Remember a ways back when I re-posted this dKos diary from Turkana which made the case that much of the real venom behind many of the right-wing attacks on Obama (as compared to, say, Clinton) was fueled by garden variety racism? It was a good conversation that evoked a range of responses – including this angry, hyperbolic, and completely dismissive reaction from Charity:
my dear left-wingers, you have yourselves to blame.
You know hatred, boy, do you ever. You have hated for the past 8 years. Some of you even forgot how not to hate and are still spewing hate on a daily basis toward anyone who dares disagree with you.
After Obama was elected, I read time after time on conservative blogs how we had to resist doing what the left did for the past 8 years. The hate. The screeching. The inability to formulate coherent sentences.Unfortunately, some of us can’t resist emulating what has become the standard in political thought.
So, if anyone on the left wonders why the level of discourse is so base, so visceral, compared to the past, it’s not because he’s black (with or without scare quotes), it’s because you lowered the bar.
(The party of “personal responsibility” heard from, yes I know.)
So imagine my surprise this week when I try checking out the right-wing sites she links to at She’s Right and right away find this gem entitled “Punk-Ass President” from Massachusetts blogger Hotspur at “New England Republican” (after the flip):
I can see him in baggy Jeans, with lipstick teardrops under both eyes, and his baseball cap on sideways.
Don’t ef with Streetdog B. He’ll be President someday in a national flight from reality, but he’s still just a punk.
I’m sure he talks about Hillary and Ted Kennedy the same way. What were we thinking?
I would also note that this post came from Massachusetts, not Alabama. Yet another case-in-point that writing racism off as an exclusive problem of ignurnt sutherners is a dangerous canard.
making a run for more guns and more ammo when Dumbya was (s)elected. I don’t remember fulminating and raging about that bastard’s birth certificate, either. And, for the life of me, I can’t remember anything remotely comparable to the wide-scale douchebaggery of the tea-buggers, either.)
Yes, odum, garden-variety racism grows under southern rocks and northern rocks, too. The post-1960s GOP is the result of Birchers and McCarthy-ites making love to the Klan. It is a toxic combination of paranoid, plain crazy and stupid.
“Ignurnt” is the operative word (along with “scared”) – I’m sure Hotspur, Charity, et. al. aren’t the most edumacated folks that you’re ever gonna meet. They cling to their ignorance and superstitions like some two-year olds chew on their binkies. And they scream bloody murder when you try and take them away from them.
Obama scares them them half out of their half-wits.
is especially humorous, ironic, disturbing, and sad in light of how the Right treated Bill Clinton
…has been going on for quite some time now.
For some people, they saw going after Clinton for his affair with Lewinski not as anything more than revenge for Clarence Thomas. Hell, Hyde himself even as much as admitted it was partially revenge for Nixon.
While it’s theoretically possible for the adherents of a belief system critical of Obama and the Dems to exist without being rooted in racism, the republican party ain’t it.
I hate to keep confusing chumps like charity with the facts, but I didn’t detest bush because he was white any more than I detest myself for being white, I detested him because he was an incompetent, illegitimate hack who wrecked the Country.
There were no shortage of perfectly good reasons for bashing bush from pillar to post without injecting race into the equation. I didn’t feel the need to go around singing “shrub, the clueless cracker” for eight years. I still don’t.
But with every chorus of “Barack the Magic Negro”, every hilarious “Obama’s a spook” gop-staffer e-mail and every oxy-moronic charge that Powell’s decision to back Obama “is totally about race”, the gops just reinforce the reality that they’re a Southern, uneducated, bigoted bunch who’re hostile to Civil Rights Legislation and think a concealed handgun is required attire for every occasion.
These tea-bagger yahoos are just their nitwit notion of an honor roll.
If an ignorant-trash talk show host is the chief spokesman for your party according to a poll of your own membership, ya can’t just cop out and claim “he’s just an entertainer” every time he says something blatantly bigoted and overtly racist, which, let’s face it, is pretty much the extent of his act.
The gops dug their own grave 40 years ago with Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, hopped in it and they’ve been pulling the dirt in behind themselves ever since.
They’ve got no case, no clue and no one to blame but themselves.
Still, they won’t go aways and they can’t be taken lightly. We’re just gonna have to drive the proverbial stake through their hearts.