Obama, the school kids, and paranoia about paranoia.

Timothy Rutten in the L.A. Times:

[Q]uite a number of people ... seem to believe that Obama intends to induct their children into -- well, it's not quite clear what they're afraid of. The Web and talk radio are abuzz with various attempts to organize a boycott of Tuesday's speech....

[There is a] process at work in the healthcare hysteria and, increasingly, elsewhere where the GOP thinks it can shove the Obama administration into a ditch. Republican officials ... are playing a dangerous game with an unhinged segment of public opinion that regards Obama not as an elected official with whom they disagree, but as an illegitimate usurper of the presidency.

That paranoid fantasy is what's really behind the 'birther' movement and the allegations that the president is -- take your pick -- a secret Marxist or a secret Muslim.

Come on! This is absurd. You're stringing one thing after another and claiming it's all part of a big scheme. That itself is paranoid ideation.

It's the kind of fanciful anxiety that produces comments like this, posted on a conservative website this week: "Barack Obama and his left-wing Chicago machine regime are putting into place laws and institutions which will insure that there will never again be free elections in America."

And this is the kind of fanciful anxiety that produces columns like this....

Good lord, somebody posted a comment on a website somewhere and in Rutten's fevered brain it's all: yes, yes, this is exactly the way it is.... this, this is the problem!!!11!!!11!!!

Get a grip, man.

These are the people who are stockpiling ammunition and keeping their children at home next Tuesday.

What people?! The people! The people! You know: THE PEOPLE!!!! The PEOPLE WITH GUNNNNNNSSSSSSSSSS.........