The silence from our Republican Representatives in Congress is deafening. The political atmosphere is rife with the odor of hate, bigotry, murder and lies. The noise is coming from the core Right in America. We are no longer talking fringe elements, but the mainstream and it is frightening. We now have exactly the same type of extreme rhetoric that we see in the Middle East here in America. The news, the blogs, comments on news stories are all full of racist rhetoric, calls for physical violence, "facts" fabricated whole cloth that are being accepted as truth. Do we hear voices of reason from the Conservative leaders in D.C.? Not many and certainly not strong enough. Again the silence is deafening.
Why are there no longer voices of reason from Conservatives in D.C.? There has been a steady stream of new Congress people whose views are so far out there as to be the domain of the insane and it is being reported in the media as valid political dialog. We have Bachmanns, Palins, McConnells, and Boehners. They look the American people in the face and spout lies and half truths. They stoke the fires of hate rhetoric. They go as far as to suggest the duly elected President of the United States is not an American, but is in fact a Muslim extremest hell bent on the destruction of America. It is utterly ridiculous, yet the media does not treat it as such.
There was a time when this type of absurdity was met with the scrutiny it deserves, but no longer. There was a time when reasonable Republicans corrected their constituents when the hate speech heated to the firing point. Now they just throw more kindling on the fire. With the economy in the tank, the environment in shambles, and a nation bitterly divided one wonders how much lower can we go? I have no doubt that the Republican leadership will astonish us with a clear answer to that question.