Yesterday morning I sat and watched, on "Meet the Press," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell once again butcher the American political tradition of bipartisan respect -- respect, not necessarily cooperation. Just basic, mutual respect.
Is President Obama a Christian? Well, he says he is, deigned McConnell, who, being the noble mensch that he is, was willing to take Obama "at his word." I half expected and wholly desired that host David Gregory would then ask McConnell to what religion he claims to belong -- prefaced by the host's similarly stated graciousness that he was willing to take McConnell "at his word" -- but such fair-minded turnabout failed to meet with the press' approval.
Just prior to watching McConnell I read Maureen Dowd, who aptly diagnosed that America "is having some weird mass nervous breakdown, with the right spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment." Dowd expanded on this twofold causation by citing the virulent Rush Limbaugh and the evangelist Franklin Graham -- or was it evangelist Rush Limbaugh and virulent Franklin Graham -- yet she omitted citing anyone on the fear-and-disinformation institutional "right," such as the aforementioned Senate minority leader ... or the House minority leader, or the Senate minority whip, or the House minority whip, or virtually all members of the Senate Republican caucus, or virtually all members of the House Republican caucus, or the Republican National Committee's asylum king ...
But, foolish me, not to fret, for the real cause of America's "weird mass nervous breakdown" had yet to be unveiled by Dowd.
It shouldn't really be laid, if I correctly followed her drift, at the irresponsible feet of malicious talk-radio hosts, or hocus-pocus shamans, or even conservative officeholders, whom one would expect to honor a somewhat higher tradition.
No, the real pathogenic agent here is -- you got it -- President Obama, because "nothing bums out a nation that blows with the wind like a self-appointed messiah who disappoints."
Just how has Obama disappointed? Why, according to Dowd, the man is too ... rational.
He "owes his presidency to the intense feeling he stirred up," noted Dowd (while minimizing the greater intensities that eight years of G.W. Bush's maladministration stirred up), but then he "turns out to be a practical guy who can’t deal with intense feeling." Further, Obama is "too lofty to pay heed to the daily bump and grind of politics," thus his refusal to wallow in the pubescent slime of today's schoolyard politics makes him "easier to demonize."
So the victim becomes the perp, the target the weapon, the blameless object of scorn the blameworthy object of scorn.
I consider myself, too, a rational man. And were I in Obama's shoes I believe I'd take that last full measure of supreme but possibly inadmissible rationality by telling the scurrilous likes of the nation's Mitch McConnells and the clueless likes of its Maureen Dowds to just go fuck themselves.
No doubt that would be "intense" enough, but would it really make me less easy to demonize?