January 15, 2011

Too true, too true

Here's an Esquire editorial remembering Oklahoma City, remarking on the Tucson shootings and what has happened on the political right since:

There was a lot of what was called "defensiveness" on the activist Right, but it was nothing of the sort. They were on offense, just the way they have been since they took that heat in 1995. They abide by the order Stalin gave to the Red Army when the Germans invaded in 1942: Ni shagu nazad.

Not a step back.

The activist Right wants this rhetoric for 2012. It wants the same dark energies that helped it win the House last fall. It wants to be able to say the same things with impunity that it's been saying since 2009, as though Tucson never happened. Oklahoma City might as well have happened to the Hittites.

Which is how nothing ever changed. Which is why Oklahoma City wasn't enough.

One-hundred and sixty-eight people.

One-hundred and sixty-eight lonely, empty chairs.

It wasn't enough.

The political culture is not what it was in 1996. It's worse. The wild-assed, Clinton-centric conspiracies — death lists! Vince Foster! Mena airport! — look positively quaint compared to the grand paranoid delusions spouted on television and on radio these days. And the casual mainstreaming of vicious mendacity isn't the property [of] talk radio alone; we have just seen installed a Congress full of thunderous loons. Against all odds — and, arguably, against all decency — what Bill Clinton so carefully criticized has degenerated into a time in which the governors of major states talk glibly about secession, and automatic weapons are casual accessories at political rallies.

Regrettably, I think the Esquire editors are correct. The right wing in this country has never before been so firmly entrenched in mainstream politics in my lifetime. There were always Congressmen who were prone to foolish statements, but they were mostly ignored. Not any more. When an entire party has concluded that science is wrong and the Bible is right, when one of that party's members asserted during his 2004 campaign that there were so many lesbians in schools in his state that only one girl could be allowed to go to the restroom at a time, when Senators from that party argue that the US military is endangered by gay soldiers, when that party argues that a respected source like the CBO is falsifying budget numbers when the numbers don't agree with the party's desires, then the mendacity levels have gotten out of hand.

Posted by Linkmeister at January 15, 2011 12:01 AM | TrackBack
Comments