Andrew Sullivan nailed Fox News a few days ago. What he saw is an America where the Bush/Cheney years are not just coming back, but never really ended in the first place. It's hard to disagree.

Sullivan began by aptly describing Fox's paranoid, dog whistle coverage of the Ebola outbreak as well as its paranoid, dog whistle coverage of the Oklahoma beheading last week. He concludes:

America, my adopted home, is a place of wonder, of energy, of enterprise, of compassion, of risk and diversity. But it is now and always has been a place where deep-seated fear and paranoia have always simmered below the surface – where McCarthyism once stalked the land, where recent hysteria justified the American president authorizing appalling torture of hundreds of people (with complete impunity), where civil liberties were shredded in a period when more people were killed by lightning than by terrorism, where refugee children as young as eight or nine are treated as terrible dangers to the republic, where undocumented immigrants are left in permanent limbo and where legal immigrants are treated as threats first and assets second, and where our leaders, whom one might expect to calm the public, instead fan the flames of panic for short-term political gain.

The great achievement of those maniacs in Iraq and Syria is to have ignited this strain in American life, exploited the PTSD of 9/11, and brilliantly baited this country into another unwinnable, bankrupting war which will only deepen the polarization that leads to more terror – a war in which what’s left of democratic accountability and constitutional norms are once again under threat. I see no one in our elites, including the president, doing anything to calm this down. And I see a Republican landslide coming in the Congress this fall, with all the consequences of more war and more hysteria ahead.

Welcome to America, no longer the land of the free or the brave, but the land of the paranoid and terrified. I haven’t felt this glum since the Bush-Cheney years. Because, it appears, they never really ended.

Me, too. And this is why I have always said that it is dangerous folly to either ignore or dismiss the significance of Fox News. Because all of this has been telegraphed and predictable since President Obama took office. Maybe before.

It's a must read.

(H/T reader Joe Marsh)