There's a line in one of my favorite movies, Billy Wilder's "Stalag 17" which might explain the howls of protest from the right.
Let me set the scene: WW II. There is a stool pigeon in one of the barracks at Stalag 17 telling the Germans secret info that newly arriving prisoners tell the others. All fingers point to Sgt. Sefton, (William Holden) the camp's black marketeer. At one point, the rest of the POW's gang up and mistakenly beat the hell out of Sefton, who is innocent. Afterward he nurses his wounds with his only friend and confidant, Cookie. Holden vows to find the stoolie. Cookie asks if he knows who it is. "Yeah" replies Sefton "He's the guy who hit the hardest."
Regarding the state of the country, there are a lot of right-wingers who are hitting back hard, perhaps too hard. Boehner, Cantor and McHenry crow into every open mic that they will obstruct everything, least Obama be allowed to enact some of the policies he ran and won on. (Talk about a rubber stamp!) Cornyn, Vitter, DeMint, McCain and the rest of the clowns in the senate can't seem to stop scolding the President for practices that were commonplace during the Bush years. The financial institutions, CNBC and Jim Cramer seem a tad too touchy over a piece that Jon Stewart did on "The Daily Show." Karl Rove and Andy Card can't shut up about anything. And of course there's Rush.
For a nation in such dire straits, the people who held power for the last eight years seem very touchy in regards to criticism. If we had a dollar for every time a Republican has said "I'd rather not dwell on the past. Let's look forward", the national debt would be history. The more we question, the louder they protest. Sgt. Sefton was right. The guilty are the ones who hit the hardest.
Stu Kreisman is the author of Dick Cheney's Diary available here, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.