What If? (A beautiful and poignant liberal fantasy)

Major madness would ensue (Image via Wikipedia)

The Birther Movement!

Death panels!

Indoctrinating schoolchildren into socialism!

The far-fetched, hysterical behavior on the right since the rise of Obama has been so extreme, I can’t help wondering: What on earth would it be like if a liberal had been elected?

The weirdest thing about The Great Conservative Psychosis is that it comes in response to a President who is by any rational measure a moderate and pragmatist, substantially to the right of his progressive base.

Imagine if in his first 100 days, Obama had proposed single-payer health insurance, immediately shut down Guantanamo, began to implement a quick withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, issued an executive order allowing gays in the military, instituted a crackdown on Wall Street shenanigans along with the bail-outs and a major investigation of Bush, Cheney, et al for war crimes?

A laundry list to gladden the hearts of many liberals, I daresay. Maybe most.

The right wing would have had to invent an entirely new vocabulary to deal with this development. Even the over-the-top epithets in current use–Socialist, Communist, Nazi, etc.–wouldn’t suffice. What would they say? Coprophagous anarchist baby raper? Maoist corpse sucker?

And what would they do? Their poor minds would boggle. Maybe the righties would’ve barricaded themselves in their homes with their plentiful supplies of weaponry and started shooting at anything that moved. Or emigrated to New Zealand. Or gathered in mighty herds and jogged over the nearest cliff.

You figure it would have to be something seriously apocalyptic.

But maybe not. Maybe they would be so stunned and disheartened, they’d just withdraw into apathy and sullen despair, punctuated by occasional fits of weeping, or avail themselves of massive amounts of alcohol and/or narcotics.

It’s a lovely dream, imagining the Becks, the Limbaughs, the Cheneys, the Palins, the Bachmanns, the tea partiers, the town hall disrupters, the whole loony crew, trying to cope with a President Nader or Kucinich or Sanders or Maddow…or a President Obama who went at the Republicans the way FDR or Truman used to.

Now that would be a crackup to really crack you up.