The Rage Is Not About Health Care, By FRANK RICH

[jefferson_dem]

The Rage Is Not About Health Care
By FRANK RICH

THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.

But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.

Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

<SNIP>

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28rich.html

[jillan]

1. Oh yeah - that last sentence!

[NJGeek]

2. we need to take this stuff somewhat seriously

if you live in a decidedly red state and you aren't a tea bagger, i would recommend reviewing what your local lawful firearms processes are and seeing it if makes sense to look into protection (after sound training first)

[geckosfeet]

3. Not minimize the RW/tea party/fundy freak insanity, but comparing it to

even a "small scale" mimic of Kristallnacht is inaccurate in many ways.

Kristallnacht was triggered by the assassination in Paris of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew. In a coordinated attack on Jewish people and their property, 91 Jews were murdered and 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and placed in concentration camps. 267 synagogues were destroyed, and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked. This was done by the Hitler Youth, the Gestapo and the SS. Kristallnacht also served as a pretext and a means for the wholesale confiscation of firearms from German Jews.

Kristallnacht

The tea par-tiers would have the world believe that the government is trying to take away their guns, put them in jail and destroy their houses of worship. These regressives throw bricks and spit at civil rights heroes while they cast themselves as the victims and the government (and liberals) as the oppressor.

[Orsino]

11. The comparison is not "inaccurate."

It's educational.

[geckosfeet]

12. It is educational. It is also very inaccurate.

[Orsino]

13. That depends on who's doing the comparing.

Look back before the real Kristallnacht, and you'll find rhetoric and violence very similar to some we're seeing now. There's nothing "inaccurate" about this, unless one starts claiming that the two situations are identical, a condition contrary to fact.

[HughMoran]

4. I pointed this out last week

Frank is reading my posts ;) http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=4313648#4314006

[Bad Thoughts]

5. "what used to be considered Republican ideas"

Isn't that at the core of the lunacy: the party has been driven so far to the extremes that it no longer can recognize what it once was, it can no longer believe in moderate ideas it held?

[BrklynLiberal]

6. Excellent column! i am stunned that 16% of the Teabaggers claim to be Democrats!!!

[Skittles]

7. he points out exactly what is the problem with HCR

repukes hate it for the wrong reasons and Dems like it for the wrong reasons

[Hekate]

8. I think I found the key paragraphs at the link: White population is declining to a minority...

The entire article is worth the read, but I think this is the most significant part: "By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority."

Susceptible people are feeling hyper-anxious and very threatened. People like me and my hubby think "How interesting," but we don't feel threatened, nor do the majority of our friends and relatives -- the majority of whom are white. Here's what Rich says:

>>> If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.
>>>
>>> They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded. <<<

"How's that hopey-changey thing workin' out for ya?" says the charismatic rabble rouser in the spike heels. Her audience feels hopeless and anxiety-ridden, and for them, Change sucks.

Hekate

[polichick]

9. Yes, they are terrified of the monsters they created. nt

[MissMarple]

10. The GOP may have created a entity or entities it can't control.

Unintended consequences are biting them in the tender bits. FOX was never totally in their pocket, as we know. If you dance with the devil, he chooses the dance and the music. Populist rage that they have been stoking for so many, many years is boiling over. They may not be able to anything much but feed the fire if they continue in this vein.

Maybe it's a little like herding cattle then finding yourself in the middle of a stampede, no stopping it, no leaving it. So I say we turn the herd right back on them.