It's no secret I'm a fan of the Current Occupant. There's a lot I like about Barack Obama, but one of my favorites is his determination to remain "No Drama Obama." With that in mind, let's talk about the crazy out there these days.
Over the past several months, the right wing lunacy out there has really ballooned and it's freaked me out. It freaks me out when Rush Limbaugh tells his audience that HCR is just Obama's way of mainstreaming reparations. Or when Glenn Beck accuses the president of practicing eugenics. Or when she who shall not be named and her congressional sidekick imply that Barack Obama is going to get us all nuked into oblivion.
It's scary because it has a tangible effect on the suggestible crowds who listen to this kind of stuff.
Also, no matter how hard you try, you cannot find an equivalent level of left-wing mainstream craziness. This is not to say there are no crazy liberals. There are truthers and PETA and Code Pink. But these people aren't our liberal TV hosts and they are not our elected democratic officials. We keep our crazies on the fringe, where they belong. The right, on the other hand, seems hellbent on mainstreaming the shit out of them.
That said, and I doubt I'm going to say this well, I'm abidingly troubled by the reaction to the right-wing crazy because it's starting to feel like some of the outrage is more in service to feeding the dialectic (us vs them) than it is because we really want it to stop. Sometimes we get all up in Fight Club just because we want to fight.
Maybe we should adopt a little more No Drama Obama and just refuse to engage in the crazy.
People aren't going to stop believing that Nancy Pelosi wants to eat their babies just because we stop getting so outraged by Rush Limbaugh telling his audience that she's no different than those mullahs who convince people to put bombs on their kids. But if we stopped paying so much attention to that kind of nonsense, we might be able to focus our energy more positively.
For example, if we'd spent less time being mad about the crazy shit the right made up about ACORN and more time talking about all the important, good things ACORN did, maybe there'd still be an ACORN.
If we keep playing this game, the game keeps going on. And personally, I've been too invested in playing it. I'd really like to find a new way to engage.
