A Wisconsin bar is being investigated by the Secret Service after a bartender burned an effigy of President Barack Obama.

A videotape of the incident was caught on tape. People in the bar can be heard screaming as the doll goes up in flames.

What looks like duct tape appears to be around the doll's neck. Aside from the racist overtones of putting duct tape around the neck of a black doll and setting it on fire (strange fruit) the Secret Service has an obligation to investigate possible threats to the president.

While the bartender's actions may not have been illegal, they are still troubling. As Michael Wolff points out on Newser, more and more fringe folks are pushing the political agenda in this country today.




Wolff writes:

The question more and more is not about the outcome of the November election but about how weird it will be. Tuesday's son-of-Ron-Paul victory fortifies not only Tea Party campaigns across the country, but the ambitions of almost every would-be politician who is passionately aggrieved. It could be that anybody who is weird has just about the best chance in modern history of getting elected in November. It could be that the weirder you are -- the angrier, the more self-righteous, the more certain of grand conspiracies and of our current era's historic apostasy -- the more likely it is that you'll run, and, depending only on the relative badness of economy, win.

Somebody should spend some time trying to measure the size of the opportunity for the nutters. You would have to quantify the inversion of reality. Among the variables: the extent to which the lack of experience is understood to be more valuable than experience; the number of people who question the president's birthplace; the ebb and flow of the passions of the Sarah Palin faction. What you define then is not just the level of the dumbing down of the public discussion but the extent of the rise of the emotionally troubled as the guiding spirit of it.

That is the scary part. When you have, as Rachel Maddow pointed out Thursday night, the attorney general of Virginia openly questioning whether Obama was born in this country, a potential senator questioning the prudence of government involvement in guaranteeing civil rights for all Americans and a push to turn over the reins of this country to the ignorant and close-minded, you have to wonder where we are headed.

The astounding thing is that this backlash comes just a few years after this country voted for dramatic change by electing the first black president. Now, you have a movement that criticizes government for being too involved in our lives just after we've seen what happens when government removes itself from regulating issues, such as the financial markets, which affects us all.

It's frightening and odd that this movement has traction, given what occurred in this country just recently. How that "weirdness " Wolff describes trickles down to the masses is demonstrated by people in a bar burning the president in effigy and arguing against providing their fellow citizens with health care.

The hypocrisy is also amazing. Many of these people don't want government involvement in their lives until they need help. They don't care about people who don't have health care until something happens to them and they need medical care they can't afford on their own. They don't want the government to help guarantee civil rights until they are discriminated against. They think the social safety net is for the lazy and uninspired until they get laid off and are in danger of losing their homes.

Bar owner Karen Schoenfeld told a local television station that the incident was being "blown out of proportion" and it was a case of "Cuervo gone wild." She says she has received death threats since the incident.

"I have to take full responsibility because it did happen at my bar," she said. "But it was not racially motivated."

This stuff is scary ... and weird.