Folks frequently refer to Bill McCellan, a semi-retired columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as a liberal. It must really be so because he tells us in Sunday’s column that he was cheering for Bernie Sanders. Gotta be liberal, even downright progressive, no?

Well, maybe not. McClellan is more than willing to embrace the GOP’s Hillary Clinton narrative. Hillary’s corrupt they say. How do we know this – it’s got to be true because rightwing shills have been making unfounded allegations for the past twenty years and the news media faithfully echo whatever cons say like it’s big doings. To be fair, a good-sized subset of the Bernie bros and gals also really want to believe this moonshine – more in the interest, I suspect of a Bernie victory than anything else. McClellan, however, unless he’s just pulling our collective leg, seems unusually credulous.

Nevertheless, the column’s shtick is that McClellan will hold his nose and chose the whiff of Clinton corruption over the nightmare of the Republican’s Big Orange Stupid. Big of him I say.

McCellan says Bill was bad, but Hillary is worse, corruption personified. He digs up some of the discredited “scandals” of yesteryear – Whitewater anyone? – and adds some of the more recent GOP fantasies to the list. For example:

Yesterday Democratic Secretary of State Jason Kander announced his intention to run for the Senate seat currently held by Republican Roy Blunt in 2016. Although Blunt is so well- established in the state political hierarchy, and his campaign coffers are so full that defeating him will be a rough slog in a state that, as the DailyKos notes, “has become increasingly Republican in recent years, especially at the federal level,” Kander  will be a credible opponent:

Kander enters the contest with the backing of Missouri’s Democratic statewide elected officials, and he’s unlikely to face any real primary opposition. Kander has only won statewide once, but he proved in 2012 that he is capable of prevailing in tough races. He defeated then-state Rep. Shane Schoeller 49-47 at the same time Mitt Romney was carrying the Show Me State 54-44. As an Afghanistan veteran, Kander also has a background that contrasts well with Blunt, who has served in Congress for decades.

I suspect that implicit in the contrast the writer was implying when he noted that Blunt  has “served in congress for decades,” is the fact that the folks Blunt has served most diligently during those decades are the ones who can fork over the dollars. It’s not for nothing that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) selected Blunt as one of the most corrupt members in congress – an honor that, as far as I remember, didn’t get too much play in the local press where folks seem to be very wary of offending a powerful politician, not to mention the daddy of former governor Matt Blunt, who, incidentally, had to field his own corruption scandals (see here, here, and here), some of them in tandem with  his father.

Yesterday evening I got a sample of that curious reluctance of local media folks to tell it like it is when it comes to Roy Blunt. Donnybrook is a local St. Louis public television program where a few minor, local media people of almost all persuasions, from the center left to far right (no hard-core progressives – that doesn’t seem to be done in St. Louis “power” circles), get together to discuss local current events. Naturally, Kander’s announcement came up. I was shocked to hear the tenor of the comments, including some from the putatively “liberal” donnybrookers.

“Roy Blunt is a darn good politician” one participant noted, adding that although Missouri has liberal media in Kansas City and St. Louis, “Blunt gets pretty darn good press; he’s almost error free, controversy free.” While my mouth dropped, another added that Blunt is a “seasoned, good politician, the press likes him, he’s personable, not crazy” and, get this, “he’s scandal free.” To be fair, a panel member, Wendy Wiese, did point out the scandals surrounding the tenure of Matt Blunt in which his father was seriously implicated, including the connections to “K-street,” and “quid pro quo,” but even she agreed that all that had “quieted down.”

So we live in a state and a time where simply not being one of the crazies and hanging on through scandal after scandal not only qualifies one for office, but, given a firm enough power base, renders one unbeatable. The other operative issue seemed to be that the Missouri press “likes” Blunt – a fact that is borne out by the fact that the scandals have “quieted” down. Many of them didn’t get much coverage, if any, to start with, apart from maybe an occasional editorial in those bastions of that “liberal media” referred to in the discussion. Remember Roy Blunt’s “Montsanto Protection Act” just a couple of years ago? Hardly controversy free by my standards.

I realize that the Donnybrook pundits were trying to talk about the political “horse race” and not the real virtues of the candidates – but I don’t think that handicapping the race need preclude recognition and serious mention of the accusations that have dogged and continue to dog Roy Blunt. I also realize that our definition of political corruption has narrowed to include only easily identifiable acts of bribery – which have come close to dinging Blunt in the past – but it wouldn’t hurt if a few media figures such as those pontificating on Donnybrook were willing to look at the things that Roy Blunt seems to care passionately about – if one can use the word “passionately” about such a lazy politician – and trace the relationship between those issues and his financial sponsors.

