{"id":185607,"date":"2014-10-01T19:38:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-02T00:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/10\/01\/this-is-a-question-that-desperately-needs-to-answered\/"},"modified":"2014-10-01T19:38:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-02T00:38:00","slug":"this-is-a-question-that-desperately-needs-to-answered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/10\/01\/this-is-a-question-that-desperately-needs-to-answered\/","title":{"rendered":"This is a Question that Desperately Needs to Answered"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charles Pierce wonders why Democrats refuse to call batsh%$ insane Republicans batsh%$ insane<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Back in 2010, as part of a biannual act of madness by which the magazine endeavors to analyze every congressional race in the country, I had occasion to talk to Tarryl Clark, who was challenging Michele Bachmann on behalf of the splendidly name Democratic Farmer-Labor Party for Bachmann’s job in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District. How, I asked Clark, does one make good use of the rich trove of lunacy that is Bachmann’s entire public career.<\/span>

<\/span>“Well,” Clark told me. “I’m not going to call her crazy, if that’s what you mean.”<\/span>

<\/span>In fact, that was exactly what I meant.<\/span>

<\/span>The great failing of the Democratic party over the past three-and-a-half decades has been the party’s failure to take political advantage of the obvious prion disease that has afflicted the Republican party since it first ate all the monkey-brains in the mid-1970’s. \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Seriously.<\/p>\n

Michelle Bachmann, for example, got started on politics by opposing the Disney feature Aladdin<\/i> (the one with Robin Williams) because she felt that it promulgated witchcraft.<\/p>\n

The so-called expert political operatives in the Democratic Party seem to think that it is either unseemly, or perhaps unnecessary, to point out the complete insanity of many Republican candidates.<\/p>\n

I guess that they think it’s a loser, but if it is, why the f%$# did Bachmann get elected for anything?<\/p>\n

Not only does it not serve the Democratic party to ignore this mishugas, it ends up defining deviancy down, because silence is most certainly perceived as assent.<\/p>\n

People need to remember Hubert Humphrey’s stirring speech at the 1964 Democratic convention, and its refrain, “But not Barry Goldwater,” put the final nail in the coffin of Goldwater’s campaign.<\/p>\n

Calling out the crazy is both the right thing and the smart thing to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles Pierce wonders why Democrats refuse to call batsh%$ insane Republicans batsh%$ insane: Back in 2010, as part of a biannual act of madness by which the magazine endeavors to analyze every congressional race in the country, I had occasion to talk to Tarryl Clark, who was challenging Michele Bachmann on behalf of the splendidly …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1002,978,1104,1024],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-writing","category-politics","category-psychology","category-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185607"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}