The Crazy I'm not quite sure why I thought this time around would be different, but it's not. Rick Perlstein does a very good job summing up the right wing insanity that always seems to accompany liberal presidents. Read the whole thing:

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

Paranoids, indeed. As a student of the Clinton years, I can attest that what I see now is very similar to what I saw then. Contrary to what certain commentators will say, there is no true parallel on the liberal side. The folks who claimed Bush was a leftover Nazi because his grandpa helped finance the Third Reich were never held up by Democratic leaders, let alone the press, as having anything more than rocks in their head. (Yes, Dave, I know that the huge antiwar rallies were organized by ANSWER. That is a case of strange bedfellows, not kindred political goals.)

But now, those who claim that everything Obama does is a giant plot somehow garner credibility and are tossed hunks of red meat by the GOP leadership. And don't forget that the nation's most popular Republican claims Obamacare would make her baby and her parents stand before a death panel.

Crazy doesn't even begin to explain it.  ¶ 5:05 PM