The people in near-riot at congress members' public appearances are fools. Or, at least, gullible. People who believe that Barack Obama is going to kill their grandma don't really have it all together. Something is wrong upstairs and their internal BS detectors aren't lighting up to alert them to the obvious. The reason for this is that they've rewired their attics to keep the BS sensors from working -- like the birthers, the town hall goons believe what they believe because they want to believe it, not because what they believe is especially convincing. For them Barack Obama is Hitler, Stalin, and Dracula rolled into one. Nothing is too ridiculous, too absurd for them to believe, because the consequences of being wrong would be too great -- what if Obama really was Count HitlerStalin and no one believed it? No one wants that. So it's just safer to believe the worst, that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim illegal alien come here to kill your grandma. Really, who wants to take the risk of believing he's not?But the Hitler outfit fits the right better than the left -- it always has. Authoritarian and prone to group-think, people on the right are most comfortable with believing they're the mainstream. And, with poll after poll showing they're not, they're confused. When people who tend toward group-think are confused, it's like a virus that infects them all. The more confused they become, the more frightened they become. And the more frightened they become, the more authoritarian they become. Things have to be a certain way and, if they're not, things have to be forced. Like other authoritarians in times past, their way is the only way and anyone who believes otherwise is the enemy of the "true" people, whether they call themselves "patriots" or "der volk." Anyone who doesn't agree with them on every single issue is an enemy of the state and must be corrected or stopped. Barack Obama doesn't agree with them, the Democrats don't agree with them, so Barack Obama and the Democrats must be stopped. As the right slips from the mainstream to the fringe, they don't see it as changing American opinions and values. They see it as America being taken over by anti-Americans.
Playing this terror-driven opposition to the president and Democrats is the Republican party. They haven't gone out of their way to disabuse the birthers and they've actually been promoting the "kill your grandma" lie. Truth is irrelevant to them because truth is the enemy of their argument. So they use lies and fear. The right's campaign against health care reform has been a campaign of the purest -- and worst -- propaganda; propaganda that appeals to fear and ignorance and hate. Call it the Weimarketing of health care reform opposition... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
