The rare “must-read” can be found in today’s Washington Post, where Rick Perlstein explains, with historical detail aplenty, the plight of liberals when it comes to the outpouring of crazy:
Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage’s entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. 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. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.
Read the whole thing.
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Chris Geidner is a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who writes at Law Dork, contributes regularly to Metro Weekly and has written for The Atlantic Online, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications. An extended biography can be found
The reminder of prior historical episodes when conservatives have dragged out “Commie!” to mindlessly shout down their opponents is particularly useful now when too many liberals are assuming that ALL of these lunatics are all racist. The example of Stevenson shows that you can be the whitest dude ever and still have conservatives scream at you and spit on you, if you are suggesting changes that scare them but that they can’t actually articulate why they’re so scared.