I always cringe when I hear someone say, “It can’t get any worse.” That’s absurd; it can always get worse. I don’t think “worse” has a floor, unless you count the End of the Universe. And maybe there’s a “worse” beyond that that’s unreachable by human understanding. But let’s leave that for another post.

It is beginning to sink into the rightie hive mind that they could lose the White House as well as more seats in Congress. And they are flapping about frantically trying to warn us of how dangerous it would be to elect Barack Obama.

Like, it could get worse?

For example, Jonah “the Doughboy” Goldberg warns us that electing Obama would be returning to the days of Franklin Roosevelt.

For some reason, I’m not quaking in my boots.

Goldberg also displays his firm grasp on American history by calling Woodrow Wilson our “first progressive president.” Please. Wilson was a damn sight less progressive than one of his predecessors, whose birthday happened to be yesterday, btw. The Wilson administration and World War I marked the end of the Progressive Era and ushered in the Republican Era of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, which took us to the Great Depression Era. But I’ve ranted about that before.

Today the righties are screaming that Obama would undermine the Constitution, never mind that the current GOP administration did more to undermine the Constitution than the previous 43 administrations put together.

And for all their hysteria about “redistribution” of wealth, I second biggerbox — “Pallet loads of cash to Iraq? No-bid contracts for Haliburton, and so many others? Jack Abramoff? Dick Cheney? Ted Stevens? Seven-house McCain?” While the GOP controlled the federal government the Republicans redistributed wealth wholesale — to their supporters and themselves.

We liberals have a crazy notion that people who create the wealth through their labor — i.e., workers — ought have something to say about what happens to the wealth. And that maybe a part of the wealth could be used to benefit the nation and its citizens, and not just the wealthy and powerful at the top of the pyramid. We think that’s democracy. The Right claims it is “socialism,” but it is not socialism by any objective definition of socialism.

Gary Kamiya writes (in an article well worth reading all the way through),

William Kristol warned that an “Obama-Biden administration — working with a Democratic Congress — would mean a more debilitating nanny state at home and a weaker nation facing our enemies abroad.” It takes a deep obliviousness to reality for an ardent Bush supporter to be sounding the alarm about the “nanny state” at the same time that his beloved president and party are solicitously spoon-feeding their wailing Wall Street brat out of a $700 billion jar of Gerber’s.

And then there’s the Religious Right. Sarah Posner tells us,

Religious-right honchos are girding the troops for political apocalypse. Townhall magazine, owned by Salem Communications, one of the largest Christian broadcasters in the country, ran a September feature, “Obamageddon: Could We Survive a Barack Presidency?” This month evangelical publishing giant Stephen Strang, whose magazine Charisma endorsed McCain, predicted that “life as we know it will end if Obama is elected.” Last week, the political arm of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family sent out a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America”, a 16-page (pdf) parade of horribles, and talk radio show host Janet Porter imagined that Christians will be imprisoned with Obama in the Oval Office.

I say they are already imprisoned in their own lunacy. If it gets worse for them, it will be entirely their own doing.

As I said in the first paragraph, it can always get worse. A great many things are outside the control of an American government and could get worse no matter who is elected. The global financial crisis might worsen, for example. The Middle East could become more unstable. Giant sea creatures could swallow Indonesia. The next big, frightening thing might be something no one is anticipating now.

But the issues the Right is trying to use to frighten us just aren’t that frightening — except to them. To everyone else, “worse” has already arrived.

Update: Via Balkinization — Steven Calabresi, Professor of Law at Northwestern University Law School and Co-Founder of The Federalist Society, warns us what will happen if Obama is elected —

“[A]ny or all of the following: a federal constitutional right to welfare; a federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities, without regard to proof of discriminatory intent; a right for government financed abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy; the abolition of capital punishment and the mass freeing of criminal defendants…”

These people are bleeping insane.

Update: Here’s more. In her trademark lyrical prose, Sarah Palin said,

“See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Obama, Barack Obama has an ideological commitment to higher taxes, and I say this based on his record… Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free. Let us fight for what is right. John McCain and I, we will put our trust in you.”

“And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us”? This from a woman who wants the government to make our reproductive choices for us?