I don't blame Christine O'Donnell, Carl Paladino, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Rand Paul, Ken Buck and others in the Far (F)right. I blame the voters -- at least Republican primary voters. As Mel Brooks said in the guise of Louis IV in The History of the World, "the people are revolting!"
While these Tea Party candidates basically ran and won as Howard Beale yelling "We're Mad as Hell," the Republican base has an even more telling slogan, "We're Stupid as Hell."
How else to explain that over half of Republicans say in polls that they believe that Barack Obama, having obtained 53 percent of the popular presidential vote and 364 electoral votes in a fair contest, was either born abroad, a Muslim, a communist or wants to impose Sharia law in this country? Or all four?
If half of a major party believe "nutty" things, why should we be surprised when candidates seeking nominations argue that rape victims cannot have abortions, Social Security and Unemployment Insurance are unconstitutional and we should abolish the EPA and Departments of Education and Energy -- and that's not including Ms. O'Donnell's odd career and comments. Then there's Newt Gingrich's weekly hate speech, so repeated and bizarre as to constitute Obama Tourette's Syndrome.
We've seen versions of such outbreaks before in our history -- the Salem Witch Trials, the Know-Nothing Party, America-Firsters, and Birchers and McCarthyites in the '50s implying that Eisenhower was disloyal. More recently, GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in 1964 famously declared,with Tea Party-like prescience, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" - and got creamed that November.
Like locusts awakening after a half century slumber, they're back! Not as a laughable Bircher fringe talking about flouride in our water as a communist plot but radicals who appear to be taking over a major party.
How is this possible in a modern educated democracy? First, people are rightly economically frightened. Second, when 40 percent of all Republicans regularly get their information from Fox News alone (and millions more from Rush Limbaugh) -- with both regularly spreading entertaining lies about "death panels" and Muslims=Terrorists -- some anxious, credulous citizens can end up believing that America is a tyranny run by "the best anti-American president ever" (Limbaugh).
Of course this is crazy. But remember the title and lesson of Drew Westen's popular book of three years ago, The Politics of the Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. Could rhetorical abstractions against Big Government and for We-the-People connect to the "lizard brains" of swing voters, in Westen's and Arianna Huffington's phrase, and vote against their interests? Tom Frank thought so in What's the Matter with Kansas?
With six weeks to go before the mid-term elections and 110 before the next presidential one, those who don't think we should go back to the '50s -- the 1850s or 1950s -- can get off the couch to do six things:
*Moderates and liberals need to stop kvetching and vote (and march on October 2 at the One Nation DC rally organized by The Campaign for America's Future, http://bit.ly/9iS4Eo). An average of only 50,000 GOP voters nominated O'Donnell, Angle and Miller -- and Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have national favorable ratings of only 20 percent. The Tea Party gets headlines but the, well, silent majority have the votes. If "Speaker" Boehner and "Chairman" Joe (I-Love-BP) Barton don't close the "enthusiasm" gap, Democrats don't deserve to hold either chamber -- and won't.
*Progressive bloggers and intellectuals who spend 90 percent of their time attacking why Obama hasn't single-handedly changed Washington -- "but there's no Public Option!" -- should consider spending more energy exposing the Extreme Team that believes in the Constitution but not the Bill of Rights (2nd and 10th amendments excepted). Making the perfect the enemy of the good is an unaffordable luxury this year and fulfills Bill Clinton's jibe that Democrats have to fall in love while Republicans fall in line.
*Journalistic poohbahs like a Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post and David Brooks of the New York Times should stop pretending that for every wacko on the Right there's one on the Left. Truth is not a mid-point between race-baiters and rationalists, between Fox and MSNBC, between Sharron Angle and Barney Frank.
*Where are today's GOP leaders with the courage to stand up for religious freedom in Manhattan and against Gingrich's bird-whistle racism, like the way that William F. Buckley Jr. ran the Birchers out of his party? If you don't like Obama's policies, can't some leading Republican say, ok, let's electorally organize to defeat him, not personally slander him. For good measure, this heroic Republican could add that denying a federal role in health care or elderly poverty or clean air is anti-history. Reagan didn't reverse the New Deal; Thatcher didn't end national health.
*President Obama should stay on offense. After being a presidential piñata, he finally found his voice after Labor Day by warning against going back to a Bush era that gave us a record recession, historic deficits, a murderous war of choice, and a man-made disaster following Katrina. Polls show a nearly 2-1 Democratic advantage (Greenberg) when the White House presents the tax debate as cuts for the middle class versus tax cuts of $100,000+ apiece for those earning over a million dollars annually, not to mention Senator Mitch McConnell's floor statement last week that we should help those "most hurt by this recession," the top 2 percent!
*Humor, finally, may be the best way to respond to awake voters from their momentary mass hysteria. The Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert events on October 30 in Washington - "Rally to Restore Sanity" and "Rally to Keep Fear Alive" -- may have just the edge necessary to explain, especially to younger voters, how ironic it would be to punish Democrats for an economy that nearly collapsed under Republican policies and Wall Street speculation. While Obama throws punches, Comedy Central can throw out punch-lines.
