Greenwald Makes Sense Of It All

Today, Glenn Greenwald made sense of the Right's reaction to President Obama's first year in office:

Nothing that the GOP is doing to Obama should be the slightest bit surprising because this is the true face of the American Right -- and that's been true for a very long time now. It didn't just become true in the last few months or in the last two years. Recent months is just the time period when the media began noticing and acknowledging what they are: a pack of crazed, primitive radicals who don't really believe in the country's core founding values and don't merely disagree with, but contest the legitimacy of, any elected political officials who aren't part of their movement.

Is The Right's Attack On Obama's Legitimacy New Or Unprecedented?

With all the nonsense I've been reading lately about how partisan things have become recently, it's refreshing to read someone writing what has been obvious. The Right hates anyone who isn't with them, pure and simple. Rep. Wilson's outburst wasn't an aberration. He's either one of, or playing to, the people who have been whining for months that their country is being taken away.

These are people who have, quite literally, created their own reality and continue to live in it. Take for example this tidbit from one of Talking Points Memo's readers:

Was having a drink with a friend at a fancy downtown bar when two well-dressed men start chatting with us. Seemed friendly and normal enough until one asks how big we think the march tomorrow will be -- "250,000? They say all the hotels are full!" I ask, "Are you here for that?" -- and get an earful about how Medicare has a $35 trillion unfunded liability, every letter you mail costs $1 is taxes, and Obama is a Manchurian candidate who wants to create a million-person national civil defense force with a budget equal to the Penatagon's.

Into the Teabag Vortex

It's hard to believe that people are so divorced from reality that they believe stuff like this. Unfortunately, as I mentioned yesterday, one needn't look very far to see the same sort of schism between reality and belief on our side. The idea that Obama, or any other politician for that matter, could somehow rise above this surreal political environment we've created is breathtakingly absurd.

Maybe when we as a nation, and our news organizations in particular, start to realize that all ideas are not created equal, perhaps then we'll start to see someone emerge who can get us to talk to each other. But when one side thinks that the other's leaders are all murderers, lesbians, or foreigners, and the other side are willing to believe that their adversaries' leaders would casually murder thousands of their countrymen without even a shred of proof, this isn't going to happen.