Then there was Father Coughlin, the radio priest who started out an FDR supporter, then moved to the anti-Semitic right. In his day he was more popular than Rush Limbauh.

our ability to recognize humbug for what it is seems to have gotten much, much worse.

No, it's about the same as always - maybe even a bit improved, thanks to the Interwebs.

But the willingness of our media gatekeepers to let them on the TV, and on the op-ed pages of our newspapers, seems to much greater than it used to be.

our ability to recognize humbug for what it is seems to have gotten much, much worse

Not even close to right.

Today we have an element that not only fails regularly to recognize humbug, but demands it--revels in it!

Commenter low-tech cyclist, above, identifies this element accurately.

...our ability to recognize humbug for what it is seems to have gotten much, much worse.

People haven't changed. What's changed is that the political information landscape has become much more democratic. And because people haven't changed, then the political information landscape has become less uniform and more extreme.

The sorry truth here is that the elites who once acted as the gatekeepers of American political culture have fallen...and this is, at least for now, a bad thing.

Of course, it's also the case—and naturally so—that to the degree that the gatekeepers are still effective is the degree to which the bias is right-wing, insofar as the extent gatekeepers are corporate. So, in some sense, we're edging closer to the worst of all possible media worlds.

Still, I have a hard time wishing for a return to an America where a handful of people essentially decided what political news the rest of us should hear.

Is it quixotic to hope for a much better educated and more rational public? Probably. But that's what our goal should be, not a return to the days of a political news monoculture controlled by a powerful few.

I am not so sure that right wingers are spreading nonsense without consequences. The health care debate may indeed be a Waterloo, but I am not convinced it's Obama's. The right has been so desperate to defeat this measure -- not only to protect the financial interests of the health insurance industry but also because the right feels its ideological future at stake -- that it has been forced to pull out all the foul stops to win it. And their falsehoods have been so outrageous, and so demonstrably outrageous, that I've got to believe when the dust settles the right will have lost credibility with those who aren't true believers.

From your mouth to God's ears, Ted.

The Republicans need to be held accountable for 2 wars, failed economy, torture and everything else associated with the republican party. Once someone is held accountable this ridiculous will stop.

Remember, the above crazies are in the esteem company of Orly Taitz! -Kevo

Nailing humbug to the corporate wall

Krugman has a hammer:

But there’s another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence.

We tend to think of the way things are now, with a huge army of lobbyists permanently camped in the corridors of power, with corporations prepared to unleash misleading ads and organize fake grass-roots protests against any legislation that threatens their bottom line, as the way it always was. But our corporate-cash-dominated system is a relatively recent creation, dating mainly from the late 1970s.

And now that this system exists, reform of any kind has become extremely difficult. That’s especially true for health care, where growing spending has made the vested interests far more powerful than they were in Nixon’s day. The health insurance industry, in particular, saw its premiums go from 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1970 to 5.5 percent in 2007, so that a once minor player has become a political behemoth, one that is currently spending $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress.

Then there's this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

with a bit more credibility then and a bit more likelihood now--in 1934 the American right didn't have its own FreiKorps the way that we have Blackwater/Xe.

oi oi oi

there's no need for a business plot agst obama...
if you can't think why not, yer not payin' attention...

I was wondering what those "William A. Wirt Was Right!" bumperstickers were all about...

How fitting, as @Steve above notes, that Republicans were projecting their own motives and actions on others in the 30s, just as Beck et al are today.

They really lack any sense of shame - or history.

Good piece. Someone should write a book.
No, wait....