Megan McArdle is a goddamned idiot. She is literally comparing the decision to wage war in Iraq with the effort to pass a health care bill. Look at this shit:
People carrying guns [to presidential appearances] are acting like jerks. So are the liberals who have created a giant scary amalgam of a right-wing protester, who has done every bad thing that every protester has ever done. More than one person has now asked me how I can defend someone who shows up at a rally holding a gun in one hand and a picture of Obama-as-Hitler in the other, and starts screaming about death panels?
Moreover, having created this horrifying bogeyman, the next rhetorical move is to claim that this constitutes the whole of the opposition to your program.
Does any of this sound oddly familiar? Wait a second . . . it’ll come to you . . . yes, that’s right, it’s 2003 all over again! Coldplay’s on the radio, Elizabeth Smart is being reunited with her family, and the rest of America is trying to rip each other’s throats out, rhetorically speaking. The party in power is busy branding the opposition as something close to traitors because they are skeptical about a speculative venture that the majority just knows is going to turn out beautifully . . . Meanwhile, the opposition is staging increasingly freakish demonstrations, while the loud lunatic fringe starts looking for fascist jackboots and death squads behind every tree. The party labels have switched, but the vitriol, and the emotional tenor of the debate, seems very much the same. You’d think that the various players would have learned something from our last outing.
So, those anti-war protesters from 2003 who said there was no evidence that Hussein had a nuclear weapons program or that he had anything to do with 9/11 or that he posed an imminent threat, and that insisted that invading and occupying an Arab land was the exact opposite of the best way to keep this nation safe? They’re the exact mirror image of the lunatics who refuse to believe that Obama is a natural born citizen, compare him to Hitler, threaten violence, and believe some of the dumbest and crudest conspiracy theories on record?
And she gets paid to write this shit. If the Atlantic wants some decent content, I’m available. I’ll write for cheap and your readers will notice the difference between substance and buffoonery.