Frank Rich on Hate and the People Who Enable It

Frank Rich has a must read, must spread column on the kind of rhetoric that is ramping up the hate in those who feel most threatened by Obama's presidency. It includes a call to conservative leaders to show some responsibility in light of recent events.

The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is really a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.

It’s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as “the height of insult,” in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was “warning us for a reason.”

Ironically, some conservative leaders did demonstrate some guts and common sense that bit of bravery might also serve to begin digging them out of the deep, dark hole they're in -especially if said conservative leaders are also closely identified with the GOP. At the moment, serious people can't take most Republicans or conservatives seriously. Their fortunes might start to change if they began acting like adults.