Rick Perlstein writes in the Washington Post In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition--Birthers, Health Care Hecklers and the Rise of Right-Wing Rage.
"Before the 'black helicopters' of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a 'civil rights movement' had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would 'enslave' whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s."
"If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing."
"The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds."
"Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites."
1 comment:
This problem will only get worse until the media, forcefully and relentlessly, starts calling people (politicians and pundits alike) who obviously and purposefully misrepresent the facts.....LIARS!
Not all statements have equal value. There are no Death Panels in any of the Health care bills.
Anyone who uses the term "Death Panel" as a statement of fact about any healthcare bill should be called a liar.
They should be called a LIAR loudly and repeatedly.
I'm not holding my breath.
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