Even in strictly horse race terms, a fresh, and truly scandal free politician like Kander might actually give a tired, damaged piece of goods like Roy Blunt a run for his money if only state media were willing to ask the real Roy Blunt to “come on down.” Instead, I heard only condescendingly tolerant treatment of Kander who, the Donnybrook regulars noted, “will have a tough row to hoe.” But hey, the official pseudo-liberal on the panel, Bill McClellan, added that if he wants “to play in the big leagues before he’s ready,” why not let him; after all, McClellan implied, what harm can the kid really do?

Also at the level of horse race journalism, I didn’t hear one word about how 2016 will be a presidential election which could bring out a somewhat more balanced constituency. Maybe if we Democrats can finally oppose Blunt with a viable, honest candidate who isn’t afraid of standing up for his beliefs, our junior Senator won’t be able to coast into office once again by capitalizing on his opponent’s fear of red state bile – center-hugging Robin Carnahan, anyone – and the perception that he’ll be okay just because he’s not quite as stark raving crazy as the type of nutjobs that Missouri has become famous for, folks like Cynthia Davis, Rick Brattin or, most notoriously, Todd Akin – who, incidentally, may be hoping to firm up Roy Blunt’s “not crazy” credentials by providing the necessary contrast with the real, worst thing in the GOP primaries.

The events in Ferguson have now been dissected from just about every angle by just about every opinionator in the country, but the really telling efforts are those by local observers. Bill McClellan, columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has written two columns to date about the events surrounding the killing of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer. He’s usually a subtle and unassuming writer who often gets to the heart of the matter. However, these two most recent efforts have an effect more like a kick in the shin and go a long way to explain why the St. Louis area has been the scene of the recent furor.

The title of yesterday’s opus, “All Killings Should Spark Outrage,” expresses, on the surface, an unexceptionable sentiment. Or maybe not. The column hinges on the undeniably true observation that not all of the many urban murders that take place regularly spark violent protest. But although McClellan gives a tip of the hat to the “racial angle,” his story rests on the assumption that the murder of Michael Brown doesn’t differ in important ways from other criminal deaths, that it can be divorced from the the systemic racism and resulting police brutality that the protesters, with very good justification, perceive as a uniquely significant factor in Brown’s death and an ever present factor in their own lives.

McClellan asks, “why did this victim’s life matter more than the lives of all the other victims?” Of course, the answer is obvious; it didn’t and doesn’t,” and I’m willing to bet that almost nobody protesting his death, peaceably or violently, would think that to be the case. Many, I’m sure would be insulted by this effort to compare apples and oranges and come up with something other than a putrid mess. Brown’s death is different. It’s not more significant, but significant in a different way.

McClellan, usually described as liberal, drives this all-violent-deaths-are-equivalent vehicle onto the road marked with the rightwing signage we are becoming so accustomed to, specifically that favorite, the “black-on-black crime” signboard.  He asserts that:

It is not condoning police shootings to point out that they constitute a minuscule fraction of the shootings that ravage black neighborhoods. It’s not the cops, and it’s not the Klan. It’s the residents themselves.

Well, duh … but what exactly does this have to do with the price of beans? Michael Brown, unarmed, hands raised, was shot dead by a police officer, and it is the manner of his death with all its unique baggage that is the topic of the moment. But wait, there’s more:

If the black community would come together on those shootings and say, “No more,” there would be no more. …

I’m willing to bet that the majority of white crime victims are also shot by folks who are not the cops or the Klan. So does that mean that McClellan thinks that if white people “would come together on those shootings,” every thing would just be hunky-dory? What does “coming together” actually mean? Lots of the folks out in the streets of Ferguson would tell you that that’s just what they’re doing. When a community, and by community I mean the entire St. Louis area, continues to turn a blind eye to abuses, the “coming together” can be expected to take a somewhat more forceful turn.  

McClellan does pays some rather perfunctory lip service to the fact the situation is a lot more complicated than what is implied by all the tired and frequently just plain wrong tropes associated with the black-on-black crime narrative. But by emphasizing that particular theme, he has reduced the impact of the poverty, the failed inner-city educational system, our indifferent and often even hostile governing elite, and, lest we forget all those armoured vehicles on the streets of Ferguson, the frequently brutal and brutalizing police presence that lies at the heart of the specific anger we have seen on the Ferguson streets.

