Patriots who revere the Founding Fathers may now be overshooting their mark by almost a century–back to the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s: If anything went wrong then, the answer was to find the servants of Satan responsible and get rid of them.

In Congress and statehouses across the country, newly minted Tea Party officeholders are hounding public employees and their unions as a response to frustration over economic woes–a solution that makes as much sense now as it did in Salem–and are edging into the kind of behavior that prompted Arthur Miller to write “The Crucible” in the 1950s as a response to McCarthyism.

For asserting that the GOP has blighted Wisconsin’s tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect,” a distinguished historian has been subjected to a demand for copies of all e-mails to or from his university account with the word “Republican” and names of Republican politicians, in a reprise of what Paul Krugman calls “the thought police.”

In Washington, House Republicans are putting the AARP in the dock for supporting “Obamacare” with hearings intended to smear the senior citizens’ organization, while the Florida GOP votes to ban automatic deductions of union dues…

MORE.

Graphic via Toothpaste for Dinner