The Difference

For eight years, some liberals got a bit paranoid, thinking that Bush and the Republicans were going to do all kinds of bad things -- like invade countries based on false evidence, torture people, create secret prisons, deny habeus corpus, gut environmental protections, weaken workers' and consumers' rights, let entire American cities be destroyed, etc. Some liberals were paranoid that the president was going to do things like invade Iran or other things that never happened. But their paranoia was based on mountains of legitimate evidence. It was easy to believe that Bush would invade Iran, because he did invade Iraq -- on even weaker evidence than was available for Iraq. So while there was some paranoia, there were many reasons to be paranoid.

For eight months, many conservatives are just as paranoid, if not worse, thinking that Obama and the Democrats are going to do all kinds of bad things -- turn the country over to Muslims, turn the country into a simultaneous totalitarian Socialist/Communist/Nazi stronghold, take away all guns, put all conservatives in prison, ban conservatives from the airwaves, force everyone in America to have an abortion and to marry a gay person. All of this is based on...nothing. There is no evidence to back up any of the conservative claims about Obama and his agenda. In fact in ALL of these cases, there is evidence to the contrary of the conservative claims, yet they believe them like they were foretold in the Bible. There is more paranoia than we've seen in America in a long time, and there are no reasons for that paranoia.

The worst part about this for me, is that I'm seeing people that I used to respect, people that I may have disagreed with politically but they were always within the realm of legitimate debate, now I'm seeing these people defending things that no sane human being should defend. I can't figure it out, either. I doubt that these people were always crazy and just hiding it, only to reveal it now. What are the other explanations? Racism? Blind partisanship? I don't know. But it is certainly sad.