It's Getting Ugly Out There

If you are feeling a bit of "deja vu" all over again, there's a reason. Six years ago we heard a lot of talk from the right wing about birth certificates, Kenyan socialists, and a presidential candidate who "palled around with terrorists." You remember all that, don't you?

While that kind of talk never really disappeared, it did eventually give way to other forms of hysteria - mostly about jobs, the economy, the federal deficit, the scourge of Obamacare, and unconstitutional executive actions (with a little Ebola thrown in there).

But lately the whole zeitgeist of right wing talking points has gone back to the more familiar territory of the 2008 election. That's why yesterday I wrote about Franklin Graham's outrageous lies about President Obama - summed up by "He only knows Islam."

Later in the day, Rudy Giuliani threw this one into the mix:

I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.

Of course much of the right wing hysteria over the last couple of days has been directed at State Department Spokesperson Marie Harf for saying that "we can't kill our way out of this war" - the exact same thing that George W. Bush and Mitt Romney said.

And finally, that leads us to Bill O'Reilly's assertion that its time for the "holy war" that President Obama refuses to declare.

The holy war begins…. The holy war is here. And unfortunately it seems the President of United States will be the last one to acknowledge it…. President Obama needs to lead – needs to lead the world in this holy war.

If you haven't gotten the picture yet, here's what it boils down to: "The Islamic extremists are at our doors and President Obama won't stop them because he's not one of us - he's one of them!"

With all that hysteria lathered up, I figure that it's a good time to take a step back and think about what has the right wingers in such a state. Scroll back up to my second paragraph and you'll get a clue. The economic recovery seems to finally be in full swing, the federal deficit is plummeting, and Obamacare is a raging success by almost any measure. Add to that the fact that the new Republican Congress is failing miserably and you start to get the picture.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist so I don't think this is a coordinated strategy. If it was, you'd have to admit that fear-mongering about a President that is sympathetic to the terrorists at our door at the same time that you are threatening to shut down funding for the Department of Homeland Security would be a colossally stupid strategy.

What is happening here is more like the spread of a contagion. As the dying beast runs out of weapons with which to strike back, it is reverting to base instincts. And those are primarily related to their racist fears. So its getting really ugly out there.