New York Times columnist Charles Blow has gotten more ill-humored about politics since the summer of 2009, when he happily opined that the GOP was doomed in the Northeast (this was less than six months before a Republican won the "Ted Kennedy" Senate seat in Massachusetts, after which Blow was considerably less happy with that geographical quadrant).
His Saturday column, "A Summer to Simmer," was full of ranting about the "callousness of conservatives" and their "unshakeable immunity to empathy."
This summer has the potential to be another turning point for the electorate, and it’s not necessarily pegged to the performance of the president. It may hinge largely on the callousness of conservatives and their seemingly inexorable desire to overplay their hand.
This may be the summer that we see more clearly that the working class has developed a lingering sense of disillusionment, that right-wing politicians have developed an unshakeable immunity to empathy and that corporations have developed a taste for blood squeezed from turnips.
And it may be the summer for seeing through the right-wing squawk machine that hopes to distract us from the damage the rich and the right are doing by manically hurling torches at the Obama administration to see if something catches fire.
This week, Representative Paul Ryan, a Republican of Wisconsin, suggested to the Economic Club of Chicago that the president’s attempt to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans amounted to "class warfare" and promoted "class envy." Ha! The war is already being waged against the poor and vulnerable, and the envious have-nots didn’t start it. The right and its cabal of economic cannibals did.
Blow kept blasting the bitterness on his active Twitter feed. Two of his tweets from Saturday:
One last word for Paul Ryan before I go: What the starving feel for gluttons is not envy but outrage.
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Voter ID laws, attacking unions, allowing corps to buy elex - the right seeks to destroy the very foundation of Dem support. Wake up ppl!
