Nigeria Content Online

The last time a Democrat sat in the
White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents.
Prominent figures on the right accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of
everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once Republicans took
control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to
unrelenting harassment – at one point taking 140 hours of sworn
testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its
Christmas card list.

Now it’s happening again – except that
this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh:
“Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best
anti-American president we’ve ever had.”

To get a sense of how much it matters
when people like Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an
utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind,
too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans
will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be
very, very ugly.

So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?

Anyone who remembered the 1990s could
have predicted something like the current political craziness. What we
learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of
Americans just don’t consider government by liberals – even very
moderate liberals – legitimate. Barack Obama’s election would have
enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact that he
isn’t, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage.

By the way, I’m not talking about the
rage of the excluded and the dispossessed: Tea Partiers are relatively
affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich.
Wall Street has turned on Obama with a vengeance: Last month Steve
Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group, the
private equity giant, compared proposals to end tax loopholes for hedge
fund managers with the Nazi invasion of Poland.

And powerful forces are promoting and
exploiting this rage. Jane Mayer’s new article in The New Yorker about
the superrich Koch brothers and their war against Obama has generated
much-justified attention, but as Mayer herself points out, only the
scale of their effort is new: billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife
waged a similar war against Bill Clinton.

Meanwhile, the right-wing media are
replaying their greatest hits. In the 1990s, Limbaugh used innuendo to
feed anti-Clinton mythology, notably the insinuation that Hillary
Clinton was complicit in the death of Vince Foster. Now, as we’ve just
seen, he’s doing his best to insinuate that Obama is a Muslim. Again,
though, there’s an extra level of craziness this time around: Limbaugh
is the same as he always was, but now seems tame compared with Glenn
Beck.

And where, in all of this, are the
responsible Republicans, leaders who will stand up and say that some
partisans are going too far? Nowhere to be found.

To take a prime example: The hysteria
over the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan almost makes one
long for the days when former President George W. Bush tried to soothe
religious hatred, declaring Islam a religion of peace. There were good
reasons for his position: There are a billion Muslims in the world, and
America can’t afford to make all of them its enemies.

But here’s the thing: Bush is still
around, as are many of his former officials. Where are the statements,
from the former president or those in his inner circle, preaching
tolerance and denouncing anti-Islam hysteria? On this issue, as on many
others, the GOP establishment is offering a nearly uniform profile in
cowardice.

So what will happen if, as expected,
Republicans win control of the House? We already know part of the
answer: Politico reports that they’re gearing up for a repeat
performance of the 1990s, with a “wave of committee investigations” –
several of them over supposed scandals that we already know are
completely phony. We can expect the GOP to play chicken over the
federal budget, too; I’d put even odds on a 1995-type government
shutdown sometime over the next couple of years.

It will be an ugly scene, and it will
be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a time of peace and prosperity; this
is a time of neither. In particular, we’re still suffering the
after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and we
can’t afford to have a federal government paralysed by an opposition
with no interest in helping the president govern. But that’s what we’re
likely to get.

If I were Obama, I’d be doing all I
could to head off this prospect, offering some major new initiatives on
the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political
dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it
safe, all the way into catastrophe.

© 2010 New York Times News Service