Half of the GOP and a fifth of America may cheer on a "mad" Tea Party that embraces a Blame-Government-First philosophy, but whether it's a fad or the future is up to us, first this November and then in two years. The winners in a Democracy are not measured by polls but those who go to the polls.
This piece originally appeared in The New York Observer
Follow Mark Green on Twitter: www.twitter.com/markjgreen
Lisa Solod Warren: What the Rally for Sanity and Obama Have in Common and It's Not Politics
The majority of Americans played by the rules but have yet to receive any assistance from this Administration. Government solutions have assisted those who fell victim to predatory lending and bail outs for institutions and institutional investors. The average American is under assault. Crushed by ill planned economic policies, gouged by the banking industry, indentured to insurance providers, taxed at every turn, and threatened by a development industry that continues to bring more housing online exacerbating our unbearable decline in personal worth and our access to the very necessities of life. Who stands with us?
From Wikipedia, "Drinking the Kool-Aid" means becoming a firm believer in something: accepting an argument or philosophy wholeheartedly or blindly.”
Fearful and devastated, we sit at the “critical care” bedside of the American dream, but are we willing to do the hard work demanded by a functioning democracy by casting and informed vote for the candidate who advances the goals I have for my family, my state, and my nation?
Don't drink the Kool Aid. Vote informed!
I'm not complaining that Obama hasn't single-handedly changed Washington. I *am* complaining that the hasn't made basic human rights important; that he has green-lighted assassinations of American citizens; that he has blatantly made clear that he does not consider the rights of immigrants and of women needing abortions important enough to fight for, or even pay lip service to.
Stop blaming progressives for Obama's drop in popularity. He could have made most of the same decisions and kept us happy if he'd made it clear to us that our priorities would be dealt with and are not trivial to him.
The fear and uncertainty generated by these events, left people yearning for a candidate that would "take our country back". The upshot is that we elected Republican, Richard M. Nixon. The Watergate break-in and Nixon's resignation put a dark stain on our history and politics for years.
Apparently it's true that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
"Truth is not a mid-point..."
This is the one thing that makes me crazy about many pundits of late. On one side, you have people going batsh!t crazy in their attempt to get Republicans back into power. They will do anything, including lie and compromise national security, to stop Obama or the Democrats in Congress from achieving ANYTHING. The neo-wingnuts hoping to join them are riding to power by promising to take apart the Constitution, throw the elderly and sick out in the streets, force children to give birth to children, and shove gays back in the closet.
On the other side, you have people trying their darnedest to fix this country, to repair the shambles the GOP made of it.
Truth is not a mid-point.
Thus risking handing power right back to the nuts on the far-right...and those who would manipulate them as a means to personal power....
We spent an entire day literally running back and forth between appointments with Senators and Representatives. I learned a few valuable things that most people simply don't "get".
1.No one in Congress, or the House has unlimited smarts on all topics.
2. They can be informed...but they are under a constant barrage by groups---and every thinks "their" issue should be "THE" issue.
3. The Pie is only so big, boys and girls. No matter how you slice it, it doesn't get larger.
4. They actually don't "hate" each other. More like "frenemies" unless they are on the floor arguing something.
5. When someone is elected, they have to deal with laws already in place, as well as anything new that comes down the pike. NOBODY gets to flip a switch and suddenly everything changes.
If the Tea Partier prevail, they will not have the power to enact broad change, and I am betting the two parties will close ranks against them. Not because they don't like them, but because no one wants the country to come to a grinding halt. Think it's not all connected? Then I suggest you remember what happened Nationally after Katrina. The Port of New Orleans closed...and supermarket shelves in the Northeast were bare.
We're in this together folks.
Exposing hypocrisy help. Ask tea partiers about the rights their gay relatives should have:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-olmsted/does-god-love-you-more-te_b_710582.html
The only thing that the Obama Administration is guilty of is being unwilling to BREAK the democratic process in order to give Liberals their way....like the GOP was (and is) willing to break it in order to give conservatives and corporations their way.
home.rr.com/oldladysquawking
And go one click back on the viewer at the first cartoon, "The Power of Prey-ers". All of them are virus free but I can't guarantee that all of the subjects I use are.
If only we could get rid of the Constitution.
We need only to look to history and show everyone how great it......works?
Better yet show them how all of the people under socialist rule were so...... happy?
Bring people in from Russia and have them lecture Americans on how to.... succeed?
LMAO
Strong Federal Government is what you take away from the founders?
No one believes that garbage.
The argument that not voting is an abrogation of civic responsibility rings hollow when the choice is between two crooks. The current system offers no meaningful difference between candidates, and no consistent party principles. One hears Democrats and Republicans saying what their parties stand for, but in truth they stand for nothing excepting their own perpetuation. Thus it comes down to whether or not one agrees with and trusts the candidates on an individual basis, or being lucky enough to live in a district where the election is being contested by a meaningful third party such as the Greens. In any event, only a fool would vote for someone on the basis of their being a Democrat or Republican.