If you reengage the American media after a month out of the country, as I’ve done this week, it’s hard not to conclude that hysteria is now the dominant characteristic of our politics and civic conversation.

Uh, since it’s kind of your job, Tim, to watch the media, and you still didn’t notice this kind of big development last month, or the many months that preceded it, you clearly ought to see a doctor.

How else to explain the fact that questions like secession and nullification — issues that were resolved in blood by the Civil War more than a century ago — have come alive again and are routinely tossed around, not just by fringe figures but by Republican officeholders and candidates?

These things have been tossed around FOR A YEAR, you blithering nincompoop who, risibly, calls himself a media critic.  The scandal is that you pretended not to see this disturbing development, and thus legitimized it and fed it.  ”Discovering” it now makes you look (even more) craven and/or dumb than usual.

For example, Zach Wamp, a Tennessee congressman who opposes the recently enacted healthcare reforms and is running for governor, told an interviewer that he hopes “the American people will go to the ballot box in 2010 and 2012 so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government.” Meanwhile, GOP candidates for statewide office in various Midwestern and Southern states are promoting the notion that states ought not to enforce any federal law not approved by at least two-thirds of their state legislators. It’s as if John C. Calhoun suddenly had risen from the grave and had a talk show.

My Gosh, you know who John Calhoun even was?  Thank Heaven for the Google. Of course, Talk Radio and Fox News have, in unison, been calling for such things, and worse, for over a year, but I guess big-time media critics have bigger fish to fry than listening to, well, the media.  Rutten seems to know about as much about what is actually broadcast in America as Dana Perino does about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which ain’t much.

In Nevada, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate has discussed abolishing Social Security and darkly mused over whether Washington’s alleged overreaching may require a “2nd Amendment solution.” That means guns, a prospect that could be facilitated in one state after another by an outfit called Appleseed, which holds weekend seminars whose participants are given a mix of Minuteman pseudo-history and instruction on marksmanship.

Right-wing sore losers have been employing this tactic since, well, the Kennedy, King, Kennedy, etc. assassinations, and have also knocked off a half a dozen cops and such in the last year, but Rutten just discovered all this unpleasantness last week.  If I were Katie Couric, I’d ask him, “What newspapers do you read?”

Meanwhile, attempts to repeal sections of the Constitution continue apace. The so-called 10thers, who want to roll back 100 years of federal law and regulation in order to assert rights under the 10th Amendment, are almost unremarkably ubiquitous in the GOP. Candidates across the country pining for “tea party” support have endorsed repeal of the 17th Amendment, which would end popular election of U.S. Senators and return their selection to state legislatures, a step that theoretically would “restore states’ rights.”

The most popular such movement involves abolishing or gutting the 10th Amendment as a way to deny American citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Even the ostensibly moderate Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has signed on to that one, while Rep. Louie Gohmert (R- Texas) speculates that such children actually are terrorist moles planted here to grow up as U.S. citizens as part of a long-range plot.

Goodness me, Tim, it isn’t possible that y’all are being played, is it?

Nothing quite tops the anti-Muslim hysteria, which has led people to organize opposition to the construction of new mosques in places from Lower Manhattan to Temecula. One candidate for statewide office in Tennessee — somebody should examine their water supply — argues that the 1st Amendment does not cover Muslims.

Nice way to sound elitist and dumb at the same time; it must be something in the Dying Newspapers’ Employee’s Manual:

1) Blame Readers for Believing Our Demented Opinion Page Writers.

2) Tell Readers We Never Believed the BS We Printed For Years.

3)  When Completely Debunked, See #1 and #2.

Some inclined toward therapeutic explanations of history might attribute all this to a kind of collective post-traumatic stress syndrome engendered by the lingering, still-unresolved aftermath of the horrific events of 9/11. Others might point to the dislocating effect of electing an African American president to govern a society in which strong currents of racial anxiety still eddy beneath the surface of everyday life. Perhaps both forces act in unseen concert.

Smart people, however, blame shitty newspapers like yours.

Back in the early 1970s — an era whose tumult we yet may come to regard as benign — social scientists here and in Britain coined the term “moral panic” to describe what can happen when groups of people are seized by an exaggerated fear that other people or communal forces threaten their values or way of life. The scholars described those who promoted the panic’s spread as “moral entrepreneurs” — a term that takes on a deep resonance when you consider the commentators and politicians who have attached themselves, and their interests, to the “tea party” and its attendant movements.

