A Very Silly Article in The Atlantic

See if you can spot the moment this story becomes unreadable (hint: it's right where I leave off):

What Does It Mean for Obama to Love or Hate America?

Rudy Giuliani is only the latest conservative to claim that the president isn't fond of his country, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Rudy Giuliani is developing a productive sideline in rage-baiting. Fresh off a largely incoherent comment about black-on-black crime following the Michael Brown case, America's Mayor said Wednesday night that President Obama doesn't love America. Here's what Giuliani said, according to Politico, during a "private dinner" for Scott Walker "at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan":

I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.

Some liberals find it tempting to read this as nothing more than race-baiting. Isn't this just portraying Obama—who just happens to have a funny name and look different from Rudy—as the Other? (The White House simply replied, "It was a horrible thing to say.") But Giuliani isn't the only person to make this claim, and the others aren't just fringe figures. Erick Erickson, hailed by The Atlantic as America's most powerful conservative, says Obama "hates America." Former presidential candidate Steve Forbes doesn't think Obama loves America, nor does a prominent Tea Party organizer. Once-and-likely-future presidential candidate Rick Perry has doubts. The view is also importantly different from the idea that Obama is a threat to America, a critique that allows for the fact that the president may in fact be doing what he thinks is best for the nation and its citizens, but that is wrong. The Erickson-Giuliani consensus is important in that it requires a measure of malevolence on Obama's part. Therefore it makes sense to look at what evidence they marshal for the view to see what it can tell us about them and about Obama.

...

No.

No it definitely does not make  "...sense to look at what evidence they marshal for the view to see what it can tell us about them and about Obama."

Because this is not 1982.  Because we have all lived through decades of watching the Affable Reagan Mask rot off the Party of Lincoln to clearly reveal the paranoid ghouls and lobotomized bigots beneath.  Because we have watched the craven Beltway enablers of these monsters prop them up over and over again with heavy planks of Both Side Do It for long enough to know that it's a feature not a bug.

Because at long last is just a silly, masturbatory waste of time to continue to pretend that raking the coals of wingnut arson will yield any useful results.

So stop it, Liberal media.  Please just stop it.

Because for far too long to pretend otherwise, the Conservatives in this country have amounted to nothing but a mob of vicious, ignorant asshole holding a gun to the head of my country and baying the same angry, incoherent gibberish that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh has been shitting into their skulls for years.  And trying to address their movement as if it were anything other than a form of madness to be contained and exorcised from the body politic is as pointless as debating pod bay doors with HAL.

I am not remotely interested in their backstory and motives or carefully parsing "what evidence they marshal".  Instead, I am intensely and exclusively interested in getting the gun out of their hand, and care about the tenets and internal "logic" of their lunatic cult only to the extent that I might be able to ransack it for some useful means of putting their movement down like the dangerous, rabid beast it is.