In an article in today's Washington Post, Rick Perlstein puts the craziness of the health care uproar in a historical perspective. When the Civil Rights Act was being debated in 1964, opponents claimed that it would enslave whites. A plan to increase mental health care during the Kennedy administration sparked claims that a new facility in Alaska was actually a concentration camp for dissidents. Perlstein notes that "Internment camps for conservatives" are "the latest theory of tea party favorite Michael Savage."
The problem, Perlstein notes, is not the existence of the loonier perspectives among the electorate, but the credence given to them by today's media.
"Back then, a more confident media unequivocally
labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist"
-- out of bounds."
Today we have Lou Dobbs and Fox News to stoke the crazy fires and promote extremism and violence.
"Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers,
getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with
the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that
their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat
Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable
political claim."
Perlstein closes by saying "Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never
have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the
provisions in it that would enslave whites."
Via Mahablog