A Picture With A Thousand Words On It...Is Worth Ten Thousand Words
In a previous post, I took the media to task for its appalling myopia about the full-throated roar of the crazies railing against President Obama and why said crazies are doing so. I said...
“Now, the news media beyond Lupica for the most part has been reluctant to look this stuff straight in the eye and call it for what it is, preferring to take the false equivocation / Sgt. Joe Friday “Just the facts...even if one side's 'facts' are clearly made-up bullshit” tack to cover their asses against I suppose...a Limbaugh-led boycott of sponsors...or some such nonsense.
They don't want to point out the big, scarlet-necked, angry elephant tearing the Goddamned room apart with its wild charges into the walls.
That dam may indeed be breaking, as evidenced in the cover story in New York Magazine last week, with said cover art shown above in this piece.
The caption accompanying it?
“The Obama Crazies, And Why They're Not Going Away”
And a taste of the story itself...
A burly Pennsylvania correction officer named David McElwee held up a poster of Obama photoshopped as a half-naked African native in a hut with a grass skirt and a bone in his nose. (Emphasis LM's) That was Obamacare, “voodoo” health care, McElwee said.
This wasn’t politics, exactly, or at least it didn’t start as politics. It came from deeper down, from a stirring pot of disaffection and resentment that made the president a kind of fantasy villain. They dreamt about him. Obama was, quite literally, their nightmare.
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Nuts. Yet what did that word even mean now? “In the early sixties, you had the John Birch Society saying the same kind of nutty things. It never made it into the mainstream,” says Robert Shrum, the longtime political consultant. “The editors of the New York Times or L.A. Times or Washington Post decided what was going to appear.” Reporter Brooks Jackson of Factcheck.org says, “We used to be gatekeepers, back when there were gates. But now you see elected officials standing up and echoing some of the most bizarre, weird, false information we see on chain e-mails.” The left blogosphere spent a lot of energy refuting the crazies—but even as they refuted them, their alternative reality grew, and maybe their power too.
For those of you thinking we here at Group News Blog and the other places where discussion of this “phenomenon” has gained currency were just some hyper-sensitive wackos with an overactive persecution complex, I direct you to this story. It probably won't change your mind, as your hatred of us is just as irrational and rooted in the same loopy biases and misplaced anger as the nuts described in the article, but hey—there the damned thing is. It is the first of many articles like it to come. What has caused this alarm to gain traction is of course the usual gang of idiots overplaying their hateful hand—proudly sporting guns at peaceful gatherings, chucking common and well-established decorum in debate out the window like slovens heaving refuse street-ward during the Middle Ages, and the absolutely craziest overreactions to the most nothing of things.
Note again New York Magazine's coda on the cover blurb—“And Why They're Not Going Away”.
They're right. They're not.
Unfortunately for them, neither are we.
There is a hard-core twenty to twenty-five percent of so-called Americans (“so-called” because real Americans would actually recognize and try to live by what the Bill Of Rights says) for whom this President cannot fail fast enough, be mud-dragged often enough, or in the darkest pit of their sick little hearts, be dead fast enough for their tastes. And every day he wakes up and they see his face sticking out beyond that white collar of his—that face being some seven shades darker that what they've seen all their lives doing what he's doing now, they go just a little bit more crazy.
It will be the job of folks like you, and us—to remain super-sane in the face of these screeching tantrums. These wild outbursts that have given the likes of the dipshit-teous Glenn Beck currency in the daily discourse. Crying, kicking, screaming, wailing, breath-holding, self-punching, clothes-ripping crazy designed to wear and wither the resolve of the “adults in charge” so that we might relent and give them that little break—allowing them to claim a victory and grease that slippery slope where all they have to do is bitch and moan loud enough to keep getting over just enough to rightfully deem our side as “weak”.
FDR fed on this sort of hatred. Where we look at him now as a beloved, patrician, fireside-sitting salve to what ailed us during the awfulness of The Great Depression and the ensuing trials of World War II, during his actual heyday he was utterly reviled by a solid chunk of the more retrograde among us in America. The article sagely notes:
Thirty percent of the country hated Roosevelt, and that number never really went away, Shrum points out. Ultimately, FDR made hay of this rage. In a 1936 campaign speech in Madison Square Garden he castigated the right as “organized money” and declared: “I welcome their hatred.” Shrum says it took FDR four years in office to arrive at a “progressive confrontational politics.”
Sometimes when a kid goes berserk in a tantrum, the thing to do is to just let 'em go off and embarrass themselves for a while—the crazier they get, the calmer you get...and you simply do not give in. You let them shame themselves. And then comes the time when you eventually have to do what you have to do and you take Junior by the hand and go where you have to go...fuck if he's got a snot-soddened face and only a hoarsened howl left for words. You make the moves grown-ups have to make and that's all there is to it in the end. The hope here is that President Obama doesn't have to spend his (hopefully for him) first four years like FDR did converting all that nutty caterwauling to so much white noise (pun unintended).
I'd like to see more of what Shrum so perfectly described at the end of that piece—“progressive confrontational politics.”
It's getting to be about time to just drag Junior's ass along, people...and to not worry about what his fellow immature knuckleheads may think about it. He's a spoiled, irrational brat. Case closed We've known that for the longest and the New York article is the bellwether that those beyond us are realizing it as well.
So we're going to keep on pointing it out here at Group News Blog.
Because it's absolutely necessary to keep 'em honest.
Because they need to know we're not going to let them get away with it.
And because sometimes...just shining a light on flip-nut, batshit crazy can be almost as entertaining as it is as scary-truth-revealing...
Yikes.
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