Ronnie went out of his gourd when he found he had to wear adult
diapers.

Anyway ...

CRAZY! Anti-Reform Boobs And Other RIGHT-WING NUTS Have A Long,
Hate-Filled History In The U.S!



"They want to get a little clip on YouTube of an effort to disrupt a
town meeting and to send the congressman running for his car. This is
an organized effort . . . you can trace it back to the health
insurance industry."

-- Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin


-----------------------------------
"In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition"

"Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage"

By Rick Perlstein
Sunday, August 16, 2009


IN PENNSYLVANIA LAST WEEK, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling
with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: "One day God's
going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of
your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just
deserts." He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President
Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health
insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who
wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed
that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man
would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox
News.

In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras
trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William
Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."

It was interesting to hear a BBC reporter on the radio trying to make
sense of it all. He quoted a spokesman for the conservative Americans
for Tax Reform: "Either this is a genuine grass-roots response, or
there's some secret evil conspirator living in a mountain somewhere
orchestrating all this that I've never met." The spokesman was
arguing, of course, that it was spontaneous, yet he also proudly owned
up to how his group has helped the orchestration, through sample
letters to the editor and "a little bit of an ability to put one-
pagers together."

The BBC also quoted liberal Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's explanation:
"They want to get a little clip on YouTube of an effort to disrupt a
town meeting and to send the congressman running for his car. This is
an organized effort . . . you can trace it back to the health
insurance industry."

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers --
these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators
staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing
the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a
president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of
the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be
spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of
genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand
America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal
ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow
interests.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of
Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and
accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately
surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants
published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly
rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status
for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand
of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the
new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a
blueprint for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor
America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles --
instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern
Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young
president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of
delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in
Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker
turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked
as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he
wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm
for hanging him!"

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers
claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the
entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the
Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced,
one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And
back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for
subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own
powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the
commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to
internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the
persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an
argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental
health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new
facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing
radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had
millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political
dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.

So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across
decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United
Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the
hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the
television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine,
a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign.
Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can
I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if
you don't know I can't help you."

The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational
dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-
evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension
-- sound as fresh as yesterday's news. (Internment camps for
conservatives? That's the latest theory of tea party favorite Michael
Savage.)

The orchestration of incivility happens, too, and it is evil. Liberal
power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a
considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular
susceptibility to existential terror -- powerful elites -- find reason
to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-
minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism:
something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing
different values down their throats.

That provides an opening for vultures such as Richard Nixon, who, the
Watergate investigation discovered, had his aides make sure that seed
blossomed for his own purposes. "To the Editor . . . Who in the hell
elected these people to stand up and read off their insults to the
President of the United States?" read one proposed "grass-roots"
letter manufactured by the White House. "When will you people realize
that he was elected President and he is entitled to the respect of
that office no matter what you people think of him?" went another.

Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and
particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that
outrage's entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented
by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. Conservatives
have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the
heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that
maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as
tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's
creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political
claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson
would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the
paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite
taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed
mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-
wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made
those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't
adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set
of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal
claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the
civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of
bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only
now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and
taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild
provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want
living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard
-- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of
"complaints over the provision."

Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never
have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the
provisions in it that would enslave whites.

]

[Rick Perlstein is the author of "Nixonland: The Rise of a President
and the Fracturing of America" and "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater
and the Unmaking of the American Consensus."]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...081401495.html

On Aug 16, 6:10*pm, Suppurating Tool wrote:

when ever i see some middle class nut case screaming to protect the
gouging of the insurance companies, i see someone moooing they are
like deer in the head ligtes, later on when all of the fighting is
over, and they won. then they will scream and bitch as they lose their
health care.

The 6 lost months of DUMBASS'S mama.
www.worldnetdaily.com

Where's DUMBASS'S Birth Certificate? Vegas, baby! (new Billboard)
www.worldnetdaily.com
cuhulin