The Deep Roots of the Right Wing Crazy Tree

Rick Pearlstein wrote an amazing op-ed today, which shows how the wingnut crazy has been a persistent part of the political landscape throughout much of the 20th century. (I love the story about how the right thought of Truman and Roosevelt years as “20 years of treason”. Especially since the current expectation by their descendants is that history will rehabilitate BushCo in the way it rehabilitated Truman.) Pearlstein makes this point:

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 justifiable 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.

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to “debunk” claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president’s program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn’t adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as “extremist” — out of bounds.

While there’s no one left with the authority of Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley that is presenting the news any more, I really wonder what the point is of shining a spotlight on the clearly extreme and legitimizing what they are so very clearly misinformed over. There isn’t a single legit journalist that does not know that the “death panels” are a clear fabrication, and most know by now that the Summer of Spittle has been astroturfed onto the news — so now what it the point in continuing to treat this as news? And covering this at the expense of covering stuff like the LA free medical event, which is certainly more germane to the “debate”.