Wing Nuts Getting You Down?

Michael Seitzman writes on HuffPo about how to deal with the lunatic wing nuts:

Are you sick to death of the I-can-out-crazy-your-crazy screaming, the Obama-wants-to-kill-yo-mama infantilism, the he's-a-Kenyan-Nazi-Communist, America-doesn't-apologize, torture-shmorture, government-is-evil-except-when-it's-interrogating-Muslims, my-gun-gets-bigger-when-you-rub-it, and the O'Reilly-Beck-Hannity-Limbaugh Axis-of-Evil? If the answer is yes, I salute you. If the answer is no, I also salute you... with this one finger.

I have some advice for all of us. Stop trying to get these people to realize how wrong they are and how right you are. Stop trying to apply reason to the profoundly unreasonable. Stop trying to mitigate or explain their collective temper tantrum. Stop trying to curry their favor, their votes, their attention. They don't care about truth, right and wrong, good or bad. They care about stomping feet, crying victim, and pointing fingers. Barney Frank had it exactly right, it's like arguing with a dining room table. Enough is enough. Fuck Kumbaya.

I'm not sure what bothers me more, the profound and disturbing ignorance displayed by some, or the ones who know what's right but protest simply because what's right was proposed by the Left. Ironically, their elected representatives don't care about them any more than they care about us. They care about reelection, they care about influence and power, they care about themselves, and they mindlessly adhere to an antiquated ideology at our collective peril (see Sunday's Paul Krugman).

Don't be afraid of them. Don't let them question (or make you question) your basic instincts for goodness, decency, humanitarianism, and the attainable America you want and deserve. Don't let them intimidate you. Think of Vivian Jones and James Hood trying to attend their first day of college, facing those bloodthirsty crowds led by none other than the Governor of Alabama seething, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" Those kids didn't run. Martin Luther King didn't run when that same governor called him a communist threatening the fabric of America. If they didn't run at the first sounds of anger, the first sight of guns, the first smell of stubborn ignorance, neither should we. And neither should President Obama.