The GOP and its malcontents

Sometime on Tuesday night, some idiot cut the propane line on the gas grill at the Virginia home of the brother of Rep. Thomas Perriello, a Democratic congressman who voted for the health care bill that was just signed into law. An organizer for the Lynchburg, Va., Tea Party, posted on his blog what he believed to be the congressman’s address, in case “any of his friends and neighbors want to drop by and express their thanks regarding his vote for health care.”

It goes without saying that a lit match anywhere near that line could have meant a disaster for Bo Perriello, his wife or their four, small, children. Happily, that didn’t happen. But that little incident reflects how the Republican Party in particular and the nation in general are dealing with something even more combustible.

With the passage of the health-care reform bill into law, the Republicans have started the ritual blame game, deciding who in the conservative ranks was at fault for the most stunning legislative rebuke the GOP has sustained in years.

They can start with their philosophical brethren, the good folks in the Tea Party movement.

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The behavior of Tea Party activists in the weeks and days and even hours before Sunday’s pivotal House vote — when TP protesters stained the parliamentary process with hateful posters and old-fashioned racist invective — probably made it easy for Democratic fence-sitters to throw their weight behind the Obama legislation that passed.

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But the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party crowd isn’t isolated to the Tea Party. After the vote came down on Sunday, GOP Rep. Steve King of Iowa spoke to a crowd of TP activists.

“You are the awesome American people,” King said. “If I could start a country with a bunch of people, they’d be the folks who were standing with us the last few days. Let’s hope we don’t have to do that! Let’s beat that other side to a pulp! Let’s chase them down. There’s going to be a reckoning!”

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On Saturday, Missouri congressman Emanuel Cleaver was spat upon by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and icon of the civil rights movement, was called a “nigger.” And Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank was labeled a “faggot” by protestors who shouted at him as he made his way to work.



South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, the House Majority Whip and like Lewis a veteran of the civil rights era, told The Huffington Post that he “heard people saying things [over the weekend] that I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus.”

And then there was that little outburst on Sunday by Rep. Randy Neugebauer of Texas, the conservative who shouted “baby killer” at Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan on the floor of the House of Representatives, while Stupak was defending his support of the bill.

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Want some more? On the day Obama signed health-care bill into law, Carl Paladino, a Buffalo millionaire and Republican candidate for governor, equated the impact of the new federal health care law to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“The day that bill was passed will be remembered just as 9/11 was remembered in history,” Paladino told Curtis Sliwa during a morning drive-time interview on AM-970. “It was an attempt by these people in Washington to defy the Constitution.”

In the days since the signing, there have been at least 10 attacks or threats against Stupak and other Democratic lawmakers in upstate New York, Kansas, Ohio and Arizona.

And, oh yeah, that severed gas line at Bo Perriello’s home.

You can’t say President Obama’s inauguration 14 months ago didn’t put people to work. It effectively created a full employment act for Tea Party activist sign painters, graphic artists and Web designers all over the country. In their angry Photoshop-capable hands, the 44th president of the United States has been transformed into a witch doctor, a lab-coated mad scientist, Batman’s nemesis the Joker, a surrogate for Osama bin Laden, a Russian general and a darker, leaner version of Adolf Hitler.

The Internet is of course a great conduit for artistic outrage. Recently, for example, the SarahPAC Web site, run by former Alaska governor and political personality Sarah Palin, displayed a map of the United States featuring 20 crosshair designs scattered over various states — 20 crosshairs meant to symbolize the 20 House Democrats thought to be politically vulnerable in November.

And if that ballistic metaphor isn’t enough, check her Twitter page. That’s where, in the wake of conservative defeat last weekend, Palin wrote: “Commonsense Conservatives & Lovers of America: Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!”

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But there’s another element to all this. Clyburn’s sense of the pervasiveness of this attitude — “This stuff is not all that isolated,” he told MSNBC. “It's pretty widespread. I hope it's not too deep" — anticipates the reality documented in a March 2 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC report, the cover story of its quarterly Intelligence Report publication, documents “an astonishing 244 percent increase in the number of antigovernment Patriot groups in 2009.”