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| Democrats get hip to the paranoid style of politics |
| 2010-04-01 |
| To read the news, you might assume that there is a militiaman under every rock and that every tea party is a front for the Aryan Nation. Will Sarah Palin's "targeting" of House Democrats incite assassins? Is "kill the bill" really a call to violence? Are there links between the Republican Party and nine nuts shooting guns outside a southern Michigan doublewide? It is usually those out of power who are drawn to paranoid conspiracies, but Democrats sound like a pack of John Birchers talking about a shadowy conspiracy that is plotting against them. Certainly the Right has seen its share of black helicopters since the dawning of the age of Obama. There are still the fringey few who hope that Barack Obama isn't really the president because he isn't really a citizen. More common is the wild-eyed notion that Obama is trying to fail on purpose in order to precipitate a crisis that will give him even greater power. But as they said about the Black Sox scandal, you have to be pretty good to play that bad. This administration is making it up as it goes along. Suggesting that presidential advisers Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod have the skills to fail on purpose gives them far too much credit. The mistakes of the Obama administration stem from good intentions, inexperience, and excessive self-confidence. The president desperately wants to succeed and believes he is doing so. But it's not surprising that some conservatives would be driven to distraction. Going from a Republican majority and a conservative ascendancy to a Democratic supermajority and the revival of an agenda more liberal than any in modern times has left a lot of heads spinning. What's unusual is for the party in power to so deeply embrace conspiratorial thinking. Democrats control both houses of Congress and the presidency, which brings in all of the spooky stuff -- the military, the FBI, the CIA. But you wouldn't know it from listening to the leaders of the party. Democrats in Congress have tried to link their passage of the president's health care plan with the protection of black equal rights in 1964. By extension, those who resist what they've done are no better than segregationists. And when Democrats claimed that ugly racial epithets were hurled at members walking into the Capitol or that one member was spit on, establishment media outlets gobbled up the story. The video from that walk has been pored over like the Zapruder film. There is some spittle flying from the lips of a shouting protester, but no spitting in disdain. And no one has found any evidence to corroborate the claim that the n-word was flying. But it appeals to Democrats to think that while what they've done is unpopular, it is morally right. Half of the country may be telling them to stop, but it's only because their minds have been poisoned by racism and intolerance. White House health care spokeswoman Linda Douglass has been on a crusade against "disinformation" and "so-called analysis" for months. It's part of the unified media theory at the White House: Nutters say bad things about the president and his policies on the Internet and then Fox News takes on the case. Soon, establishment media outlets are reporting the story. It's seen as a perpetual motion conspiracy that keeps more Americans from understanding what's good for them. Obama talks about the "loose amalgam of forces" arrayed against him and says that the "core group" of the tea party movement isn't "sure whether [he] was born in the United States, whether [he] was a socialist." Rather breezy of the president to equate thinking him a socialist with thinking that he is an impostor. You don't have to be someone who stays up late looking through Kenyan birth announcements to think what's going on here looks an awful lot like socialism. Obama is trying to delegitimize dissent by lashing his all his critics in the same boat. It's a strategy that deepens the political chasm in America, but one that hints at significant peril for the president's ambitions. It's paranoia when people without power imagine that an elite group is conspiring against them. But when the ruling classes think that the masses are out to get them, that means there's revolution in the air. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 Not getting hip--it is just part of a inherent mental disorder. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2010-04-01 10:34 |
| #1 Maybe they could get some pointers from their buddy Yugo Chavez on how to deal with problem people. |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2010-04-01 08:43 |