Like Frustrated Toddlers

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo brings us a longtime reader's insight into the impenetrable poison behind Joe Wilson's outburst last night.

Wilson's outburst reflects something deeper. One recurrent theme of extremist assaults on the president has been the deep, visceral conviction that he's hiding an extremist agenda. The more moderate his rhetoric, the more reasonable his tone, the more detailed and specific his claims, the deeper this conviction grows.

If you start with the presumption that the president is trying to foist his socialist agenda on an unsuspecting nation, then his apparent moderation and civility is actually further evidence of his duplicity. When nonpartisan groups substantiate his claims, it's because they're swallowing his transparent lies instead of revealing his real, hidden agenda. Every bit of apparent evidence that the president is reasonable only makes the situation more desperate - how to break through the illusion and reveal him for what he is?

We saw this dynamic recur again and again throughout the month of August, as anger boiled over at town hall meetings. Right wing activists insisted that they knew, to a moral certainty, what the plan was actually about, and demanded that their representatives acknowledge the truth. Such arguments are immune from rebuttal; at their very heart lies the esoteric contention that the real agenda is only implicit, hidden within the bill's provisions, and that seemingly benign clauses actually contain loopholes that will be nefariously exploited following its passage.

So when the president stood up and declared that the bills means what they say, Wilson simply couldn't contain himself any longer.

I'd just add, because it can't be said often enough and because too many delicate pundits insist on denying it, that a major factor in this reality-denying rejection of Obama is old-fashioned racism.

These people simply cannot accept that a black man is president. For them, it is as if the sun rose in the west or gravity suddenly stopped working.

It's impossible. Therefore, anything that lends credence to this impossibility, anything that implies that backwards sunrises and a lack of gravity are OK or even good for you, must be a lie.

Nothing that anyone says, nothing that anyone does, no miraculous improvement in the economy or healthcare or their own personal lives is going to change that rejection of Obama, that denial of reality.

We have to learn - President Obama and Congressional Democrats have to learn - how to govern the country while ignoring and marginalizing this group. Because pretending that they can be persuaded, or that they have something to add to the discussion, is pointless and self-destructive.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....