The Other McCain

One of the amazing things about the whole debt-ceiling episode is how it has caused liberals to say stuff even crazier than the crazy stuff they usually say. Michael Lind at Salon:

The debt ceiling crisis is the latest case in which the radical right in the South has held America hostage until its demands are met. Presidents Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln refused to appease the Southern fanatics. Unfortunately, President Obama and the Democrats in Congress chose not to follow their example and instead gave in. In doing so, they have encouraged the neo-Confederate minority in Congress to find yet another opportunity in the near future to extort concessions from America’s majority by sabotaging America’s government.

That’s some 180-proof crazy. But when it comes to pure high-octane crazy, nobody beats Amanda Marcotte:

Now it’s time to reflect on how our country has gone so far off track that we can’t even handle the basic responsibility of keeping the country from plunging into a manufactured crisis that nearly led to economic collapse. There are multiple causes, but one that hasn’t been discussed much is abortion.
Yes, abortion. Or, more specifically, the sustained sex panic that has been going on in this country since the sixties and seventies, when the sexual revolution occurred and women secured their reproductive rights. . . . [I]t’s sex panic that helped create the modern right-wing populist, and it’s the modern right-wing populist that created the current crisis. . . .
The genius of conservative leadership was that they were able to take all this anger about sexual freedom and desegregation and put the blame on two enemies: Democrats and the federal government.

So it’s neo-Confederates and/or “sex panic” that cause people to, uh . . . . Wait, what are we talking about? The federal debt.

The only way to exempt yourself from these bizarre accusations is to support infinite deficit spending. Otherwise, you’re like a giant inkblot in a Rorshach test, onto which Michael Lind and Amanda Marcotte will project their paranoid fears. You can’t simply debate fiscal policy with people like Lind and Marcotte, because they are endowed with the Magical Mind-Reading Power of Liberalism, which enables them to discern that you’re really a sex-panicked neo-Confederate upset about desegregation and “reproductive rights.”

It’s like having Charles Manson call you a psychotic.

UPDATE: Here’s a classic. On Sunday morning, Marcotte proclaimed to the world that “sex panic” explained the debt-ceiling dispute. But Tuesday, once she’d seen Lind’s neo-Confederate theory, she suddenly decided his theory was exactly right:

Southern whites have disproportionately tried to fuck up everything great about this country, all because of their racial resentments and backasswards views on gender . . .

Notice that “backasswards views on gender” now emerge as a uniquely regional trait of the South, as Marcotte evidently hopes to engraft her “sex panic” theory onto Lind’s Dixiefied theory. But either way, it’s the same thing: If you don’t agree with liberals, it can only be because there’s something wrong with you.

Your disagreement therefore licenses liberals to diagnose your disorder, a prerogative to which they are entitled, because they are your intellectual and moral superiors. And I remind you that this habit — diagnosing dissent as pathological — has been a signature trope of liberalism for more than half a century: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.