Liar, Liar! Pants on Fire!

As a former resident of the Sunshine State, I take some interest in what's going on over there. One of the many differences between Florida and Oklahoma is that in the former, it's actually possible to find substantial numbers of Democrats. Unfortunately, there are substantial numbers of Republicans also, probably more than there are in this hotbed of progressive thought in terms of absolute numbers. But there are ties that bind these people. Two that I can think of right off the bat: first, they have taken leave of their senses, and second, they lie. They lie like rugs. Here's what the GOP of Florida is saying about Obama's talk today to the nation's schoolkids: Schoolchildren across the nation "will be forced to watch the president justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other president."

It's hard for me to fathom people so devoid of honor as to broadcast so blatant a lie as this. Consider: the people behind these statements, all the b.s. that has been spewed and is still being spewed by the Republican Party, these people know that what they're saying is not true. They know it. But they also know that the silly putty out there that believes this nonsense is composed of frightened, credulous victims, for the most part. People who are so distraught by the general tenor of the times that they simply must find someone to blame for their discomfort. Frank Rich had it right in one of his columns last month.

The biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism remains panic in some precincts about a new era of cultural and demographic change. As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”

Considering that Bell made these observations in the early 1960s, when the crisis for the right was the election of a Roman Catholic as president, it's all the more pertinent today when the pace of technological and social change is a hundred times more chaotic.

The bottom line in all this is that the Republican politicians and right wing talk show haters, the enablers of the nut cases out there in the town meetings, the armed stooges in rally crowds, the screaming meamies at the tea parties--well, these people are beyond contempt. If and when some twisted not out there kills somebody for being a liberal, the blood will be on their hands. Oh, wait . . . that's already happened. (See Frank Rich, cited above.)