Yeah, Rutten, rather belatedly, is noticing that real grassroots movements to end pointless wars and get rid of crooked Presidents could maybe turn out to be good, but only much later; nothing to be gained in the here and now from, call it “premature sanity.”  Better yet, he goes on to blithely equate the astroturfed, warmongering, and racist Teabaggers with peace advocates.  Nice work, if you can get it.

In the midst of moral panic, inchoate indignation stands in for reason; accusation and denunciation supplant dialogue and argument; history and facts are rendered malleable, merely adjuncts of the moral entrepreneur’s — or should we say provocateur’s — rhetorical will. As we now also see, a self-interested mass media with an economic stake in the theatricality of raised and angry voices can transmit moral panic like a pathogen.

That’s why my paper dumped Robert Scheer and hired Jonah Goldberg.  We needed the money.

Looking around the United States in the summer of 2010, hysterical moral panic seems an apt description of our fevered political condition.

Better late than never, Tim.

In response to the well-deserved disrepute our media has so richly earned from the public for such unforgivable lameness, the solution has not been to improve quality and try not to misinform so, but rather to bring in new “talent” to serve up the same old swill.  Fortunately for, say, David Gregory, the media defines “talent” rather loosely.  Unfortunately for the long-suffering news consumer, the trajectory of “talent” is always downward; witness the NYT’s slide from Safire to Brooks to Kristol to Douthat…  who’s next, Drudge?  Britney Spears?  The LA Times dropped Robert Scheer to make room for Jonah Goldberg’s substantial bulk, and look how that turned out.  Desperate measures make for desperate times, but count on these lame rags to blame Y2K or el nino for their troubles.

Over at FOX, the dilemma was a little different, as you’d expect.  But media-savvy little Rovettes that they are there, they knew they needed something big to appeal to that ever elusive under-70 crowd; Bill O’Reilly was too sober, and as Murdoch himself said, maybe Hannity was a bit “academic.”  Enter Glenn Beck stage right, and then some.  Now, as Q-ratings go, you wouldn’t think Beck would have been the most obvious choice; he’s pasty and pudgy, beady eyed and dumb-looking, and his voice sounds like Richard Simmons without the “accent.”  Besides which, he’s utterly uneducated, bereft of any journalistic experience, and, well, to call him histrionic would be like calling Ann Coulter “outgoing.”  But therein lies the Beck magic; the “rodeo clown” FOX needed to reel in younger dumb people, and as a bonus, to make the network’s universally abysmal “journalism” look almost respectable by comparison.  Win, win.

In such an post-journalism environment , it was inevitable that Sarah Palin’s high heels would come clicking onto the stage.  Since nobody was asking any questions anyway, why wouldn’t a politician not bother to have any answers, even scribbled on a 3 x 5 card like Reagan used to?  That gal can just waltz onto any FOX show and say something like this:

“Scares me the road that he [President Obama] has us on, not seeming to understand what it is that built up America’s economic system, the free enterprise principles, the shrinkage of government, not the expansion to allow the private sector to grow and to thrive and to do what it does best and our families keep more of what they earned, so that they can reinvest and prioritize instead of government doing it for them, which is a step towards socialism. So some of the steps we’re taking economically right now scare the heck out of me.”

I’m scared too, mostly that that woman has a driver’s license, but to Bill O’Reilly, that speech was all but Churchillian.  He was no doubt too busy loofah-ing her in his mind to notice the tumbleweeds behind her eyes, but honestly.  He may think his audience is dumb, but surely they speak English?  Disturbingly, the answer is probably yes, since Palin finished up thusly:

“. . . what Reagan did . . . he boiled it all down to this. He looked at our enemies, enemies around the world, and he said, we win, you lose. That’s what I want to see and feel and hear from our new administration, from President Obama.”

Alrighty, then.  You can just imagine that over in the next studio, Glenn Beck’s Red Phone to the President is ringing off the hook, offering her the cabinet-level position of Queen of the Department of Law.  Or something.

Please….  If politics is going to henceforth be a talent show, would it be too much to ask that it contain some, uh, talent?