Obligations elsewhere mean that a full post under this name can only appear generally once a week, usually on Saturdays. This week's was published yesterday. 

But it is hard to ignore a growing noise that could well become dangerous. As Jon Stewart explained last week, dissenting from what the government is doing is not only acceptable in this country, it should be encouraged. While many of us believe we have a president who has the potential to be a great one, others, quite naturally, do not agree and are unhappy with his proposals, and with a Congress that appears to agree with them.

There is no intent to criticize Stewart, who is as important a voice as there is, in saying that tt is  wrong to trivialize (or even exult in) the extreme language being used to express that dissent. Media Matters did a good job collecting many of them and kos himself noted a similar tone in some of what else is out there. Comments posted to that post allowed some concerns to be vented, but this essay is a longer version of them, because, honestly, this is becoming frightening. To those of us who have been around a few years this is a scary repeat of the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s. The "Impeach Earl Warren" campaign, based mainly on the Supreme Court's decisions desegregating public schools and against religious ceremonies on public grounds, including at schools, was a particularly memorable example of reasonable dissent morphing into incendiary rage. Indeed, the intolerance that was not only encouraged by the John Birch Society, but propogated by such broadcast and newspaper figures as Fulton Lewis, Jr. and then his son, F.L. III, and the many others who followed the extremists Father Coughlin and Westbrook Pegler in the prior generation, ultimately found their voice from the podium of the Republican National Convention when its presidential candidate proclaimed that

extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice

.


It is, sadly true that when President Roosevelt died exactly 64 years ago today, there were some who were quietly happy. Eighteen years later, far more expressed (even publicly) satisfaction in the murder of President Kennedy. Indeed, the Warren Commission detailed the many extreme comments made in Dallas in the weeks before that horrible event, including the publication of this handbill similar to an advertisement published in a major newspaper.



The result of all of this, so sadly similar to that we heard during the campaign just finished, and the garbage passing for political commentary today, ended tragically as we all know and prompted this from Chet Huntley in the middle of that evening's Huntley-Brinkley Report.



(The magazine he is referring to was, by the way, the National Review. Things haven't changed much, huh?)

And here we are 45 years plus later, and Chet Huntley's prayer has still not been realized.

Huntley was right. Some of us are guilty of incendiary talk---we cheered the guy who threw shoes at the President of the United States, and we expressed hatred for that President and the repulsive Vice President with whom he served. But the levels of rhetoric have increased markedly since President Obama's election began to seem likely and certainly since his inauguration.

There is no place for this stuff. It has to stop. It is irresponsible. If a guy like Limbaugh or Beck thinks he is being funny or just making a buck, he does not seem to care about the impulses it unleashes in the less balanced among us. Others should know better.

It is our duty to cause those who ignore or want to laugh about these excesses to pay attention to what is going on here. If the whole goal was nothing more than a stupid empty impeachment, which was bad enough in distracting the country from more serious issues, we could certainly hoot them down by now. But impeachment is off the table now and these screwballs are getting angrier by the moment. It is important that we act now to prevent this from getting worse.