Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Tomorrow we return to our day job at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.  We've enjoyed the last two weeks.  It's been nice just getting up in the morning, logging on to the New York Times, sipping coffee, and finding random things to pontificate about.  We'll miss the slow pace of the day that allowed us more time to reflect and, we hope, produce read-worthy stuff.  We'll try not to let the base down as we move back to our part-time blogging.

In the meantime, Sloppists should check out Frank Rich's column from today's "Week in Review."  In a nutshell, he writes about the increasing virulence of right-wing haters and the media enablers who encourage them.  In just the last couple of weeks, we've had the assassination of an abortion provider in Kansas and a fatal shooting at Washington's Holocaust Museum.  Rich provides plenty of additional examples and calls for conservative leaders to step up and denounce such fanaticism.  We're not optimistic.

We don't really have anything to add to Rich's piece, but we would love it if someone--anyone--could offer a sane explanation for such demagoguery.  All kidding aside, the Solipsist believes in rationality, and he would like to think that there is a rational explanation for such hatred (leaving aside for the moment the question as to whether hatred can be rational).  In other words, why are right-wing people so full of hatred for Obama and other liberal thinkers?

Look, we at the Solipsist "hate" George Bush.  We point to the state this country is in and say that Bush and his cronies are largely responsible.  It's based on facts.  The hatred directed toward Obama seems largely based on fears or misconceptions.  Fanatics claim that Obama and his followers are somehow selling the country out to terrorists.  Do they forget that the worst terrorist attack in this country's history happened on Bush's watch?  When they claim that 9/11 was somehow Clinton's fault, do they forget that it was Clinton who launched a 1998 missile attack on Afghanistan in an attempt to assassinate Osama bin Laden?  Or that, when he did so, he was accused of doing it only to distract the country from the Monica Lewinsky scandal (a scandal, incidentally, that was essentially a right-wing witch-hunt by an out-of-control prosecutor)?

Let's take right-wing ranters at face value for a moment.  Let's assume that all the things they fear coming to pass come to pass: same-sex marriage endorsed by the federal government; a complete realignment of the Supreme Court that leads to the reaffirmation of abortion rights and other conservative betes noir; strict gun-control laws; increased cooperation and respect for the United Nations and other international organizations, as well as acceptance of International Criminal Court jurisdiction in relevant cases; etc. etc. etc.

OK.  What exactly is so bad about all that?  We are not being rhetorical here.  We really want to know what it is that scares people so much that they are willing to take up arms and commit cold-blooded acts of, not to put too fine a point on it, terrorism in order to forestall these events--none of which is overly likely to happen anyway.

We of the left-wing persuasion have put up with almost thirty years of nearly uninterrupted right-wing governance (while socially liberal, Bill Clinton could hardly be considered a fire-breathing radical).  And for all our fears, the country has, essentially, survived, albeit in much worse shape than it could have.  We gave the right a chance, and they blew it.  Now it's time to try something else.  That's the way democracy works.

We just pray (in our avowedly agnostic way) that the left is given the chance.