Which brings me to McClellan’s latest column, reassuringly titled “Memo to the world – we’re fine.” McClellan seems to be of the mind that all the agonizing he’s been reading in the national press is just the preening of a lot of liberal drama queens.  The reporters and politicians who were arrested and gassed were just glory-hounds who have an incentive to inflate the moment:

It was foolish to arrest them, I’d say, but it gives them some status. Fifty years ago, they would have stood up to Sheriff Bull Connor and his dogs and his fire hoses in Birmingham. It is not their fault they are reduced to loitering too long at a fast-food restaurant.

In his mind, while the Ferguson and St. Louis County police have mishandled the situation, they are also victims of bad optics. “Two heavyset white guys with silver hair expressing their faith in each other does not inspire confidence with a skeptical young black audience,” and “perceptions matter,” McClellan tells us. I don’t know about perceptions, but I know that dead kids do really matter, and kids killed by folks entrusted with power over their life and death matter in a special way.

Constitutional and civil liberties violations also matter, even if the historical significance doesn’t rise to the level of Bull Connor and his canines. When such violations occur, the fact that the individuals victimized, like most humans, may have mixed motives is what doesn’t matter. Snide digs at those who had what it takes to go to Ferguson and see what was going on first-hand only makes McClellan look small-minded and doesn’t in the least diminish the importance of what they saw and reported.

While McClellan acknowledges that “we are not in great spirits,” he wants the nation to know that the violence is small in scope. A friend who lives near the scene of the riots, he reports, was out of town and didn’t know anything was happening so close to home. Well Whoopee! I can assure him that lots of folks all over my mostly lilly white West County neighborhood are also fine and, except for tsk-tsking about all the looting and bad behavior, are basically untroubled. Unlike many people in Ferguson who believe, correctly or incorrectly, that their young men risk a death similar to that of Michael Brown’s every day.

This separate but unequal experience seems to be characteristic of life in St. Louis. And its impact is only reinforced when influential local columnists like McClellan characterize the outpouring of anger in Ferguson as “farce,” deplore the failure of black citizens there to stamp out violent crime by the force of their will, and try to claim that all is really “fine” as long as nobody in St. Louis takes the criticism of outsiders to heart. This is the St. Louis I have slowly come to know and not to love so much.

McClellan seemed to find Leonard Pitts’s characterization of Ferguson as a “scream” to be risible. He wrote:

I’d be amiss if I didn’t mention my colleagues. They’ve waded into the midst of things to get their stories and their photos. Some really great photos, too. My favorite was of a guy with sagging pants jumping through a store window with a bottle of wine in each hand.

As Pitts would say, it was a portrait of Ferguson screaming.

And, McClellan’s amusement aside, it was. The man with the wine may not have known it either, but it was.

* Text slightly edited for clarity; (8/16, 2:15 pm.)

 

Lots of people no longer remember the riots that ensued in Boston when African-American children were bused to predominantly white schools. Mothers and grandmothers spitting, jeering and tossing trash and bricks at buses loaded with children. I bring this up as a prelude to a story about one of my aunts, a redoubtable, tough-as-nails Irish-American woman with a hard-scrabble background; in the 60s, thanks to decades of union effort to better the working classes, she and her family were just beginning to experience a little of that material comfort that so many identify with the American dream. In short, she was just the type of woman one would expect to see rioting in the streets to ward off the invading hordes.

But my aunt’s story is different. She lived in a quiet suburb where integration happened, for a blessing, relatively quietly and her children attended a school with many African-American children. As a result, in 1976 when Jimmy Carter was running for president, my aunt, a staunch Democrat, had to be reassured that Carter, a Southerner from Georgia, was not a racist, but had, in fact, spoken out against segregation. She explained her attitude in terms of her concern about the African-American children who were friends of her children and their parents, people she had met through school-related activities. In this case diversity in the classroom did what it was supposed to do – foster understanding and acceptance. I know that my aunt was an uncommonly open woman and her experience was not necessarily typical, but I bet there’s more like her out there and we’re a better country for it.

I bring this up because of Bill McClellan’s column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch a few days ago, titled “Understanding Anger at Transfers.” The column addressed the court-ordered transfer of a contingent mostly African-American children from the failing Normandy district to the heretofore  mostly lily white Francis Howell School District in St. Charles County. I want to be clear. I’m not going to rail against McClellan for racism. He’s a clever writer who specializes in empathy – real empathy, I think – especially for those who get short shrift almost everywhere else. I’ve always liked reading McClellan’s columns because he never presents himself as too good for the down-and-outers he often writes about.

