We all know that something about Barack Obama brings out the crazy on the right, but let’s not forget that people were equally insane about Bill Clinton. I’ll let driftglass do the talking here for a moment, as he waxes nostalgic for 1990’s gems like TravelGate, WhiteWater, TrooperGate, the Vince Foster murder/cover up, the Mena airport cocaine smuggling operation, and so on:
It was a warped, hysterical campaign funded by wealthy Right Wing thugs like Richard Mellon Scaife and propagated by wealthy Right Wing thugs like Rupert Murdoch who made sure the lies were jack-hammered into the headlines day after day, year after year.
And judging by its objectives, it was also a very successful campaign: it legitimized and metastasized Hate Radio; killed the credibility of the “objective” media once and for all; made the overt mass-slander of political opposition by the Right acceptable; moved radicals, militia nuts, bigots, Creationists and Limbaugh zombies to the center of the Republican Party; accelerated the exodus of reasonable moderates the hell out of the Republican Party; destroyed the possibility of public discourse; and kicked the door open to the use of Congressional hearings as instruments of political vendetta.
I think that is well said, don’t you? And there’s plenty one could add. Let’s not forget the way the “objective” media worshipped at the feet of Matt Drudge’s shitty website for well over a decade. There’s a price to be paid for pretending people like Dan Burton are normal, sane public servants with a rational point of view. And there’s a price for letting reclusive or foreign billionaires poison our discourse by buying up our newspapers and radio stations and creating a 24-hour cable news station and then spewing a firehose of lies into the eyes and ears of unsuspecting citizens. We were mean and stupid before that all began, and we’re meaner and more stupid every day.
Also, too, I think Sarah Palin’s mere existence and the need to rationalize it acted like the vinegar to the right-wing’s Stupid baking soda. Which also might explain why the right no longer has any grasp of the role of carbon dioxide in climate change.