Listen to right-wing talk radio and well, it would seem that America has been taken-over by Lenin and the rest of his Communist cadres. Depending on the radio program, we're either about to become a communist or fascist nation (okay, sometimes both), all because of the suspiciously foreign-looking guy in the White House is leading us to ruin.
The saving of the American economy by the timely, strategic and ultimately successful extraordinary actions of the Bush and Obama Administrations, working closely with the Federal Reserve, has been re-positioned by the Tea Party and the AM radio liars as a latter day Bolshevik take-over.
Silly as all this really sounds if you've ever read a 7th grade history textbook, there are many people, across America, willing to believe in this kind of lie. It fits with the paranoid narrative of "they've taken our country away" (which really would seem best translated as "there is a Black man in the White House - WTF?").
Now that General Motors - and the supporting industrial infrastructure that is the basis for American industrial capacity - have been saved, the government's stake dramatically reduced, you would think that the Commie talk would have subsided.
But no.
Crazy talk is running rampant - and in the process distorting our capacity as a society to fully understand how close we were in 2008 and 2009 to another Great Depression. (In other words, not being able to understand reality, we're setting ourselves up to repeat the same mistakes at a later date.)
Finally, the White House is communicating the benefits of is intervention in the auto industry - with a nifty video that shows what actually happened with General Motors.
While objective information does not seem to turn on many of these Obama-haters on the radio dial, for the rest of us who are looking for pragmatic answers, it explains what was really at stake - and how close we came to blowing up our whole economy.