I'm not talking about the GOP party platform. Heck, I agree with many of their 'original' planks: balanced budget, responsibility for actions, avoid 'nation building', party of Lincoln. Let's set aside for a minute the fact that the Party of Bush looks nothing like the Party of Lincoln, or even Reagan.
No, the problem starts with the mechanism that has been constructed to bring them to power, and keep them in power. It starts with misinformation and misleading labels - 'activist judges', 'San Franciso Liberal', 'family values'. If it had stopped there, you could merely call it dirty, but unfortunately typical, politics.
However, it leapt beyond the normal dirt when they started to spew first fear ('they hate us for our freedom') and then lies ('Obama is a Marxist/Socialist Muslim who wasn't even born in this country'). Now, through a mix of the two ('Obama will be the end of this country/he is the Anti-Christ/they're coming to get you, Barbara'), they've created a not-insignificant segment of the country that is turning violent and, quite possibly, seditious.
And who are the 'they' that is spurring the hate? It is the cynical 'entertainers' who probably don't even believe their crap: Beck, Rush, Coulter, Savage, Hannity, Malkin, et al. Like the Beatles in their latter years, they are amazed at the crap that their followers will swallow - and they keep upping the ante.
So, who is evil: the cynics who spread lies they know to be untrue for their own personal gain; the many who follow because they're too lazy or dim to do any investigation themselves; or those that know, but continue to remain silent while supporting their positions? After WWII, did we separate out the Nazi leaders and the brainwashed who followed them from those who were simply too meek to oppose? No, history merely remembers the evil. An extreme example? Not if today is 1932.
This is way beyond party politics, when national leaders have to worry about their safety, when militia groups plot to kill police officers, when mobs spit and hurl epithets at congressmen. Will it take some extreme act of violence - one of the minion simply acting out the current rhetoric - to wake this country up? Will we have another April 19th? |
