The cry "Take back our country" is one I heard frequently from tea
partiers. The sense is that some elected officials are illegitimate
usurpers of their office. The implied meaning in 'take back our
country' is usually electoral, but violence, as in a 'second amendment
solution,' lurks in the background.
The idea that elected officiasl are not legitimate holders of their
elected office can come from concerns about the fairness of the election
or about the officials themselves. It's often mixed up in the believers'
heads. Obama was elected by fraud, he's not a natural-born American, or
(more likely) no one with his political philosophy should ever be elected, in these people's minds.
Graphic: xark.typedpad.com
So Obama is treated like a usurper. But Clinton was also
treated like a usurper, and there's no doubt that he was a natural-born American. I
think the concerns about fraud and Obama's citizenship are just smokescreens for the real reason people don't want him as
president--that they don't want someone with his politics in the White
House. Therefore, any Democratic president is going to get this
treatment--the constant complaints, the attacks on his legitimacy, the
insults like "traitor," and the calls for impeachment.
Clinton got it too, and it was surprising in its virulence at the time.
Hillary called it a "vast rightwing conspiracy," but it actually became
normal operating procedure for Clinton's GOP opponents. The machinery
hasn't ever stopped. Now Obama is the target, along with his senior
staff, particularly Eric Holder for some reason.
Bear in mind that there can easily be an unending series of complaints
about any official since none of us is perfect or all-powerful or able to
accomplish every single thing within our purview. I think the Obama
administration has been relatively clean, which is why
Operation Fast and Furious is still such an item of anger for the right. It's the
biggest club with which to beat the administration, and it isn't that
big (in my opinion), especially since it began under President Bush in 2006.
I wonder about this sense that any Democratic president is a usurper. It
can feel that the president doesn't have much support if you live in a
deep-red state or receive your political information in a partisan echo
chamber. Many people, on the right, left, or middle, think that they are
actually in the majority, or would be if only:
- The media wasn't so biased.
- The media would get the truth out.
- Voting fraud was eliminated.
- Stupid voters weren't allowed to vote.
- Freeloaders weren't allowed to vote.
- Immigration laws were enforced.
The belief that your ideas are superior and would win an electoral
majority if only [something] is common enough. I just don't know why it
persists in the face of election results. Why is there the sense that
you are part of the "silent majority" (Nixon) or the real Americans
(Palin), and those others are not?
The echo chamber of media and the people around you can certainly
reinforce that idea, and Fox News and other right-wing outlets do plenty
of conscious reinforcement. But I think there's more. There's a kind of
resentment at work. It's resentment of elites, particularly in
non-conservative media and in academia, who have used their power to
stifle. Many people fell stifled, belittled, and embattled. It's no
wonder they want to take the country back. That's how anyone feels when
they're shouted down, or just perceives that kind of treatment. So they
turn their resentment on these elites and their allies, the Democrats.
I don't have a quick solution to this. But I want to remind
people that
civil discourse and true listening are lacking, and we see the outcome in
this situation and probably thousands of others.
Not a bullseye for this topic, but a great graphic
from
rustbeltradical.wordpress.com/tag/paul-street
Extras:
Type "most Americans want" into Google to see what phrases come up in
auto-complete.
Please excuse typos in this post. Blogger lost it and I had to retype it from the preview page in the Firefox history. Freak accident, but only electrons were harmed.
The prizes for media bias go to...
The biggest prize for lying belongs to Fox News, for advertising itself every second of every day as "Fair and Balanced" when they are completely in the tank for conservatives. Fox, you really think you'll going to lose credibility if you start calling yourself "conservative news" and change the tag line to "The other side you really need to hear?" Come on, you have the barest credibility anyhow, which is why the Obama administration could threaten to ban your reporters due your network constantly launching attacks on their officials in fall 2009.Yeah, I remember that.
Other prizes are for the mainstream media for pretending it's neutral just because it's not nearly as bad as Fox. If the mainstream media was so neutral, why is there so much space for Fox and conservative talk radio? The obvious answer, if you think about it or watch this media, is that it's riddled with a low to moderate level of liberal bias. A prime example is talking about social problems and social programs without talking about certain favorite conservative issues like personal responsibility and taxpayer costs. Of course we need a conservative media if that hardly ever happens in MSM. That kind of coverage should be right in those articles and reports, not something that only gets consideration in budget reporting. My credit card bill soars if I don't watch how much everything costs. There's a huge multiplier when government acts that way. (This is why I hate idiot bleeding heart liberals and the endless social programs they would create and how they would raise my taxes over and over. I lived through it in New York state, so I'm speaking from experience. I definitely have compassion fatigue. It's real, and it happens when we're asked to do too much. I feel no guilt about it. It's called not being a saint, something I shit-sure am not.)
Fucking Stupid Campaigns
As I've complained before, the presidential campaign coverage is focusing on miniscule, unimportant shit like misleading statistics about women's job losses, Ann Romney's spending habits, and ... (I've already forgotten what yesterday's stupidity was). This is partly the media's fault, but also the campaigns' because they send out their shills and surrogates to repeat this crap on TV.
In the meantime, we know what the important issues are: the size of government, the size of our debt, what programs we really want and what we don't what, how much it costs, tax reform, how much can we afford to spent on policing this unruly world, and trying to stay out of unnecessary, deadly, and expensive foreign messes.
Come on people. We know that what's important. So stop wasting all this bandwidth on other fucking shit.
Your reactions
So, was this too much? Should I return to civility, practice it and defend it, or give up? I'd like feedback, civil or not.