Tom Tancredo Jumps The Shark

For those that don’t know, “jumping the shark” is a pop-culture term for when someone finally goes way too far, crossing the invisible line that separates decency from farce.  The origins of the term lie in the 1970s TV show Happy Days, where hero Arthur Fonzerelli (The Fonz) telegraphed the final decline of the long-running show by making a pseudo-dramatic waterski jump over a shark while garbed in his trademark leather jacket.

Among hyperpartisan, meme-driven contemporary politics, jumping the shark is becoming a daily occurrence, as politicians and bloggers take turns seemingly trying to out-do each other in making ever-more ridiculous blasts of rhetorical excess and manufactured outrage.  This has been a particularly rich week of shark-jumping, beginning with the NAACP’s throwback slandering of millions of “Tea Party” sympathizers as “racists” based on the bizarre but exaggerated behavior of a few wackos and wannabes, marching through the drip-drip revelations of the infantile antics of the “Journolist” clique, and continuing the NAACP fiasco in mirror-image form with false charges of “racism” directed at an Department of Agriculture functionary based on a dishonest edit of a 24-year-old video of a speech that no one cared about 15 minutes after it was given.

Today, it is the turn of former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo.  Readers can be forgiven for surprise at the notion of Tom Tancredo jumping the shark, though.  Like South Park and Family Guy (the two TV shows generally considered to be incapable of jumping the shark because grotesque violations of social conventions are their reasons for existing at all), Tancredo is regularly so hyperbolically extreme in his ongoing crusades against immigrants, gays, unmarried women, and, well, pretty much everyone in the world, that it defies credulity that he could ever go so far as to exceed the bounds of what could be expected from him.

But he managed:

Yes, Mr. Obama is a more serious threat to America than al Qaeda. We know that Osama bin Laden and followers want to kill us, but at least they are an outside force against whom we can offer our best defense. But when a dedicated enemy of the Constitution is working from the inside, we face a far more dangerous threat. Mr. Obama can accomplish with the stroke of his pen what bin Laden cannot accomplish with bombs and insurgents.

It is certainly true that Tancredo’s ludicrous outburst is easily matched by some of the wild-eyed bizarreness that was thrown towards the previous president, but that’s a diagnosis of the problem, not an excuse.  The fact that so many elected officials and opinion leaders feel justified in throwing around such nuclear-powered allegations without need of a shred of evidence other than a manufactured display of blind passion is a sign of serious political sickness on both sides of the partisan aisle.  The fact that the sickness is shared on the other side doesn’t alleviate the effects, it worsens them.