Editor’s Note: A longtime journalist, Margo Howard went into the family business (her mother was the fabled Ann Landers) in the 1990s as Dear Prudence. Her broad experience and understanding of human nature provide answers for the troubled — and entertainment for everyone else. Margo’s advice column, Dear Margo, appears twice a week — on Thursdays and Fridays — on wowOwow.com.

I wrote this a few days ago, but with my editor decided it might be too incendiary. After former President Carter’s interview, however, I decided to join the still-thin chorus expressing this viewpoint. I think Obama and his supporters have been too willing to turn the other cheek – an admirable impulse in normal times. But when the debate becomes as coarse as it has, rebuttal is needed.

I find what is abroad in the land, as Henry James would have said, simply repellent — forget frightening. An elected official hollers out "You lie!" during a presidential address, yahoos are wearing firearms wherever they go, even at events where the president is, not to mention bars … certainly a great place to have a drunk with a  pistol. The desperate lunatic fringe, with some help from the Fox guys, have people (well, OK, the gullible, dim ones) believing that old age is reason enough for execution, Obama was born in Kenya, dissenters will be locked up á la the Nazis and the true mission of this administration is to turn us into a Socialist — if not a Communist — country. Even a true-blue conservative author and speechwriter for George W. Bush, David Frum, is concerned about "the wild accusations and paranoid delusions from the fever swamps." The Los Angeles Times called the increasing number of head case Republicans "the party of the paranoid."

Maureen Dowd wrote what I had been thinking: All this insanity is simply the bigots acting out. I am afraid it may really be true that the loudest naysayers cannot stand it that we have a black president. In what psychiatrists would call "displacement," the anger of some at having an African-American leader has been dolled up with scare tactic complaints and projections. They just can’t live with it, so they’re trying to upend it. Divide and conquer. Read it and weep.