As usual, Frank Rich steps up to the plate and knocks it into the parking lot. From his must-read op-ed in yesterday's New York Times:
"How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far...
If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan 'Take our country back!,' these are the people they want to take the country back from."
Rich's eventual point is spot-on: The tea baggers who hold out for some kind of revolution to return them to their rightful place as the entitled rulers of the land are doomed from the start. They've already lost, because the actual demographic make-up of the country is changing so drastically that those whose hegemony they're defending -- good, old-fashioned white people -- will soon be in the minority. They know this, and it scares the hell out of them.
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