re: #36 klys

The climate was bad, but not THIS bad.

Clinton pissed the Right off, but didn’t drive them to this extreme. Prior to the Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky thing, the only one in Congress floating Impeachment was Bob Barr.

To me it seems that the anti-Clinton stuff was led by cynics - the likes of Gingrich, Coulter, Limbaugh. They would say anything to get rid of him, but you sensed that it was all means toward a goal, rather than something they really believed.

Now? The cynics have been upstaged by the genuinely crazy: Coulter by the likes of Malkin and Geller; Gingrich by Bachmann, Broun, Gohmert, etc; Limbaugh by the sheer volume of crazy pumping out of Right Wing Hate Radio.

As I’ve said before, I used to hang out on an archery and bowhunting forum, and we used to be able to discuss politics without real rancor. That changed a bit after the Iraq war started going sour, but when Obama was elected, they went completely around the bend. They lost any connection with reality.

Clinton was impeached because Nixon was (almost) impeached, because they hated him, and because he gave them an excuse. Still, it wasn’t until the Lewinsky thing that anybody in Congress but Bob Barr was talking impeachment.

The crazy wing existed then, but the establishment encouraged it, controlled it, and used it. Now that wing has taken over to such an extent that in the past 2 election cycles, the GOP failed to win control of the Senate because the crazy wing primaried Senators who were shoe-ins, but not ideologically pure, and nominated unelectable knuckle-draggers.