Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Obama versus the Loonies

The Loonies are among us -- and they're running several candidates of their breed.  Just look at Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, and Carl Paladino.  Rational people would say these candidates are seriously mentally disabled and belong in the loony bin.  As a rational human being, you wouldn't think these nut cases could be taken seriously by ANYone.  Yet, you would be wrong. There are actually voters in this country who identify with people like O'Donnell, Angle, and Paladino.  If the word "intellectual" is ever mentioned within their hearing, they rise up, ranting and raving against the nasty "intellectual lib'rals."  Higher education is anathema to them.  They much prefer to think of themselves as the common folk (even though they vote for a George Bush who thought of himself as an "elite"--go figure. There is no rhyme or reason to their thinking.) But with the arrival of Sarah Palin on the political scene, tapping deeply into the "us common folks" well, we now have her imitators: the Sharron Angles, the Christine O'Donnells, and the Carl Paladinos, spewing their idiocy and ignorance in their daily appearances before their worshipful followers. 

It's sad to see in a country that had, up till now, come so far in knowledge.  But, as a country, we are fast regressing with the rise of the idiots, which came to full bloom with the (s)election of George W. (Duhmbya) Bush as President and Evil Dick Cheney as his puppeteer.  Then came the rise of Sarah (with cynical "Thanks" to John McCain, a used-to-be "maverick" who has sold out his principles--if he ever really had any).  OMG! Can any rational person even imagine Sarah and the Palin tribe in the White House??????????? To do so, is to make the blood run cold. Yet there are millions of voters in this country who have formed a "Tea Party" around candidates such as this.  Pathetic. Sad. Unbelievable. But true.  I receive e-mails from some of the believers in people like O'Donnell, Palin, and Angle. They watch FOX News for their directions, and they love being called "dittoheads" by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.  And, often, they have bigoted views that will never accept a black man in the White House.

As a philosopher once said, it does take all kinds to make a world, but I am concerned that there are so many dittoheads in our world today.  And they will vote again for more obstructionists and crazies--even against their own interests!--ensuring that our country will be taken down by this kind of ignorance.

The following is from an essay by Roger Simon:


...even if Obama had pleased his entire party, that still would have left Republicans, the tea partiers and the wackos.

How can one blame Obama for the shocking numbers of people who erroneously believe he is a Muslim or was not born in the United States or is a socialist-communist-fascist (take your pick or take all three)?

Nobody in the White House, including Obama, expected the degree of sheer hatred that has been directed against him. They knew Obama’s approval ratings would fall — how could they not when, in his first 100 days in office, he hit 69 percent, the highest approval rating for any president at that point in 20 years?

But tensions, fears and suspicions bubbled just beneath the surface. Certain facts had been overlooked in the wave of pride and good feeling that followed Obama’s election. While Obama had won the popular vote by a solid 7 percentage points, he had lost the white vote by a landslide, 12 percentage points. And when he made a world tour, in which his messianic image got amplified and his halo got polished by huge and adoring crowds, the clouds back home began to gather.

He cannot be blamed for the demons who demonize him. In a fine story by Sandhya Somashekhar in The Washington Post on Sunday, under the headline “Hope Isn’t What It Used to Be,” a little doozy appeared in the 25th paragraph about how a volunteer was manning the Democratic Party table at the Arkansas State Fair “when a man walks over wearing a green T-shirt that says, ‘Either he dies, or the country dies.’”  (!!! Need anything more be said about the crazies?)

Either he dies, or the country dies? Do we really live in a country where a man would go out on the street wearing such a thing? If I had seen it, I think I would have called the Secret Service. (I Googled the phrase to see if I could find the manufacturer of the T-shirt, but I found no hits. Does the person print them up in a basement?)

If Democrats get swamped on Nov. 2, sure, some of it will be the fault of the enthusiasm gap and some of it will be the fault of the president, but some of it will be the fault of those loonies who have crept into American politics like bedbugs and grown bloated on their own hatreds.

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