"Madman!" screeched Roderick Usher to the narrator as they both recoiled in terror at the wraithlike apparition that faced them at the door in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher."
"Madman!" he screamed again at the narrator of this tale of horror, who by this time had "perceived ... a full consciousness on the part of Usher of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne."
A sound conclusion this was, for Roderick Usher was insane. His fevered imagination conjured images of fantastic dimensions, such as the living, breathing nature of the house his family had inhabited, as well as the room he painted -- ghoulish, subterranean, frightful, one in which "no outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor."
It was, in short, a cavern inside a bubble concocted by one who has lost his connection to reality. This was one who also accused his exalted visitor, the narrator of this story, of a condition from which he alone suffered -- madness.
Which of course brings to mind President Obama's re-election campaign themes, as well as those seen at the Democratic National Convention. Take for instance accusations made against Mitt Romney for being somehow responsible for the death of a woman whose husband worked for a company for which Mr. Romney's responsibilities had ended seven years earlier. Or consider the groundless accusation that Mr. Romney did not pay taxes for a decade or so, which generated further the charge that he is a felon and a liar. Or take further the maniacal frothings of Democratic partisans who essentially accuse Republicans of being Nazis -- this from a party that constitutes the poster boy for the most statist, anti-free enterprise, and arrogant regime in American history.
Via: The American Thinker
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