OPINION
51
Right-Wing Crazy Is All-American
Birthers, tea parties—it's nothing new
By Matt Cantor
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Posted Aug 16, 09 8:23 AM CDT
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(Newser)
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With the left back in power, we’re seeing right-wing "crazies"—the “birthers, tea-partiers, town hall hecklers”—getting louder. But that’s nothing new, writes Rick Perlstein in the Washington Post. In America, “the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.” The trouble today is that the media lends credence to these voices, Perlstein notes.
Republicans in the 1950s accused FDR and Truman of “20 years of treason," while reports in the South in the 1960s suggested the Civil Rights Act “would ‘enslave’ whites.” “The similarities across decades are uncanny,” Perlstein writes. Liberal power creates “panic” among some; political “vultures” milk it, he notes. But in past decades, “a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as ‘extremist’—out of bounds.”