I realize that as a left-of-center type of person I'm inclined to exaggerate the stupidity of conservatives in some ways. However, watching/listening to Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Hannity, and others just makes people go fuc#ing bananas. I mean they aren't just complaining about what Obama's doing, which is their profound right and responsibility. They are literally selling people on the idea that our country is turning into either a Nazi state or a Commie one. Some of them (and their followers) are so dumb that they don't know the vast difference between a free democratic capitalist country with some government intervention and Nazi Germany or Communist Russia.
I know that not all conservatives think this way, but the ones who represent the greatest danger to democracy do: the ones who don't think critically, or for themselves, and are constantly misinformed by idiots. And what's scary is just how influential and popular these idiots are. I mean Beck has one of the most popular shows on television. Faux News has almost quit trying to appear nonpartisan (or sane).
I also know that other liberals have commented on this trend lately and pointed to examples like this that go way back in time. So perhaps it's just that I wasn't informed/interested enough during the Clinton years to appreciate it, because this seems new. And one has to wonder, with the recent shootings by all these bigoted gun nut conservatives, if the combination of Antichrist rhetoric and Glenn Beck's rodeo clown antics aren't pushing more over the edge than before.
Last night at B&N I saw a lady ask where DeMint's new screed about the Nazi USA could be found.
Today I read things like the founder of Freeperland calling for a revolution that begins by removing every elected official in government. I have to agree with this guy's analysis:
There will always be a certain portion of both the right and left who are basically nuts. The hysterically exaggerated dangers of a Bush putsch were written about endlessly by the left for 8 years. Now it’s time for righty crazies to crawl out from under the rocks and dark places where they’ve been hiding to make conservatism look like an ideal home for kooks, paranoids, and other unbalanced denizens who inhabit a creepy reality of their own making that bears little resemblance to the real world.Basically: is it just me, or are some conservatives just going fuc*ing nuts?
Conservatives will laugh this kind of thing off as an aberration. But I am telling my fellow righties that we ignore this crap to the detriment of the rest of us who oppose the administration’s actions. With pop-cons like Hannity, Beck, Coulter, and other conservative celebrities mouthing some of this nonsense (while implying even worse) on a daily basis, more and more of the base are turning into unhinged, screaming maniacs who believe America is being “destroyed” by Obama and the liberals.
This screed is symptomatic of the sickness of thought and reason that afflicts many conservatives today - more than we are prepared to acknowledge and far more than one would normally expect from a philosophy that supposedly prides itself on prudence, rationality, and probity.
You can dismiss Robinson and his unhinged followers. But they aren’t going away and their influence can only grow if we ignore them.
