The real un-Americans

By Harold Meyerson
WashPost
Thursday, September 23, 2010

There are un-Americans among us. They don't share our values, yet they control the most powerful offices in the land. We must rid ourselves of this fifth-column menace.

That's pretty much the Republican and Tea Party line these days. When a right-wing talk show host interviewing Sharron Angle, now the Republican senatorial candidate in Nevada, told her last year that "we have domestic enemies" and that some of them worked within "the walls of the Senate and the Congress," Angle chirped up, "I think you're right."

The Tea Partyers aren't wrong about the growing influence of un-Americans in high places. They've just misidentified who those un-Americans are.

As the right-wingers see it, even President Obama's more conventional ideas have no place or precedent in the American experience. Ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, Dinesh D'Souza reasons in his summa idiotica currently on the cover of Forbes magazine, cannot be explained within the confines of American political thought. However, he writes, "if Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income to pay even more."

(More here.)