity of beliefs is plain: Now, as then, there is said to be a conspiracy in the highest places to end American Constitutional rule and replace it with a Marxist dictatorship, evidenced by a plan in which your family doctor will be replaced by a federal bureaucrat—mostly for unnamable purposes, but somehow involving the gleeful killing off of the aged. There is also the conviction, in both eras, that only a handful of Congressmen and polemicists (then mostly in newspapers; now on TV) stand between honest Americans and the apocalypse, and that the man presiding over that plan is not just a dupe but personally depraved, an active collaborator with our enemies, a secret something or other, and any necessary means to bring about the end of his reign are justified and appropriate. And fifty years ago, as today, groups with these beliefs, far from being banished to the fringe of political life, were closely entangled and intertwined with Senators and Congressmen and right-wing multi-millionaires.

Via Anne Laurie, Balloon Juice.

From Birchers to this isn't such a big step:

I guess Larry Klayman couldn't wait until November 16, his own self-imposed deadline date for the President to "voluntarily" leave the White House, because he showed up at today's wingnut soireé, demanding that President Obama "put the Koran down" and "come out with his hands up."

This isn't new for Klayman, whose reputation stretches all the way back to the Clinton years. But in recent months, he's been ramping up the rhetoric and stoking up those people who want a reason to believe that President Obama does not hold his office legitimately.

In July, he called for the military to overthrow him.

In September, he vowed to force the "evil tyrant Obama" from office by November 16th. Then he slid the date to November 19th.

Just last week, he sadly announced that he believed violent revolution was imminent.

This is the Larry Klayman whom Ed Brayton calls "the stupidest lawyer in America whose name isn't Orly Taitz or Mat Staver." He's not only stupid, he's crazy.

And another priceless bit, this time from the teabaggers' darling of the week (hey, he may even last the whole month), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Canada):

On Sunday, Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz converged on Washington, D.C., to co-headline a protest against the federal government's closure of the World War II Memorial. It is perhaps not surprising that one of the more cynical and patently ridiculous statements made by a politician during the shutdown emerged out of that occasion. (It IS mildly surprising that Sarah Palin didnt say it.) Cruz, the junior senator from Texas asked the crowd "a simple question" that in fact included a very complex layer of sophisty. "Why is the federal government spending money to erect barricades to keep veterans out of this memorial?”

Noreen Malone unpacks this one at New Republic.

And speak of the devil (and his henchman):

Makes me want to puke. If there were the slightest indication that either of them were honest, I might feel differently, but Cruz, at least, is like a secular Tony Perkins -- cynical con man.

That protest, by the way, was a real triumph -- complete with Confederate flags and racist epithets. (Oh, and in case you think the racism charge is too easy, Paul Krugman has an insight on that. Warning: he's not trying to be polite.)

And it occurs to me that this echoes something I've seen in the professional gay bashers lately, in an even more obvious form: when you're losing the fight (and the GOP does not like the recent poll numbers), focus on picking nits. Vets at the WWII memorial? The freakin' Statue of Liberty is closed because you assholes shut down the government. WIC programs across the country are running out of money, the NIH has had to stop taking new patients for clinical trials on cancer drugs, and you're worried about a cheap barricade in Washington?

The bottom line is they put their foot it in, the country really hates them right now, but Oh! Looky there at the bright sparkly things!

Does anyone wonder why I'm really into escapism these days?