Paranoid, It’s the New Black

At some point, I made the self-deluded promise that I wouldn’t talk politics or anything “controversial” on this site.  (Technically, I already broke that promise with this post.)  In doing so, I’ve pretty much confined myself to innocuous ramblings about toe lint and grass clippings.

(Although, expending too much time on political postings is a waste of energy. There are those who do it so much better than me.)

But in light of the continued, utter derangement demonstrated by the Right in this country, in particular their weeping and wailing over the insinuation that their violent rhetoric might incite…uh, violence, I thought this was rather apropos.

…we live in a nation in which it is commonplace, and considered completely rational, for elected officials to believe the President is a foreign interloper. We live in a culture where the nation’s most powerful Republican, House Speaker John Boehner, cannot bring himself to condemn the maniacal derangement that is birtherism, but is reduced instead to a mere acknowledgement that since Hawaii says the President is a citizen, that’s “good enough for him.”

I saw the interview in question. In it, Matt Lauer asked Boehner if he believes Obama is an American citizen. To which Boehner responded, awkwardly, with, “If Hawaii, thinks so, that’s good enough for me.”  Lauer, in a rare fit of actual journalism, pressed him farther, asking if Boehner would serve this bit of reality to his Birther colleagues in Congress.  Boehner prevaricated and stammered something about letting his colleague have their own opinions.

It would seem, in Boehner’s America, that any opinion, no matter how batshit crazy, has equal validity. Equal rights for stupid, I guess.

At any rate, the idea that the attempted assassination of a politician can be anything but political is ludicrous. The paranoid, “they’re out to git us,” platform of the Teabagger Right may not have directly driven Loughner’s actions. But it certainly created a climate where delusion isn’t just tolerated, but celebrated and given legitimacy.

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