By FRANK RICH
Published: October 16, 2010
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CloseLinkedinDiggMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink CARL Paladino began
his New York gubernatorial campaign by bragging he'd "clean out Albany
with a baseball bat." When an ally likened his main Albany target, the
(Jewish) leader of the State Assembly, to "an antichrist or Hitler,"
he enthusiastically endorsed the slur. We also learned of Paladino's
repertory of gag e-mails — among them a pornographic picture of a
woman having sex with a horse and a photo of an African tribal ritual
captioned "Obama Inauguration Rehearsal." How blind we were not to
recognize that his victory in a Republican primary under the proud Tea
Party banner was inevitable.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Frank Rich
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A week ago New Yorkers were presented with a vivid reminder of how a
bat can be used as a weapon. A pack of young thugs was charged with
torturing three men in the Bronx for being gay, one of whom, The Times
reported, was sodomized with "a small baseball bat."
It's probably safe to assume that no one in this lynching party has
heard of Paladino. Presumably he has heard of them, but a man of Tea
Party principles will not compromise, no matter what may be happening
in the real world. Don't tread on Carl! And so last Sunday, as the
city was reeling from both the Bronx bloodbath and the earlier leap of
a bullied gay Rutgers freshman off the George Washington Bridge,
Paladino visited a fringe Orthodox synagogue in Brooklyn to stand his
ground. He attacked gays for supposedly plotting to brainwash children
into accepting the validity of homosexuality.
We don't know what will happen on Election Day, but one fairly safe
bet is this: Paladino will not be the next governor of New York.
However tardily, he's been disowned not only by the state's extant, if
endangered, cadre of mainstream Republicans but even by some of the
hard right. No one apparently told him that while bigotry isn't always
a disqualifier for public office, appearing on YouTube vowing to "take
out" a reporter from Rupert Murdoch's New York Post can be. As a rule,
it's career suicide to threaten to murder your own political base.
But if New Yorkers may take comfort from the pratfall of this
particular barbarian at their gate, the national forecast is not so
sunny. Paladino is no anomaly in American politics in 2010. He's just
the most clownish illustration of where things have been heading for
two years and are still heading. Like the farcical Christine O'Donnell
in another blue Northeastern state, he's a political loss-leader, if
you will, whose near-certain defeat on Nov. 2 allows us to indulge in
a bit of denial about the level of rage still coursing, sometimes
violently, through our national bloodstream.
That wave of anger began with the parallel 2008 cataclysms of the
economy's collapse and Barack Obama's ascension. The mood has not
subsided since. But in the final stretch of 2010, the radical right's
anger is becoming less focused, more free-floating — more likely to be
aimed at "government" in general, whatever the location or officials
in charge. The anger is also more likely to claim minorities like
gays, Latinos and Muslims as collateral damage. This is a significant
and understandable shift, if hardly a salutary one. The mad-as-hell
crowd in America, still not seeing any solid economic recovery on the
horizon, will lash out at any convenient scapegoat.
The rage was easier to parse at the Tea Party's birth, when, a month
after Obama's inauguration, its founding father, CNBC's Rick Santelli,
directed his rant at the ordinary American "losers" (as he called
them) defaulting on their mortgages, and at those in Washington who
proposed bailing the losers out. (Funny how the Bush-initiated bank
bailouts went unmentioned.) Soon enough, the anger tilted toward
Washington in general and the new president in particular. And it kept
getting hotter. In June 2009, still just six months into the Obama
presidency, the Fox News anchor Shepard Smith broke with his own
network's party line to lament a rise in "amped up" Americans "taking
the extra step and getting the gun out." He viewed the killing of a
guard by a neo-Nazi Obama hater at the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington as the apotheosis of the "more and more
frightening" post-election e-mail surging into Fox.
The moment passed. Glenn Beck, also on Fox, spoke for most on the
right when he dismissed the shooter as a "lone gunman nutjob." Those
who showed up with assault rifles at presidential health care rallies
that summer were similarly minimized as either solitary oddballs or
overzealous Second Amendment patriots. Few cared when The Boston Globe
reported last fall that the Secret Service was overwhelmed by death
threats against the president as well as a rise in racist hate groups
and antigovernment fervor. It's no better now. In a cover article last
month, Barton Gellman wrote in Time that the magazine's six-month
investigation found that "the threat level against the president and
other government targets" is at its highest since the antigovernment
frenzy that preceded Timothy McVeigh's bombing of a federal building
in Oklahoma City in 1995.
