There's an article in the New York Times today...

...by a guy named Dan Frosch about a Congressman named Lloyd Doggett and a Republican activist named Heather Liggett. (Let's see: Frosch, Doggett, and Liggett. That's just too many names to make fun of this morning.) It's also a disconcerting one, about "tea party"-type protesters organized to drown out a reasonable discussion about health care reform during the August recess. What's particularly discouraging to me is that these are probably just the kind of people that Obama is trying to protect from the whims of the private insurance companies. But somehow, these companies have scared these very same people so much that they are now doing their bidding in the debate over reform. It's both mind-boggling and sad.

It's also become clear to me lately that the Republican Party is following in a pattern that's been in place since at least the late 1940s, when people like Nixon and later McCarthy advanced their careers through Red-baiting. After the eight-year interlude of the Eisenhower years (in which the Birchers accused even Ike of being a Communist) came the rise of Goldwater (and Reagan), "states rights" and later the emergence of the "Southern strategy" which was used so effectively by Nixon. The 80s brought us Lee Atwater and the whole Willie Horton/Pledge of Allegiance/"card-carrying member of the ACLU" nonsense that torpedoed Michael Dukakis. No sooner had Atwater died (after a death-bed confession of his dirty pool) then along came Karl Rove and all of his gutter tactics. Which brings us up to the present and all the talk of Reverend Wright, Michelle Obama's new-found pride in America, and even the president's birth certificate. And now health care. Even my own mother (!) told me this weekend that she was "hearing" that the government might encourage old people like her to die under the proposed reforms. (Besides telling her to stop watching Fox, I assured her that not only was health care reform coming this fall, but that everything would be okay. And furthermore, she could relay that information to the rest of the people at her church.)

"Don't worry, Ma (I always call her that even though her last name isn't Kettle), we won't let the guys in the black helicopters get you."

Am I naive, or are the Democrats just as guilty? I don't see it. Instead, more and more I'm convinced that the GOP is the disingenuous party.