Kevin Drum talks about the currently growing brand of right-wing lunacy, talking in particular about John Shadegg (R-Arizona), who described the current bills on health care reform as “Soviet-style gulag health care”:
it’s a good example of what I mean when I suggest that today’s right-wing lunacy is different from left-wing lunacy of the Bush years. Sure, there were lefty bloggers who went over the top about Amerika and how the NSA was bringing 1984 to life and so forth, but for the most part you didn’t have members of Congress taking to the House floor and joining in. They largely managed to keep a slightly more even keel. But on the Republican side, after a mere few months of Obama, this kind of stuff has become routine. They’ve joined the Caps Lock crowd feet first.
I would posit that any significantly large set of people contains an extreme wing – not just extreme in the content of their beliefs but also in the form that they use to express those ideas. As Drum calls it: the CAPS-lock wing of the group.
I tend to be skeptical of all the lefty hand-wringing about the ‘tone’ of things these days, and consider the youtubization of politics that enables all the crazies who have been around forever to suddenly have an easy route for public consumption. That said, I do think there’s something going with the “CAPS-lock theory of right wing politics.”
Which is not to accuse every – or even a significant percentage – of Republicans of going ALLCAPS on us. There are always going to be nuts in any crowd. It’s just to say that it’s striking how easy and comfortable the respectable parts of the right-wing seem to be jostling elbows with the nuts.