Great description of "the crazification factor".

[Hamlette]

Alan Keyes got 27% of the vote when he ran against Obama for Senate in Ill. Someone blogger wrote that that 27% is the American "crazification" factor. We are seeing them now at town halls etc. A reader wrote this great description of that group of Americans to Sullivan and he posted it on his blog:


They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land's original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn't even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.

These are the folks who drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town's borders to the Okies and played the protectionist card right up til Pearl Harbor, when they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-flouride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrly commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-de-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming, they make up much more of America then you would care to think.

I'm always optimistic about America. We're a naturally rich and beautiful place. Every generation we renew ourselves with a watering of immigrants committed to the American dream, immigrants like you. But please, Andrew, do not for a second underestimate the price in blood and tears we've always paid here for progress.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/08/is-your-bubble-bursting.html

[Odin2005]

1. The bottom of the barrel.

[Rincewind]

3. No

They are the slugs squirming in the dirt under the barrel.

[annabanana]

2. It's those "some of the people all of the time" folks. .

The ones who never learned, or never cared.

[Cha]

4. Thank you, Sully, for your reader's brilliant

explaination of the kind of deadenders who have always tried to bring our country down(who could forget the joe mccarthy era?).

[central scrutinizer]

5. "baited breath"?

That describes the freepers, at least aroma-wise, but the correct phrase is "bated breath".

[mscuedawg]

6. "Lunatic fringe is a derogatory term...

...used to characterize members of a usually political or social movement espousing extreme, eccentric, or fanatical views. It was coined by the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, to marginalize American anarchists."

I just love this... :)

[oberliner]

7. The No Nothing Party? Isn't it the Know Nothing Party?

Wasn't that the anti-immigration party of the 1850s?