Frank Rich: The Rage Won’t End on Election Day

[highplainsdem]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/opinion/17rich.html

The Rage Won’t End on Election Day
By FRANK RICH
Published: October 16, 2010



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We don’t know what will happen on Election Day, but one fairly safe bet is this: Paladino will not be the next governor of New York. However tardily, he’s been disowned not only by the state’s extant, if endangered, cadre of mainstream Republicans but even by some of the hard right. No one apparently told him that while bigotry isn’t always a disqualifier for public office, appearing on YouTube vowing to “take out” a reporter from Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post can be. As a rule, it’s career suicide to threaten to murder your own political base.

But if New Yorkers may take comfort from the pratfall of this particular barbarian at their gate, the national forecast is not so sunny. Paladino is no anomaly in American politics in 2010. He’s just the most clownish illustration of where things have been heading for two years and are still heading. Like the farcical Christine O’Donnell in another blue Northeastern state, he’s a political loss-leader, if you will, whose near-certain defeat on Nov. 2 allows us to indulge in a bit of denial about the level of rage still coursing, sometimes violently, through our national bloodstream.

That wave of anger began with the parallel 2008 cataclysms of the economy’s collapse and Barack Obama’s ascension. The mood has not subsided since. But in the final stretch of 2010, the radical right’s anger is becoming less focused, more free-floating — more likely to be aimed at “government” in general, whatever the location or officials in charge. The anger is also more likely to claim minorities like gays, Latinos and Muslims as collateral damage. This is a significant and understandable shift, if hardly a salutary one. The mad-as-hell crowd in America, still not seeing any solid economic recovery on the horizon, will lash out at any convenient scapegoat.

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As Milbank has written, “it’s not fair to blame Beck for violence committed by his fans,” but he would nonetheless “do well to stop encouraging extremists.” The same could be said of the many politicians who are emulating the Beck template — especially given the tinderbox state of the nation. Whether it’s Sarah Palin instructing her acolytes to “reload” or a congressman yelling “baby killer!” at a colleague on the House floor or Sharron Angle, the Tea Party senatorial candidate from Nevada, proposing that citizens consider “Second Amendment remedies” to “protect themselves against a tyrannical government,” we know where this can lead.

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[bluestateguy]

1. The New York Times editorial page

let's see what the old establishmentarian has to say here...

[BlueCaliDem]

2. The "rage" is red meat being gratuitously tossed out by corporate media

against this President and against this Congress without so much as a whisper that the Grand Obstructionist Party is the sole problem.

Everyone hurts after an election when your party does not win. God knows, I have. But the media was good in cooling the justified anger by the American people who watched as the pResident's friends on the Supreme Court usurped the will of the people and crowned him King completely against the Constitution. But America's well-oiled propaganda machine from radio to broadcast to print, knew how to calm the anger using choice words that they're trained to lean in journalism school, and the outrage waned.

Since then, time after time, after time, we had to watch how the Republican'ts in Congress and the WH eroded our rights in favor of corporate rule, but not a peep from our media that were not even trying to fake any semblance of being our fourth estate anymore. Instead, they kept up their meme that America needed to ... wait for it ... come together.

So, when will our media announce to those bunch of Republican sore losers to "come together and support" this legitimately elected President?

I've been waiting ever since they announced, on the day of President Obama's inauguration, that they'd "ask him the hard questions" {having been remiss during twelve years of Republican tyranny and Bush pResidency}, and I have yet to see it happen. Anywhere.