Dumb or Scary?

While the Republicans are running their annual Conservative CPAC event this week, there are those admonishing their own party that believe they lost the last two elections due to getting away from their core values, i.e. small government, low taxes (especially, in practice, on the rich) and whatever else reminds them of Ronald Reagan. Pajama Media's Rick Moran ends his piece today:

There must be a reckoning with those who violate the very nature of conservatism by obstinately adhering to exclusionary, anti-intellectual precepts that have thrown classical conservatism over in favor of ranting, ideological tantrums.

He's got that partly right. By embracing Joe the Not-Really-a-Plumber, the intellectually skimpy Sarah Palin and the now proven liar Bobby Jindal, the GOP has embraced the simplistic in a time of complexity. The result is that nobody attends their anti-tax "tea parties" and their supposedly smart lawyers are making fundamental errors in handling Norm Coleman pathetic court bid to steal the Senate election in Minnesota from Al Franken. And the biggest star of their CPAC conference is a 13-year-old:



But it this simplicity of thought, so completely useless in this time of (I would argue) GOP-led economic meltdown, has a brutish side as well. Imagine the outcry were a leftist public official or blogger or cable news personality advocate violence in the face of our new Presidency. But they're doing it right in public.

Joe the Plumber is advocating shooting members of Congress he disagrees with. Sean Hannity is calling for armed revolution on his Website. Fox News is running stories on the coming civil war. John Bolton picks Obama's Chicago for a terrorist attack.

This while white supremacists are plotting the assassination of our new Chief Executive.

I was a child in the 1960's when political assassinations stole a generation -- maybe two -- of progressive leadership from this country. This stuff isn't fantasy or in any way excusable. Remember, the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil wasn't from foreign nationals in 2001, it was from a rightwing anti-government decorated military veteran named Timothy McVeigh six years earlier in 1995.

The Republicans behind all the violent hate talk are, in essence, giving license to every reactionary lunatic out there with a fucked-up power fantasy and a copy of Revelations.

And should anything happen to Obama or his family, they must be held accountable.