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" WHAT \u2014 OBAMA, WORRY? /// The president can&amp;#039;t possibly be so dedicated to his notions of civility as to listen politely to both sides of events like Peter King&amp;#039;s Muslim hearings and Scott Walker&amp;#039;s union badgering if one side is the destruction of his own presidency. All in all, it was one hell of a good week for fear. National Public Radio decapitated itself because a pasty-faced little charlatan \u2014 who, by all rights, should be shucking crawfish in a Louisiana prison farm \u2014 faked another tape, and an NPR executive got caught telling the truth about the Tea Party in such a way that would agitate anyone&amp;#039;s chamomile. Since the Republicans in Congress once again have NPR in the crosshairs, the executive got fired and the CEO got tossed out a window.  But NPR was not alone in being scared out of its Dockers by legions of misinformed elderly people. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who has been a boring old senator since he was first elected by the Free Soil Party, bailed ingloriously on his stated opposition to the meat-ax budget that came out of the Republican House, largely because the toothless wolves had begun to howl back in Elkhart.  And let us not even discuss the ungainly gymnastics being performed at the moment by Orrin Hatch, who is apparently going to spend the next two years trying to convince his base that the several times he&amp;#039;s made sense since 1966 were completely accidental.  And it&amp;#039;s hard not to notice that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker decided to go Pinochet-like at least in part because his poll numbers were tanking and he didn&amp;#039;t want to alienate the one group of voters who didn&amp;#039;t think he was a buffoon. Elsewhere, Representative Peter King opened up his investigation of the &amp;quot;radicalization of American Islam&amp;quot; while dodging questions about his own outspoken support in the past for the Irish Republican Army. Desperate to get his show on the road, King split a bunch of unlikely hairs, convinced nobody with a brain, either here or in Ireland, and then dropped the gavel on what very likely is going to go down in history as the most nakedly bigoted performance by a congressional committee since the Fugitive Slave Act was under discussion. If you would like a free trip to Washington, you should declare yourself a Muslim who knows exactly what the cabdriver down the block is plotting. At which point, Peter King will fly you to D.C., put you on television, make you famous, and then perhaps take you down Capitol Hill to The Dubliner so you can sing &amp;quot;The Rising of the Moon&amp;quot; in Farsi. Act today! (VERY MUCH RELATED: The 10 Most Compelling Moments from Peter King&amp;#039;s Hearing) It has been a long time since so many powerful people have been so obviously afraid. And it is not the good, healthy fear that elected politicians should have regarding their constituents. The political game is far too rigged at this point for that to matter much. On Wednesday evening, the cable-TV speculation was that Walker had committed political suicide and made himself a viable candidate for the 2012 Republican national ticket. This is not as oxymoronic as it sounds: Walker spit in the eye of his entire state, but he did so in such a way that the movers and shakers in the party see him as a real comer \u2014 the actual voters at this point being little more than a minor annoyance.  No, this is serious, existential dread on the part of people, like the president of the United States and the people around him, who really ought to know better. You could say that the Republicans have been functionally radicalized, and that they are playing a very long game. The Right is engaged in a massive transfer of wealth upward, conducting a not-very-covert national campaign to defund or destroy any potential center of power that stands in its way. This necessarily includes the Democratic party, of which the president is the putative head. While it would have been unwise for him to wade into the specific debate in Wisconsin, Barack Obama surely must realize what&amp;#039;s going on in the nation. Certainly, he should take a stand against a completely transparent attempt to dismantle the political power of the forces that got him elected in the first place, right? Obama can&amp;#039;t possibly be so dedicated to his notions of civility as to listen politely to both sides of the argument if one side is the destruction of his own presidency. Nobody&amp;#039;s that stupid. And lost in all the yelling up in America&amp;#039;s Dairyland was the fact that the president got rolled on the festering sore that is Guantanamo Bay this week, largely because of the unfounded fear of putting the inmates there on trial in American courts that was ginned up by nitwits like, well, Peter King. To make sure Obama stayed rolled, John McCain and Lindsey Graham proposed to remove jurisdiction over the prisoners there from the Department of Justice and to hand it over to the Department of Defense. It may have eluded McCain&amp;#039;s notice, but he lost the election and, therefore, doesn&amp;#039;t get to reorganize the executive branch, but surely Obama remembers that he won and is obligated to put up at least a perfunctory defense of the prerogatives of his office. So we are left with fear. The national Democratic party will not even vigorously stand up for itself against a threat to its own existence, nor take up the cause of the people who will. It cannot find the sand to stand credibly for a viable middle class, nor for the institutions that make that possible. It cannot summon the spine to defend the power it was granted in two consecutive elections. It is frightened by its own best instincts. It seems more than ever to be setting itself up to be a player in whatever form of corporate oligarchy comes after the great conservative project is complete, and to hell with anyone left outside the gated community of American politics. It trembles before liars with video cameras. It jumps at shadows. It had better hope that the people on the lawn in Madison stay there. They&amp;#039;re really all that&amp;#039;s left. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a9592/fear-mongering-in-politics-5376802/>