I had a certain empathy myself for the point McClellan was making which focused on his father and McClellan’s perception that his upstanding, working class father would have had sympathy for the folks in the Francis Howell District. After all, McClellan implies, these white American who are responding with anger because their children may be exposed to poor, African-American children are actually only concerned that their children continue to enjoy the advantages they, their parents, have sacrificed to provide for them. McClellan concludes his column by acknowledging that he understands that anger too. He, like his father, saw solid neighborhoods decline after an influx of African-Americans.

Well-and-good. I understand what the fuss is about as well. I’ve had my own clutch of relatives who would have felt right at home with McClellan’s father. They were mostly people I loved and respected although I disagreed with them often. Because of them I know that frightened people often react angrily, even violently.

I part company with McClellan, however, when he neglects to point out that indulging this type of fear is destructive and prevents positive change – and when he fails to speak out about what’s really motivating the folks who label the transferring children as “trash.” I remember, after all, my aunt, one of the most hard-core members of her tribe, and her about-face when she learned first-hand that folks from other tribes aren’t necessarily as bad as they’re often cracked up to be.

In fact, McClellan seems to think (or not – more about his waffling later), that there’s a chain of facts that justifies the white flight that helped populate St. Charles county:

These are facts. Uncomfortable perhaps, but indisputable. The blacks arrived. The schools declined. The whites left. You can debate the underlying reasons, but you can’t argue the facts.

I’ll give McClellan the benefit of the doubt here. It’s possible that he is trying to say that this is the perception of the facts that fueled white flight, rather than the actual, complex sequence of events that led to the decline of inner-city schools. He must be aware that the sequence of events he outlines is itself questionable?  Perhaps things happened this way in St. Louis – I wasn’t here then – but it’s not the story in Detroit and many other once thriving American cities where, instead, (1) the blacks arrived, (2) the whites left, and (3) the schools declined. And that decline had lots to do with loss of property tax revenue and jobs that fled to the suburbs where white folks continued to live their rosy lives while black poverty intensified in the inner city. Some folks, like McClellan’s father, tried to stick it out, but the majority of whites began the race to the suburbs as soon as the first black family hit their blocks. And when the money and jobs go, so goes the neighborhood and the schools.

McClellan’s column was weak-tea, nothing to get anyone really worked up. But, in the context of a society where real racists seem to feel more and more emboldened, it’s maybe worth it to take the time to note that he’s not telling the whole story. Understanding ugly emotions is not enough. In a world where a young,unarmed black teenager can be harassed by a gun-toting vigilante neighborhood watchman, inappropriately confronted, ultimately shot dead, and the shooter is then found not guilty of anything at all, we can’t afford to go too easy on “white fear.”  

I have to admit that I have grown to appreciate St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan. His low-key prose often packs a very subtle wallop. I also admire the way that he doesn’t hesitate to speak out when his sense of injustice is tickled – how many other columnists do you know of who aren’t afraid to point out that sex-offenders are actually human-beings?

Which is why I was so surprised by his kid-gloves report on his recent sit-down with Rep. Roy Blunt. He seems to go out of his way to help ol’ Roy reestablish his tarnished “outsider” credentials. Because Blunt, a former House Majority Leader who served as Minority Whip until 2008, lost a couple of popularity contests with other very big men on the GOP campus, McClellan concludes that he “does not sound like an insider to me.”

McClellan should know by now that the big dogs always have to fight to stay on top of the heap and they don’t always win every fight. And Blunt was one of the biggest of the big dogs right up until 2008 when the New York Times characterized him as “the second most powerful member of his party in the House of Representatives.”

McClellan handled the accusations that have been leveled against Blunt the fundraiser with equal gingerness.  Without referring to the content of the widely distributed ads run by the League of Conservation Voters, which lay out Blunt’s considerable take from energy industries, McClellan dismisses them as simply “negative” campaigning.

The only reference McClellan makes to Blunt’s well-known ability to pull in the corporate bucks is to quote his contention that “he has gotten contributions from every county in the state” because he can “represent their values and understand their concerns.”  However, according to the Washington Post in a 2005 article about Blunt and Delay, respectively the second and first most important people in the House at that time, Blunt’s fundraising networks had considerably more reach and smelled a lot worse:

Blunt and DeLay are fundraising powerhouses. Their political organizations use multiple fundraising committees, have rewarded family members and have provided an avenue to riches for former aides now in the private sector.

Indeed, as Politico reported earlier this year, if Blunt is losing some of his fundraising mojo, it is probably due to the newfound Republican disgust with the corruption with which this quintesential insider has been identified:

Much of the apprehension among rank-and-file Republicans stems from the former House minority whip’s deep Washington ties and worries about how his record in House GOP leadership will be used against him.

Maybe if McClellan had done his homework, he wouldn’t be so willing to help re-christen Roy Blunt as Missouri’s latest Mr. Smith who wants to go (back) to Washington. I would certainly hate to think that McClellan, so often a model of integrity, pulled his punches because he was just too overwhelmed by the attention of a big GOP player.  

Democrats have dodged some bullets, Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan told the West County Dems on Monday. Just imagine the trouble they’d be in if they’d elected John Edwards and all this illegitimate child stuff broke while he was in office. And we came close, McClellan thinks. If Jack Ryan hadn’t gotten a divorce, with all the dirt about his sex life surfacing, Obama would never have been elected senator and had a chance to run for president. Edwards would have been the only anti-Clinton candidate running. At a time when Americans might not have been willing to keep the dynasties going–Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton–Edwards would have been the alternative.

McClellan didn’t seem to consider that Clinton might have buried Edwards, but, whatever. He has a point: the problem with dodging the Edwards bullet is that we’ve gotten a president who’s not delivering on the change he promised. He just nibbles around the edges.

Not that Republicans have anything to offer. McClellan, who is no died in the wool Democrat, panned pretty much everything Republicans did during their eight year reign. Oh sure, some of it sounded good–until you tried it. Invade Iraq, the neocons urged. Instead of swatting mosquitoes, drain the swamp. That sounded appealing on that side of the Iraq invasion. But from this end? Sheesh. And they took us from paying down the debt to deepening the debt. They were regulating scientists when they should have been regulating bankers.

How can it be, then, that the Republicans are gaining traction? How is that even possible?

Part of the problem, McClellan thinks, is that Obama has been naive. Yes, he’s from corrupt Chicago, but he didn’t hang around there long enough to know how crooked politics works. McClellan, on the other hand, having been raised in Chicago, remembers that as a child he simply accepted police corruption. Everybody liked it.

Instead, Obama, who was accustomed to associating with people willing to discuss issues rationally and compromise where necessary, overestimated the possibility of bipartisanship in D.C. Hey, even G.W.–the “uniter not the divider”–did that. In Texas, Dubya’s folksy style generally worked with people on both sides of the spectrum. Not in Washington.

I’m not so sure I agree with McClellan about Obama’s naivete. He did spend longer than it made sense to, trying to enlist Republicans in health care reform. That was naive. But it looks to me like Obama knows how to placate the big money boys (see Geithner and the bank reform we’re not getting). It strikes me that Obama would know how to get along in pay to play Illinois politics.

In any case, Obama took office in a hyper partisan city, says McClellan, and made the mistake of trusting Congress with a health care bill. Everybody knows how campaign finance contributions rule our rulers. That was never going to work.

So McClellan has a better idea. He thinks–and believes it’s still not too late–that Obama should have appointed a task force to come up with a health care reform plan, which could then be put up for a national referendum. That’s what Switzerland did. The new plan barely passed there, but now the Swiss love their health care system.

Even here, we’ve sort of done that on another issue. When military base closings had to happen, everybody knew that every congressman with a base in his district would fight reason in favor of his own constituents, so a task force was appointed to settle the matter.

McClellan maintains that his solution at least makes real change possible instead of this half baked solution we’re getting. As it is, health care costs will continue to rise, and Obama will have the Obamacare albatross hung round his neck.

McClellan has a point there, but unless Obama gets wind of the idea via this blog posting, I don’t see his idea taking off. We’re going to get a “nibble around the edges” bill and be forced to work on improving it. I will say, though, in the face of the legalized bribery we know as campaign contributions, that it’s tempting to appoint a task force to deal with every major piece of legislation. Then we could fight about who got to be on the task forces. But if we went that route, could we still call ourselves a democracy? Far as that goes, can we now?

After tackling the health care issue, McClellan regaled us with his take on capitalism and socialism. Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you about it.

Post-Dispatch columnist, Bill McClellan, has given up on bi-partisanship. In his own quirky, good humored way, he concedes that we are a house divided and that maybe we need to take Texas Gov. Rick Perry up on his notion of secession and let the other Southern states follow suit.

He had thought Obama’s hope of uniting us would change the political picture, but on inauguration day, he tuned in to Rush Limbaugh and realized his mistake:

[Rush] was outraged, of course, and the target of his outrage was the Rev. Joseph Lowery, whose benediction had included a riff about a day when “black will not be asked to get back … and white will embrace what is right.” That riff brought forth a vein-popping fury that I found chilling – 50,000 watts of hate pulsating out of One Memorial Drive in downtown St. Louis. And not just St. Louis, and not just Limbaugh, and not just at that moment. Different cities, different times, different people, but all with variations on the same theme.

You can’t blame this all on the conservatives. Had McCain won, the left would have been pouring hate on Sarah Palin. You can’t blame the radio stations. Sex sells and hate sells, and you can’t do sex on the radio.

McClellan tries to live and let live, so he sees the two nations that might result this way:

I’m hopeful (that’s my nature) that we can remain on good terms even though we will be very different countries. We’ll have health care reform with a role for government, and you’ll have rugged individualism. You can pass a Sanctity of Marriage Amendment, and we’ll muddle along without one. (I’m celebrating my 30th anniversary this December.) You can make English your official language, and we’ll put up with a babble of voices. You can teach creationism or intelligent design in your schools, and we’ll teach evolution. You can deregulate the bankers and regulate the scientists, and we’ll regulate the bankers and deregulate the scientists. You’ll have Memphis and Dallas, and we’ll have New York and San Francisco. With unfettered scientists and Silicon Valley, we’ll have medical research and computer sciences, but you’ll have great barbecue and Tex-Mex. Hey, I’ll keep my passport current.

I suppose it’s curmudgeonly of me to light into McClellan for his vision of an amicable divorce. After all, he’s just trying to jolly people into getting along, without laying excessive blame on either party. But like so many journalists, McClellan considers a false equivalence to be the same as balanced objectivity. Me, I think you can’t equate right wing fury with left wing temper. I have to agree instead–full disclosure, here: I am a left winger, therefore biased–with Leonard Pitts that the ire and rancor on the left is but a pale imitation of the rage and malice from the right. Pitts describes, for example, an analysis from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

“Terror From the Right” is a listing of bombers, killers, would-be assassins and insurrectionists motivated by anger over abortion, gays, taxes, blacks, Muslims and illegal immigrants.

Which raises an obvious fair and balanced question: What about terror from the left? The SPLC’s Mark Potok says left-wing terror essentially means eco-terrorists, e.g., animal rights extremists. The death toll from their work, he says, is zero.

By contrast, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people because he was angry at the government, brothers Matthew and Tyler Williams shot two men to death for being gay, James Kopp killed Dr. Barnett Slepian for being an abortion provider, and dozens of other men have been indicted for dozens of other plots to kill thousands of other people with whom they had political disagreements.

It’s one thing to read these stories in isolation and another to see them collected, and thereby connected, here, one extremist plot after another in the 14 years since Oklahoma City. It gives you a sense that – apologies to Buffalo Springfield – there’s something happening here and what it is is all too clear. The report provides troubling context for the outrageous behavior that has attended the election of our first African-American president.

And if hate characterizes the right more than the left, so does fear. We’re entering a new McCarthy era, with accusations of communism and socialism bandied about without proof to scare the livin’ bejeebus out of anybody gullible enough to listen.

So, yes, Bill, I do despise Sarah Palin.  There have been times when I could enjoy her antics, figuring who needs Tina Fey when you can laugh at the real McCoy. But then Palin lied about death panels and ceased to be cute in any way. Her callous disregard for the truth, if it succeeded in deep sixing health care reform, would end up keeping tens of millions of us from getting health care. Call me cranky, but stuff like that annoys me.

In fact, anger is the only normal response sometimes.

Civil discourse is fine, but when the other side is fighting dirty, you should get angry. Don’t let the bully kick sand in your face. The White House should have impaled death panel malarkey as soon as it came up.

By the time the president got feisty in a speech on Monday, the inmates had taken over cable TV, much like the spooky spirits swarming up over Bald Mountain in “Fantasia.”

As far as I’m concerned, right wingers are mad as hell and they’re not going to take their meds anymore. And that scares me. I’m grateful that I decided to pick a screen name when we started this blog, because the right is getting uglier by the day.

Fess up, Ed Robb. Are you the one that’s been e-mailing Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan? Or do you just commune spiritually with the wingnuts who did?