While Obama-hatred remains a staple of the right, the ebbing of his
political clout may have diminished him as a catchall for America's
roiling, inchoate rage. The president is no longer the sole
personification of evil. For those who see government as Public Enemy
No. 1, other targets will do, potentially some as remote from
Washington as Oklahoma City.
Dana Milbank, a Washington Post columnist who has written a new book
on Beck, has been tracking the case of Byron Williams, a bank robber
on parole who injured two California Highway Patrol officers in a July
shootout. Williams was out to start a revolution, his mother said,
because "Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda
items." But instead of picking Congress as his target, Williams was
gunning for progressives closer to home, at the Tides Foundation and
A.C.L.U. in San Francisco. The Tides Foundation? It's an obscure
nonprofit whose agenda includes education and AIDS prevention. But
it's not obscure to Beck fans, who heard him single it out for
vilification 29 times in the 18 months before Williams grabbed his
gun.
As Milbank has written, "it's not fair to blame Beck for violence
committed by his fans," but he would nonetheless "do well to stop
encouraging extremists." The same could be said of the many
politicians who are emulating the Beck template — especially given the
tinderbox state of the nation. Whether it's Sarah Palin instructing
her acolytes to "reload" or a congressman yelling "baby killer!" at a
colleague on the House floor or Sharron Angle, the Tea Party
senatorial candidate from Nevada, proposing that citizens consider
"Second Amendment remedies" to "protect themselves against a
tyrannical government," we know where this can lead.
Even Paladino's short, crumbling campaign can take credit for a share
of the real-world damage in New York's civil war over the "ground zero
mosque" this summer. His television commercials calling the proposed
Islamic center "a monument to those who attacked our country" helped
push his primary campaign over the top, noticeably raising the city's
temperature. The fever peaked not quite three weeks after his ads
first appeared, when a passenger slashed a New York cab driver in the
face and throat simply because he was a Muslim.
Paladino's fanning of Islamophobia was common among his national
political brethren this summer. Equally common was the violence
against Muslims and mosques that ensued, whether in Tennessee, Texas
or California. Paladino's antediluvian brand of homophobia is also
making a comeback, from O'Donnell, who has called homosexuality an
"identity disorder," to Carly Fiorina, the Senate candidate in
California whose campaign is allied with the National Organization for
Marriage, notorious for its fear-mongering horror-movie ads portraying
same-sex marriage as the apocalypse. Two weeks ago, Jim DeMint, the
South Carolina senator who serves as the G.O.P.'s Tea Party kingmaker,
reiterated his desire to ban openly gay schoolteachers. Michele
Bachmann, Tea Party doyenne of the House, refused to condemn
Paladino's homophobia when asked about it last week on the "Today"
show. As Stephen Colbert observed last week, after the G.O.P.
repudiated a Congressional candidate in Ohio for wearing an SS
uniform, the only line you can't cross as a Republican is dressing as
a Nazi. (Though, as Colbert added, "dressing the president as a Nazi"
is O.K.)
Don't expect the extremism and violence in our politics to subside
magically after Election Day — no matter what the results. If Tea
Party candidates triumph, they'll be emboldened. If they lose, the
anger and bitterness will grow. The only development that can change
this equation is a decisive rescue from our prolonged economic crisis.
Not for the first time in history — and not just American history —
fear itself is at the root of a rabid outbreak of populist rage
against government, minorities and conspiratorial "elites."
So far neither party has offered a comprehensive antidote to our
economic pain. The Democrats have fallen short, and the cynics leading
the G.O.P. haven't so much as tried. We shouldn't be surprised that
this year even a state as seemingly well-mannered as Connecticut has
produced a senatorial candidate best known for marching into a
wrestling ring to gratuitously kick a man in the groin.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/opinion/17rich.html?ref=opinion
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
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