Reichstag Burning

The Amarillo Globe-News can only be applauded for providing ever greater access for associates and permanent members of the loony bin to the public forum, not that the AGN has failed to perform such a laudable service in the past, but that their campaign to unloose the straightjackets and empty the padded cells, unleashing the certified “cannot play with scissors” and “imagines he is a newspaper publisher” upon the Panhandle is now in full swing.

The latest spastic heaves are paranoid-schizophrenic rants about leftists in our universities poisoning young minds and liberals destroying our freedoms. What makes these Cold War ramblings so laughably detached from reality is that we must believe these long, vast leftist conspiracies have succeeded in tearing down the country. The fact that it is Republicans and the Bush administration tearing down the country seems to have gotten missed during someone’s sodium-pentothal nappy time.

We need no lengthy exegesis about the assaults on our liberty by the Right. Most of us have noted, in passing, everything from the attempted academic pogroms and the fundamentalist’s attacks on religious liberty to the open breach of law and violation of constitutional rights. What these demented souls are sharing with us, besides their Valium-laced pudding on a plastic spoon, is their weltanschauung that a political party that tortures its enemies, keeps them in secret prisons, holds citizens without due process, and openly violates the nation’s constitutional laws, has in fact nothing to do with these crimes.

Instead, just as the “communists” burned down the Reichstag the “liberals” have ruined America. It is the liberals who have corrupted American citizens. It is the liberals who treat the Constitution as “toilet paper.”

And why shouldn’t the lunatics convince their fellow twittering nuthatches to believe? The men who have perpetrated these crimes, the leaders who consider the Constitution a “damn piece of paper” and mere tinder for their fires, can not -- will not -- be impeached, be held culpable, be found accountable, or even referenced as a footnote in an appendix on brush cutting in the early 21st century. No matter the reality, our local disengaged opinion makers will continue to luxuriate in the snuggly narcosis that is the worship of George W. Bush.

Must we refute every crayon scribbled letter claiming the moon is made of cheese or the Earth is flat, challenge each gibbering twit dribbling vanilla on his bib and mice jumping out his pajamas? The genteel once visited Bedlam to gawk and stare when these madmen were under lock and key. Now the inmates run the asylum and the AGN has become the Elwood Park of newspapers: the demented camp out on their pages and rational folk are discouraged. It beggars the imagination.

Pudding anyone?


Post Script

Few would claim that criticism of the Amarillo Globe-News is a direct assault upon the Fourth Estate or the First Amendment (yes Dave, you vehemently disagree), or that taking issue with Pat Robertson is to object to Christianity or to be anti-God (yes Haynes, you'll argue with that). So why is it unremarkable that Republicans must see even the mildest rebuke against their President, this time from Kofi Annan, as anti-American, as America bashing, even when it is made in appeal to American traditions and values?

L'État, c'est moi. Republicans make no distinction between their monarch and the state. Here is their grand delusion, the complete and total identification of nation with self and party. Let us counter pose Louis’ “I am the state” with George’s “I am the decider,” detested frog with admired warhorse, absolutist with unitary executive, and Sun King with Moon Calf. His flatterers and courtiers, narcissists all, howl at the slights and injuries against their august Lord and persons. Oh what pricks must be suffered.