Blue Monday, holy shit edition

The rivers bile

Yeah, the Birthers are amusingly insane.

But they grow increasingly frightening in their rage.

The birther movement is a natural combination of two political/cultural phenomena. The first is the illegitimate crowd. That is, the Beltway insiders who have played havoc with the last three Democrat presidents, painting them as Outsiders who didn't deserve to be in the White House. Carter was from Billyland and Clinton was white trash with a health care agenda and a penis. Neither of them would be accepted in "polite" Washington society. Obama came into office conscious of that, and has stocked his administration with former Congressional employees who know their way around Capitol Hill. But Obama, himself, was a 1/3-term Senator, a fact that drives batshit insane one or two prominent senators who happen to be in the rolodexes of every network and NPR producer.

The second is the White Minority Victim phenomenon, aka, White Supremacists. The fact that a black man is in the White House is so psychologically disturbing -- at a time when their societal standing -- and income -- have been eroding for years -- it drives them to a rage that makes me wonder what the Secret Service is thinking about these days.

Add to that coordinated, violent attacks on our creeping socialist experiment called universal health care and we've got quite a toxic mix. Can draft riots be far behind?

White culture

Birthers of a Nation.

• Above all others, the real celebrity here has been Rush Limbaugh. He's done this kind of thing before -- remember the "Barack, The Magic Negro" song? But in the wake of the Gates incident, he's managed to become even more hard-edged about it. "Here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman," Limbaugh declared this past Friday. Yesterday, he shared a dream he's had about the dangers to capitalism: "I had a dream that I was a slave building a sphinx in a desert that looked like Obama." And he joked that food-safety advocates will go after all the unhealthy foods people like to eat, one by one -- but they'll have to wait until Obama is out of office to ban Oreos.

• Glenn Beck said this today on Fox News: "This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture. I don't what it is. You can't sit in a pew with Jeremiah Wright for 20 years and not hear some of that stuff, and not have it wash over."

• During his new crusade of Birtherism, Lou Dobbs suggested on his radio show this past Wednesday, right before the Gates flare-up, that Obama could be an illegal immigrant, tying this into his usual preoccupation. "I'm starting to think we have a document issue," Dobbs said. "You suppose he's un-- no, I won't even use the word 'undocumented,' it wouldn't be right."

I'm starting to think Lou Dobbs is a ped -- no it wouldn't be right to use the word "pedophile."

Increasingly demented. Increasingly dangerous.

UPDATE: Rachel Maddow, that "Teabagging Queen," beat me to it.