The right’s stunning meltdown

[DonViejo]

With the NRA and the Tea Party exposed as destructive crackpots, can the rest of us finally undo their damage?

BY JOAN WALSH

Just when it seemed the meltdown on the right couldn’t get any more spectacular, after House Speaker John Boehner’s Plan B humiliation Thursday night, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre self-destructed Friday morning. His bizarre self-serving tirade blamed everything but guns for the Sandy Hook massacre last week. He proposed placing an armed police officer in every school.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he pronounced fatuously.

As usual for the NRA, the solution to gun violence is more guns. But finally, Americans are seeing that for the destructive illogic that it is. LaPierre is truly one of the bad guys. We don’t need guns to fight him, though, we just need votes. And we need the politicians elected with our votes to stand up for us.

Last June, President Obama told a roomful of donors that if he were to be reelected, “the fever may break” and the Republican Party might return to its common-sense roots. It won’t be that easy. Obama and the Democrats can’t passively wait for relief from the sickness that claimed the GOP, even though it may seem that the party is self-destructing on its own. They are going to have to fight.

For at least the last decade, and arguably longer, we’ve been held hostage, as a nation, by bullies and crackpots. Democrats try to placate and compromise, but the bullies and crackpots only get crazier. They went silent on gun control, afraid of the NRA, yet the NRA and its friends on the right only became more extreme. They apologized for the excesses of big government and adopted formerly Republican market-based reforms like tax credits for poor people rather than welfare, and an individual mandate to purchase private health insurance rather than expanding a public program like Medicare. And Republicans abandoned those ideas and moved even further to the right.

-snip-

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/21/the_rights_stunning_meltdown/

[jimlup]

1. One thing that I have learned in observing the right for many decades

When they take a position that you think is as absurd as it possibly could be they prove you wrong.

The other thing I've discovered is to not underestimate their push for absurdity. If we don't pay attention they get their stupid way. I thought back in '79 that the country would never be stupid enough to elect Ronald Reagan. I then thought back in 2000 that no way would the country be so stupid as to elect W. I guess I got one out of two but certainly not in the way I would have guessed.

[EmeraldCityGrl]

3. Reminds me how I thought Reagan would NEVER fire the air

traffic controllers. That was my moment of clarity in understanding
what we were now dealing with.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

4. I've given up on what insanity will pass for reason within the GOP

and what brainwashed America will swallow willfully. It is staggering sometime how indolent some have become.


“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,”

This guy is channeling Shane or dirty Harry, but that is just movie fiction.

Meanwhile parents are burying their children and hope for the future. I have a 19 month old, and it scares the hell out of me who will be the next psychopath to mow down innocents.

[libdem4life]

2. Agreed 100% Outrage. So what is going to be the Left's solution...one that doesn't

immediately rely on a well-needed, but expensive and time consuming boost to the mental health system, require confiscation of 300 million guns or require schools redesigned as prisons? Despite the fact that The Left has appropriately warned about this likelihood for decades. They are good ideas, just magical thinking in the near future.

And the crazies can go either way ... lynch mobs come to mind. Cooler heads must prevail. So kids go back to school in January. That's up front and personal. Now what?

[davidpdx]

5. The rightwing wackos are already going off the cliff

I defriended one yesterday over a conversation on guns. I just don't want to listen to their shit.