I'm So Tired of These Wingnut, Lunatic Haters!
Over at the Daily Beast, John Avlon provides the public service of rounding up "46 anti-Obama books" that have been published to date. He calls it "the Obama haters book club," describes the tomes as "detailed demonizations of the president," says that the midterm elections are "driven by hate," and winds to this conclusion:
You might not be able to distinguish between the self-published pathology and the semi-professional polemics—they are all fear-mongering for personal and partisan profit. And that's the larger point.
We're all getting caught up in the politics of incitement, becoming desensitized in ways that damage the institutions of our democracy. Because if any Republican thinks that this cycle will stop with the next president, they underestimate the ways that politics follows the lines of physics—every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. This will become the new normal. […]
All this is evidence of an acceleration of the impulse to demonize the duly elected president of the opposite party. We are cannibalizing our body politic. We need to stop this cycle of incitement before it destroys our ability to unite as a nation absent a disaster.
The name of Avlon's new book? Wingnuts: How The Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America.
Link via the Twitter feed of Garance Franke-Ruta. Watch Avlon talk to Nick Gillespie about Wingnuts at Reason.tv:
