Frank Rich Gets All Hysterical Over NY-23

New York Times clown columnist Frank Rich got even more hysterical than is his norm Sunday, and Reason blogger Matt Welch took him down. Welch cites Jesse Walker's observation, which is the inverse of Richard Hofstadter's theory: the projectionists who try to sound the alarm about what they perceive as threats out there on the fringe wind up adopting the same tactics and lexicon of the very people they hate. Pogo boiled it down to a much simpler concept in just three comic strip panels- "We have met the enemy and he is us":

New York Times columnist Frank Rich, whose commentary about the political right this year has been among the very stupidest in a remarkably dull-witted season, manages to go one step further: In an op-ed on New York's District 23 congressional election, Rich embodies Walker's observation at the exact same time as quoting Hofstadter's. Check it out:

[T]he electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era's equivalent to today's tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society's "ruthless prosecution" of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode.

How do you even get to a place like that?

Indeed, Welch schools Rich with a history lesson. Stalin, in just one of his purges, executed about 1,000 of his fellow communists and others every day for two years for a grim total of at least 724,000 deaths. Rich's hallucinatory Beck/Palin "purge" consisted of one "moderate" Republican who suspended her campaign and lived to endorse the Democrat only a few hours later.

A Little Fright Music, maestro, if you please....

Isn't Frank Rich
full of hot air?
Are his eyes on the mirror when he
goes on a tear?
Send in the clowns.

Shaky Frank Rich,
out on a limb.
Losing all reason, his mind
is growing dim.
Where are the clowns?
Send in the clowns.
Don't bother - they're him.

Related: At Pajamas Media, John Hawkins weighs in, as does Darleen Click at Protein Wisdom.

- JP