The Bile Boils Over

Enter the Tea Baggers, the Birthers, the Deathers, Glenn Beck, town hall shouters, guys with guns, and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC). The right's simmering kettle of bile is boiling over.

You almost can't blame them for losing it. Conservatives spent three decades building, Bolero-like, towards their denouement: control of both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House. And a permanent Republican majority.

Their efforts climaxed with the presidency of George W. Bush. They lost it all to Barack Obama.

Bush's presidency climaxed on a pile of rubble in New York just after 9/11.

A flood of post-September 11 articles asked how the attacks happened, what we would do next, and why terrorists hate us. One savvy pundit asked, Would America keep its head?

We invaded Iraq on trumped-up intelligence. We conducted illegal surveillance on our own citizens. We imprisoned people without charge, here and abroad. We rendered prisoners for torture and tortured others ourselves in violation of international law. All the while, millions of staunch, law-and-order conservatives supported and defended it, and still do. Vigorously.

Did America keep its head? Uh, no.

But with the election of its first bi-racial president, the electorate threw the movement conservative and neocon bums out. Had America's temporary insanity finally abated? Uh, no. It's worse.

Osama was one thing. But Obama?

People weren't this crazed over Jackie Robinson, were they? Father Coughlin was off the air by then. People's minds were not as marinated in the mind poison the right-wing has pumped out daily for the last twenty years.

Case in point. I once worked in an office where a guy recorded Rush Limbaugh every afternoon. Using a small FM transmitter, he rebroadcast the show the next morning to fellow dittoheads in the building so they would be primed for Limbaugh's live broadcast at noon.

No lie.

In Appalachia, dentists call it "Mountain Dew mouth." Children carry around the acidic, heavily caffeinated soda, taking a sip every few minutes. It's "like bathing the teeth in it all day," according to one dentist. Children go from decayed to toothless.

Is the mind rot from listening to Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity or Savage every day any different? Or from passing on the sludge from Drudge or WorldNetDaily? Or from reading those chain e-mails forwarded by relatives and friends who spread them like Typhoid Mary? Inhaling mercury vapors might be less harmful.

Conservatives bathed in daily lies -- from WMDs to "death panels" -- have become so comfortable spreading them that they treat it like good, clean fun for the whole family. They spread them dutifully, no matter how extreme or outlandish (assuming they know the difference any longer).

The day of Obama's speech, Crooks and Liars' Dave Neiwert again insisted that "ideas, agendas, talking points, and memes in general regularly [migrate] from the extremist right in America into mainstream conservatism." This week we saw just how far up the infection goes.

Hours before South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson yelled "You lie!" at the president, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appeared on NPR's Morning Edition and rebuffed an invitation to condemn the "death panel" rhetoric. The GOP leadership won't quit the useful idiots who do their dirty work for them.

By Obama's address that evening, "the town hall freak show" had come to a joint session of Congress.

Responding to Birthers, Deathers, and a flood of right-wing paranoia from the likes of Glenn Beck, Open Left's Paul Rosenberg discusses the mental elasticity of linear thinkers like Beck. They build elaborate conspiracies like Frankenstein's monster, linking together random bits of their own chaotic fears. "They are put together, but can't be logically deconstructed," he writes, nor argued with "any more than you can reason with a nightmare."

Responding to his flood of hate mail filled with "spitting, incoherent rage," Paul Krugman commented, "Something is going very wrong in the head of a substantial number of Americans."

The poison has spread to the GOP's very soul.

Comments

[Susan L. Travis - Huffpost Blogger]

Great article, Tom - individual conservatives don't seem to realize that they are the tools, the instruments of destruction under the spell of corporatocracy - we gave corporations personhood, let them pillage our people for profit, and now they have the an army of zombies willing to spout whatever spew creates the ENERGY of negativity, fear, and status quo. The words don't have to make sense, they just have to have vitriolic energy - the "Typhoid Mary" energy necessary to maintain power.

We MUST pull critical thinking back into our schools, because the dumbing down of America in order to ensure to sustain things that don't make sense is NOT WORKING. Well, it's WORKING - to ensure that the mooing masses sustain things that don't make sense - religiously, economically, socially, educationally, and on goes the list. As critical thinking diminishes in our schools, media, and politics, it diminishes in our collective response to ailments of our society. To my mind, it's step one in the solution.

[PlaceboStudman]

The truth is, the bile hasn't even begun to boil over. And I suspect it won't boil over until and unless insurance reform passes, and people begin to realize that insurance reform is not the magic pill that people believe it is. When real American men, women, and children, continue to die, not from lack of care due to lack of insurance, but because of the poor to dangerous quality of care we receive. There will have to be MILLIONS of disabled, critically ill and chronically ill people die, some by their own hand, before the bile really begins to boil over

[humbug]

Why aren't the members of the media, particularly those who favor the more progressive lawmakers, more open and direct in their recognition that the birthers, nativists, name callers, far rightists and assorted nuts are in the midst of Civil War II? Most are unreconstructed Southerners or Southern sympathizers who are, under the guise of health law experts and individualists simply old time racists. The accusations that President Obama is a fascist, a racist, a Socialist, a Communist, a foreigner,etc. are gross projections for most of these people. Most are not aware they are the racists and those that still have an unresolved Civil War they are unconsciously re-enacting. The media should spell out the demographics of those in mutiny against democracy: White, Southern, Republican, nativists, gun advocates, religious literalists, etc. They claim to be pro-constitution but would override it to control others sex lives, family values, civil liberties and rights to privacy. Some good research would, I bet, show the authoritarian nature of these rightists in bold and smelly relief.

