An Unhinged Minority

     Has America gone off the deep end? It's a good thing the new health care bill includes mental health and addiction treatment, because we may need to send a segment of society to the couch for a few sessions.
     When did it become acceptable in the United States to threaten violence against duly elected representatives because they voted for legislation you don't like? (Forgetting for the moment Alabama's State Senator Charles Bishop and his punch on the Senate Floor) Cut gas lines? Spitting on Congressmen? Bricks through windows (an irony that Frank Rich points out in his latest column: the teabagger protestors paint President Obama as Hitler, but it was the Nazis who perpetrated Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, on the Jews. So who's Hitler here?)
     And then there's Sarah Palin's rifle cross hairs on Members of Congress, paired with her exultation to "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" Is this supposed to be "cute"? How can any elected official look the other way?

     And to think that critics during the election campaign were complaining about the animals being hunted down from helicopters in Alaska! 
     Can you honestly say that this is truly acceptable to American society today? If there is an assassination of an elected official, will there be blood on the hands of those who urged the mob on? And will they protest that "we never suggested any actual violence"?
      Anyway, both Rich and Maureen Dowd point out that the "take back our country" screed is doomed by demographics. The country they want back is gone. America has changed, as it always does. The President is a black man, the Speaker is a woman, and one of the chief proponents of the health care bill is gay.
     Not that any of that will exactly sate a mob calling for blood.