Last Call

Steve Benen notes even Joe Klein is starting to get really and truly scared by The Stupid.

Time's Joe Klein reports from Arkansas, where he attended a town-hall event hosted by Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D). He found an "astonishing" number of attendees who were absolutely certain that President Obama has "larded the government with communists." It was among many of the "vomitous, disgraceful notions" he heard from locals, one of whom said, "We are living Glenn Beck's fantasy life."

Could I just say that the intensity of this getting pretty scary...and dangerous? We are heading toward a cliff and the usual brakes of civil discourse are not working. Indeed, the Republicans have the pedal to the metal -- rushing us toward a tragedy far greater than the California health care forum finger-biting Karen describes below. I'm usually not one to panic or be overly worried about the state of our country -- even when we do awful things like invade Iraq and torture people, we usually right our course before long -- but I have a sinking feeling about where we're headed now. I hope I'm wrong.

It's possible that Arkansas is just uniquely strange right now. It is a state where a majority of residents trust Rush Limbaugh, and distrust President Obama. It's a state where less than half the population believes the president was born in the United States. It's a state with one of the highest rates in the country for those lacking health insurance, but where the idea of reform is wildly unpopular.

Or maybe it's not just Arkansas and there's something very wrong with our political system, put under a serious strain by the "conservative lunatic brigade," stuck in a "perverse nonsense feedback loop."

Birthers, Deathers, Tenthers. Beck, Palin, Limbaugh. Bachmann, Inhofe, DeMint, King, and Broun. A scorched-earth campaign intended to tear the country apart, questioning the legitimacy of the president, the government, and the rule of law. It's all very scary.

The best part? Obama has been President for just seven and a half months. We've literally got years of this ahead of us. And it will only get worse. I'm not sure there is a cure for this kind of pervasive lunacy. The country has gone insane, literally. And at the core of it is a Republican Party that believes it has no choice other than to continue to feed this conflagration.

No matter what Obama does, this will continue. If he fights it, it gets worse. If he ignores it , it gets worse. People have to want to learn new information and have to make a choice to open their minds. Millions of Americans refuse to do so. They see the President as an illegal usurper and do not recognize his legitimacy.

As I have said before, the logical endpoint of all this Obama Derangement is that somebody will attempt to remove him from office. Should the Republicans win in 2010, it will be only a matter of time before Obama is impeached.