These guys really are crazy

From ABC news:

President Obama at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner last night, discussing false claims made about the health care reform bill, told a little anecdote.

"I was up at the G20 -- just a little aside -- I was up at the G20, and some of you saw those big flags and all the world leaders come in and Michelle and I are shaking hands with them," the president said. "One of the leaders -- I won't mention who it was -- he comes up to me. We take the picture, we go behind.

"He says, 'Barack, explain to me this health care debate.'

"He says, 'We don't understand it. You're trying to make sure everybody has health care and they're putting a Hitler mustache on you -- I don't -- that doesn't make sense to me. Explain that to me.'"

Well, I can't explain it. As far as I can tell, most of what is called the right wing in this country has gone completely insane because a black man is in the White House and (I'm guessing) they automatically assume he's going to screw the white race as badly as they have done to his race whenever they've inserted one of their own into the office. When I say insane, I do actually mean insane, this is not political rhetoric. They believe things that are blatantly obviously false and do not relate to reality, and then act on this and expect everyone else to act on it.

I don't think it's quite possible to realise how crazy they are, from outside the country. I'll try and provide some examples tomorrow & following, but ..... just the insane bullshit advertising that is getting run in prime time (paid for indirectly by deeply crazy right wing millionaires, of which there are a terrifying number), are just utterly incredible. Big deep booming scarey voices telling you that the Health Reforms will mean that old people will be denied all medical coverage and left to die, or that you wont get to choose your own doctors but faceless Washington bureaucrats will tell you who you have to see and what treatments you can have. And this stuff is running 4,5,6 times an hour in some program slots.

It's hard to believe it doesn't have some effect, but it's such an utter and total lie: and yet it doesn't even get denounced in TV 'news' or on a lot of the print media (buy thats a slightly different rant). You know, when the Clintons were talking about a vast right-wing conspiracy to pull them down and destroy them back in the '90s, I thought, yeah, yeah, right, sure: how could there be such a conspiracy. Watching them try to destroy Obama over the most idiotic of lies, I see what they mean. It's not a conspiracy per se - that would be logistically impossible plus half the conspirators would kill eachother if they met in the flesh - so much as an automatic and unspoken way of thinking, a modus operandi, which operates whenever the right sort of target pops up, and seems to be where all the old KKK-style open racism has been channelled.

To try and explain my political leanings, I keep telling people here that this country has a party of dangerously right-wing extremists, and then there are the Republicans as well - definitely in the ha-ha-not-funny category of joke, as far as I'm concerned. Of course they all look at me like I'm just pulling their legs and noone could actually think the Democrats are right wing. Oh, so wrong.

The really sad bit is, in England I'd be a centrist, and back home probably centre*-right (although I'm not sure I could ever grit my teeth long enough to vote National, Little Bobby Muldoon did a pretty good job of inculcating that feeling).

* I do find it alarming how much my spelling is deteriorating here, I'm starting to write center, color, Theater .. akk!! I'm sliding into decadence, and it's not even any fun!!!