"It’s not that New Deal-era Republicans didn’t believe what they were saying about the end of liberty; many earnestly did. They hated Roosevelt, too, genuinely and irrationally. But when Hamilton held that dog tag in the air in 1936, he knew exactly what he was doing and why. His calculus was cold-eyed (if wrong-headed). He was inciting voters to take leave of their senses. Yet, for all the nuttiness of his presentation, he had not taken leave of his own. Therein lies the difference between the Republican Party of the past century and the Republican Party of our own (especially, but not exclusively, its Tea Party faction): the difference between calculation and obsession, between a hysterical style and an honest-to-goodness, diagnosable hysteria—the collective kind, like the compulsive dancing manias of medieval Europe. " I might add that this hysteria is compounded by the American media. The fact that CNN has a clock counting how long the government has been shut down speaks for itself. What a massive circle jerk.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 19:53:42 +0000