The 2007 Summer of Hate is culminating with a sort of haters Altamont, the right-wing attack on Graeme Frost of Baltimore, Maryland.
This is sort of a game the Netroots have been playing with the rabid right for some time. The left puts up someone whom they think is unimpeachable to attack some right-wing plan, then the right drives them under anyway. Max Cleland, John Kerry, Cindy Sheehan, Michael J. Fox. Each stepped to the microphone and each was smeared in turn. Few in the mainstream objected, just as few liberal parents objected when kids started growing the hair long in the mid-1960s, smoking pot and going to anti-war marches.
Just as hippies kept going further-and-further trying to freak out their parents 40 years ago, so the haties are now going further-and-further in order to stay what they think of as sane. That’s really what the nooses are all about. They reject your reality and substitute their own, one in which they’re always right and everyone else is an enemy of the good and true.
Peace, love, dope, meet war, hate, grope.
But now they’re doing it to a 12 year old kid. And to his family, people who have done everything Republicans always said was right. The couple stayed married, they didn’t abort, they bought a home, they tried to build a business. They raised their kids with good, conservative values. But when times got hard, through no fault of their own, they depended on a state-based health insurance program to get by, and they had the nerve to defend this program in the face of a Presidential veto.
What made this a tipping point? Perhaps it was the family’s
circumstance. More likely it was the fact that, in this case, the
President vetoed something much of the Republican base favored, which caused the blinders to come off.
Had the Frost family attacked the President’s Iraq policy even two
years ago they wouldn’t be getting near this amount of sympathy.
Instead, with Iraq costing $100 billion a year the President vetoed a
tiny fraction of that for kids’ health, an impacted kid protested, and
these goons descended on him like, well, like the Hell’s Angels at
Altamont. (The picture is from the Rolling Stones gallery.)
So now we’re not just seeing a lot of self-righteous anger from the
left, but the story is gaining important traction. People throughout
America are starting to draw the line, from FreeRepublic to Michelle
Malkin to Mitch McConnell, and they’re no longer liking what they see.
Just as the right, 40 years ago, would complain "we saw it years ago," so
the left is singing a similar song now. But that’s the way history
rolls. What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to
reason away. Until he can no longer.
That’s how a political thesis collapses. The result, right now, is a
political vacuum. It’s filling that vacuum we should be about.
