During a comprehensive interview with The New York Times, President Obama attacked modern conservatism and the GOP for being too ideological and extremist. He continued by describing the Democratic Party like so:
And by the way, it generally is fact-based and reason-based. You know, we’re not denying science, we’re not denying climate change, we’re not pretending that somehow having a whole bunch of uninsured people is the American way.
Borrowing Politifact‘s ranking system, I’ll give this quote a “Mostly True.” For now.
I’m glad the president qualified his observation with the word “generally” because although the Republicans have slowly allowed the lunatics to take over the asylum throughout the last 14 years or so (mostly in the last five), the far-left wing of the Democratic Party is beginning to give the tea party a run for its crazy money. Put another way, yes, the Republican Party has ceded control to its crackpot tea party flank, almost irrevocably disconnecting it from reality and reason, but the far-left is growing louder as well and there’s a serious danger that the Democrats could repeat the GOP’s idiotic validation of their extremist wing.
By in large, America has gone nuts. Our political cheese has slipped off our political cracker.
The discourse has grown so utterly dysfunctional and incoherent — up-its-own-ass in reaction to every minuscule social media blip and every hyperbolic political headline, making it difficult to find an actual “fact-based and reason-based” discussion anywhere. Everything on the far-right and, yes, the far-left has become, to one degree or another, a conspiracy theory. NSA, drones, Benghazi, healthcare, Guantanamo, Gaza, Syria, immigration, teleprompters, the word “folks” — you name it and there’s a privileged crank being paid to spam Reddit with scare-headlines about it. And it almost always includes predictions about the end of America as we know it, with our perhaps-Kenyan, perhaps-conservative, perhaps-liberal, perhaps-pacifistic, perhaps-war-mongering president accelerating the inevitable death of the nation.
Is the tea party far-right more guilty than most for amplifying the nincompoopery? Absolutely, yes. While it was obvious five or six year ago that the ascendancy of the first African-American president… CONTINUE READING