How Crazy Is Too Crazy? 0

I observed in an email to one of my two or three regular readers:

Boy the crazies are coming out of the woodwork like termites swarming in the old Orkin commercial.

(Thus betraying my age. “When termites start swarming/you have to take warning./Call Otto the Orkin man.” I tried to find it on YouTube but could not. It’s too old.)

She emailed back:

They really are. It wasn’t this bad in Dallas in the 60’s.

She grew up in Dallas in the Sixties.

I suggested that, if the actions of the KKK, the bombings of churches during the civil rights struggles, and stuff like that were taken into account, the violence of the Sixties might rank right up there.

Over at SLANTBlog, F. T. Rea also differs with my reader. He says in part

Terrorism flowing from the radical rightwing opposition to healthcare reform is not all that different from thuggery stemming from the bitter opposition of court-ordered desegregation in the ‘60s. It’s not so different from the terrorism/thuggery that’s taken place in the name of being anti-abortion. It’s not different enough from blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma City to attack/threaten the government, or blowing up the World Trade Center towers to attack/threaten our society.

(snip)

I’m old, I’ve seen this kind of crap before.

But then I got thinking. There is something different today.

Back in the Sixties, when I was a young ‘un, the national leaders of both the Republican and the Democratic Parties neither excused nor encouraged the violence.

One cannot say that about the leadership of today’s Republican Party.

I have not before seen the leadership or those who are seen* to represent the leadership of a major United States political party excuse, embrace, and encourage violence without rebuke from their own party.

The Republican Party has shown itself to favor uncivil government.
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*If the Republican Party cared to disavow the Becks, the Hannitys, the Limbaughs, or any of the other haters, it could easily do so with a press release. It choses not to. By its silence, it endorses them.