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Cole in Salon: "The Great Right-Wing Freak-Out"

Juan Cole 04/13/2009

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My Salon.com, “The Great Right-Wing Freak-Out” has been posted, with the subtitle: “Symptoms of the conservative crack-up were on full display after President Obama’s trip abroad. Bill Kristol, take a bow.”

Excerpt:

‘ President Obama’s recent trip to Europe, Turkey and Iraq was a fairly bland freshman outing in foreign affairs, notable for the enormous good will it generated toward the U.S., along with some practical achievements and a few minor errors. It lacked the drama of the untested young Kennedy grappling over Berlin with the wily old Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961. On the American Right, however, Obama’s trip produced a hysteria not seen since radio listeners mistook Orson Welles’s 1938 radio production about an invasion from Mars for the real thing, and crowded the highways, heads wrapped in wet towels, to escape the poisonous miasma of the onrushing aliens. The weeping and trembling of Sean Hannity, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and William Kristol underlined once again that the rightwingers are playground crybabies who kick and scream and faint whenever they do not get their way.’

Read the whole thing.

End/ (Not Continued)

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About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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