Crazy as a Pre-Existing Condition

Business columnist Steven Perlstein of The Washington Post delivers another gem of a column as he assails the cowardly mainstream media for its failure to call the right-wing fringe on loopy paranoid claims.

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision." Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.

UPDATE: Jesse Walker responds to Perlstein on Reason with the "Five Laws of the Crazy Tree."

In one way, the article is refreshing: At a time when many liberals have been describing the protests at the health care "town halls" as an unprecedented event, even as a sign of incipient fascism, Perlstein reminds readers that flare-ups like this actually happen fairly frequently in American history. But the article is aggravating, too, and not just because it casually conflates the bona fide kooks with anyone who happens to protest at a tea party or a town hall. Reading the piece you get the impression that the crazy tree grows only on the right, and that the health care battle is a simple case of hysterics attacking enlightened reform.

1) The crazy tree is always blooming somewhere but not always on the right.
2) Lots of people try to exploit it for their own reasons.
3) It has a life of its own despite the efforts of others to control it.
4) It isn't completely crazy. Aspects of otherwise crazy claims can be valid.
5) It blooms in the center too, often as a way for the powerful to dismiss dissent as crazy.

--Ballard Burgher