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The
Rage won't End on Election Day
by Frank Rich
Carl Paladino began his 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 under the proud Tea Party banner was inevitable...
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, 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 Obama’s win.
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 will lash out at any convenient scapegoat.
Yes, we are living in a nation of crazy people.
Bush burned down our house, and when Obama tried to
rebuild it,
they accused him of going on "an out-of-control spending spree."
Did they not want the house fixed?
Did they not want the banks and Wall Street saved?
Did they not want to GM and Ford saved, along with those millions of
jobs?