“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?…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 WP, historian Rick Perlstein puts the latest incarnation of the stark raving right-wing in historical perspective. The difference this time? The media is completely failing at its job. “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.”
Bzzzzt! The Civil Rights Act only passed because of the Republican Party and despite the Democrats. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his father were life-long Republicans. President George W. Bush appointed the first black Secretary of State and the first black female, as well. I can go on…
I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at. Abe Lincoln was Republican too, and back then the Radical Republicans of Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner were considered far-left-wing. Parties change, the left and right remain.
The word Republican doesn’t even appear in my post. I’m talking about the craziest members of the right-wing. Sure, during the Civil Rights era, they were often (although by no means exclusively) Dems, and right now, they pretty obviously tend to be Republicans. But what party ostensibly represents the stark raving right at a given historical moment is really beside the point.
The point is the media nowadays is giving obvious kooks — and their current GOP enablers — a platform because today’s establishment journalists are lazy, self-centered, and meek: They believe they’ve fulfilled their civic responsibility if they characterize opposing sides as identically valid. Real journalism would hold up these respective arguments to objective fact.
In other words, as Paul Begala once well put it: “If John McCain and Sarah Palin were to say the moon was made of green cheese, we can be certain that Barack Obama and Joe Biden would pounce on it, and point out it’s actually made of rock. And you just know the headline in the paper the next day would read: ‘CANDIDATES CLASH ON LUNAR LANDSCAPE.‘”
So trying to play “who’s the real racist” gotcha games with U.S. history is missing the point entirely.