[Tom Sullivan - Huffpost Blogger]

You're right that many don't even see racist underpinnings for their ideas. They've been trained for so long to speak in dog whistles about “welfare mothers,” “voter fraud” and “personal responsibility” that they don't even recognize them as “politically correct” ways of speaking about race without speaking about race. They actually believe it's about the sanctity of the vote or defending the Protestant work ethic. They sublimated it that deeply ... until a black president came along.

Alan (The Closing of the American Mind) Bloom would have a field day with that. It's been awhile, but as I recall he was pretty hard on the fact that so many Americans were convinced that their own ideas were their own ideas. They had no clue that so much of what they thought of as American ideas came from Nietzsche and other, you know, Europeans. No sense of history or the progress of ideas.

The Tea Partiers are no different. They actually think they're upset about the size of government, not about the fact that health care reform will help people who are not of their tribe – My family, My friends, My neighborhood, My church, My ethnic group – or people who don't share My opinions.

What many of these good people really want is a Christian nation that denies healing to the poor and sick.

[Querent]

The GOP doesn't have a soul. It is undead.

[whyisthis41]

The South will NEVER FORGET. There is more and far more coming fo rall of us. President Obama is their worst nightmare. Racism in all of it's hateful forms is thriving in the xtian south!

[seawolf77]

I agree with you. The more I see of this the more I realize the South has still not gotten over the North telling them how to live thier lives. A black president somehow crystallizes this. I really think Obama has been told a black president is as far as you go son. I mean this is no Doug Williams moment people. This is not Tiger Woods. There are a tremendous number of white people in this country who will always want a black leader to fail, and the vast majority of them live in the Southeast, in a place and time you and I will never understand. .

[been2there]

Actually, the North didn't tell the South how to live, they told the South that Black citizens had to be treated like citizens. That is not quite the same thing as people trying to force their religious beliefs, unscientific idiocies, and the like on others.

[rbenjamin]

What you describe is mass hysteria, carefully nurtured by professionals who know how to whip it up much better than they know how to actually control it. The Constitution of the United States is mass hysteria friendly, and not so much from First Amendment protection of speech as from the fact that our representative form of government is decidedly not "one man, one vote." Senators from small population states have powerful incentives to basically extort favors from the majority by holding legislation hostage whenever possible. Interest groups know where to invest their money, and members of the House of Reps know how to play along. It's no accident that South Carolina has just made the news again. The engineered frenzy respects no boundaries and spreads as collateral damage to all 50 states. New media have little to do with this, newspapers and posters spread big lies and misinformation just fine.

[Paul Baack]

I'm beginning to wonder if these crazed right-wingers are being caught up by, and swept along with, their own apocalyptic rhetoric -- to the point of a semi-berserker rage to see EVERYTHING come crashing down. I'm beginning to wonder if what they actually want is a real, shooting, civil war. The Culture War, as it were, fought with live ammunition. The inflammatory rhetoric of their leaders, both elected and media-based, is becoming more and more violent in its metaphors, while playing almost exclusively to fear and prejudice.

"Patriotism" is being defined by how much one hates one's government. And by how much ordnance one has stockpiled.

[Tom Sullivan - Huffpost Blogger]

" 'Patriotism' is being defined by how much one hates one's government. And by how much ordnance one has stockpiled­."

Good line. A neighbor was just saying he felt vulnerable not having a stockpile in this crazy environment.

[blood1]

It has been sad to watch the GOP devolve to such a degree that they are being represented by a screaming group of un-informed individuals, which legislators, PAC and lobbying groups have decided to support. We all know that there are rational adults out there who are believers in the basic GOP standards of smaller government, but I wonder if that group really wants to eliminate the national government and have governance performed only on a state by state basis.

As we watch this spectacle, I wonder if the elected legislators actually believe all that this ragtag group of very vocal supporters say. The most recent example is Joe Wilson, an elected member of Congress, who says that he does not believe what was written in HR3200 regarding health care benefits for illegal immigrants. He is supposed to be an educated individual, but if Representatives and Senators say they don't believe what is written in a bill such as HR3200, then trying to enter into a rational discussion is useless.

It is sad, but the country can survive without them...so we need to ignore these antics and remind the remaining members of congress that they were sent there to represent us, not some fringe group and if we want HCR, then they need to give us exactly that. If sanity ever becomes the GOP majority again, they will thank the DEMS for this action.

[S1m0n]

The 'basic GOP standards of smaller government' is a principle which (to quote Hamlet) "is a custom more honor'd in the breach than the observance­."

Republicans talk a good line about favoring small government, but they're worse than the democratic party at delivering it. If you judge by their actions rather than their rhetoric, there is no evidence that the GOP has the slightest interest in smaller government.