Johann Hari: The Republican Party Is Turning Into A Cult:

“Since Obama’s rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and — at the same time — that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to… the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren’t fringe phenomena: a Research 2000 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn’t born in the US, or aren’t sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has ‘questions to answer.’ No amount of hard evidence — here’s his birth certificate, here’s a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here’s the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper — can pierce this conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up ‘death panels’ to euthanize the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed — with a straight face — that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.”

I agree with a lot of what Hari says, including this:

But this kind of mania can’t be co-opted: it can only by over-ruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people with the maddest fears. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, “It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It’s not how change happens.”

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarro-cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America.

These are people (and who are very real) who live in the Appalachian Mountains (Kentucky and Tennessee) who take at a direct quote from the New Testament (Mark 16:17-18) at face value:

“…And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover….”

These people dance around with live poisonous snakes, speaking in tongue (essentially it sounds like babble) and top it off by drinking strychnine poison. And what’s incredible – these people don’t die!

What I’m really saying: the USA cannot be painted by just one or two fine brushstrokes. I wish this debate were as simple as McCarthyism. It is not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_handling

I assure you, as strange as this sounds, I am not making this up.

It certainly DOES sound strange. I know that the diversity of views in the pluralistic society that is the USA can beget strange extremes of view.
I know that when George W Bush talked about ‘evil doers’ and an ‘axis of evil’ he wasn’t talking to the mainstream, but to a bible-belt right-wing constituency whose first organising principle is to believe there is a ‘media conspiracy’ intent on driving the nation to the devil … but even so, wow.
Dangerous stuff.

(re the the end-of-the-world mortgage term: no kidding!)

There is more to this than just political wrangling. Yes, I agree that FUD is alive and well in this debate. But the people who are fueling this fire are more interested in God, or more precisely a White Anglo-Saxon God, who will smote their enemies (pretty much anyone who doesn’t agree with their viewpoint) than just political mischief. It is far more complex than a simple “witch hunt.”

I know people who believe this stuff and to quantify their strangeness I should also tell you two things about them. One, some of these people are very well educated. And two, many of these people also believe that world will end on December 21, 2012. This is the last day of the Mayan Long Count Calendar. What’s curious about this belief is that for many, those who have been engaged in the money borrowing frenzy of the last five or six years, see the worlds end as a solution to their own personal financial crises.

I assure you, as strange as this sounds, I am not making this up.

There is more afoot than just Hypocrisy.

the “Death Panel” comment is really about dispersing negative and confusing comments

Yes, I agree with you on this. The use of FUD (Fear, uncertainty & doubt) is a time-honoured (but not honourable) political and business tactic. It seems to me it’s often used by operators who have convinced themselves the end justifies the means, including deceiving their constituency. Putting words in one’s opponent’s mouth, or mischaracterising their goals like this “Death Panels” example is a contemptible practice.
Still, democracy is a messy business. – P

What is incredible about the Health Care debate in the US is that the very people who would benefit the most from Health Care Reform are the uneducated and the uninformed.

Stupid people are their own worst enemy!

The problem with these particular stupid people is that they are led by political pundits whose hypocritical rhetoric is broadcast from the evangelical bully-pulpit of some of Americas largest Protestant churches. The world view of these organizations is that the Bible is a rule book that can be dissected selectively and distorted for their own political use and monetary gain.

These stupid people are also very very dangerous and should not be underestimated.