The Hard Right

[monk222]

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

-- Frank Rich for The New York Times

Frank Rich shines his klieg lights on the intense and sometimes even violent vitriol regularly dished out by the right-wing these days, and how it is hardly unreasonable to see how this contributes to the political environment stoking the more murderous of their following, whether it's painting law-abiding abortionists as being murderers, or gleefully suggesting that Obama isn't even a real American and is actually a mortal threat to America. These are interesting times, much too interesting.

Comments

[neowiccan.livejournal.com]

yeah, i generally like rich and this was a really good one.
part of me is pleased that the fringe RW-ers are becoming more shrill and marginilized, but it's also chilling that in their death throes they're becoming more and more deranged and dangerous.
khairete
suz

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Heh, it is a bit reassuring to see the other side so clearly manifest their idiocy, but, no, it doesn't portend a sweet future.

Of the Sunday Times, the Koontz story was the real highlight. I recall that you like to read some Koontz, and that was a fun piece he had. :)