James Joyner misses the point that Josh Marshall is trying to make. Marshall’s point wasn’t that everyone on the Right is a crazy nutbag while everyone on the left is cooly logical. Marshall’s key point is here (emphasis mine):
That’s the thing about where the GOP is right now. I don’t question that they’ve gotten some traction on a range of issues over the last month or so. But they’re still relying on some pretty far-out, alienated and often just generally whacked out folks to puts the gusts of wind into their sails.
When you are relying on birthers and teabaggers to push the fight against health care reform, you are doing something quite distinct from how the Democrats deal with the IMF and World Bank protesters. If the Democrats had sent labor goons into town hall meetings to scare the crap out of reps considering Bush’s Social Security privitization, that would somewhat equivalent to what the Republicans are doing.
But it’s even worse than that. The Republicans are actively turning their base into a bunch of misinformed, angry hooligans by their tolerance and tacit support for the Birther and Teabagging movements. These people would be unbalanced anyway, but they didn’t come up with the idea that Obama was born in Kenya on their own. Someone had to tell them that Obama wants to take their guns away and dictate their end-of-life decisions for them. If you keep feeding lies to the gullible, they get dumber and dumber. And if those lies suggest that their whole way of life is about to be ruined, a certain subset of them will turn violent and kill people.
As a Republican, Joyner should be embarrassed to see his party attempting to benefit from the growth of violent lunacy.
