NEW PUBLIC ENEMY #1 – REPUBLICAN SENATOR CHUCK GRASSLEY/IOWA – [a.k.a. SCHMUCK ASSLEY] – THE “DEATH PANEL” SENATOR!

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Actually, the real Public Enemy No. 1 is the entire Republican Party.  Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley just made it official over the last two weeks with his public comments and by virtue of the fact that he is the Republican counterpart to Democratic Senator Max Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the very committee at the center of the health care legislation process at issue.  Uncle Chuckie stated  just last week at an Iowa town hall meeting that it wasn’t proper for government to determine when to pull the plug on grandma.  Just yesterday he stated that it was time to “scale back” this health care legislation!

It just so happens that New York Times columnist Frank Rich took dead aim at what is transpiring within the right-wing outburst we are witnessing in America today.  Rich nailed it in his column today and I have taken the liberty of excerpting 5 of the more salient passages from his column and including them here in this blog to provide a brief but inciteful observation on this dark and growing insidiousness unfolding before our eyes.

The following passages are from Frank Rich’s New York Times column of today:

“No, the biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism remains panic in some precincts about a new era of cultural and demographic change. As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world – now overwhelmingly technical and complex – that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”

“Even Charles Grassley, the supposedly adult Iowa Republican who is the Senate point man for his party on health care, has now capitulated to the armed fringe by publicly parroting their “pull the plug on grandma” fear-mongering.“

“Bell’s analysis appeared in his essay “The Dispossessed,” published in 1962, between John Kennedy’s election and assassination. J.F.K., no more a leftist than Obama, was the first Roman Catholic in the White House and the tribune of a new liberal order.”

“Bell could have also written his diagnosis in 1992, between Bill Clinton’s election and the Oklahoma City bombing. Clinton, like Kennedy and Obama, brought liberals back into power after a conservative reign and represented a generational turnover that stoked the fears of the dispossessed.”

“While Bell’s essay remains relevant in 2009, he could not have imagined in 1962 that major politicians, from a vice-presidential candidate down, would either enable or endorse a radical and armed fringe. Nor could he have imagined that so many conservative intellectuals would remain silent.”

I rest my case, your honor.

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