It's a treacherous thing, guessing just what is afoot, historically. But it has seemed to many of us for some time that the conservative hoi polloi (i.e., the Republican "base") has been descending into new and stunning depths of mob-like irrationality. One watches the angry-man-in-the-street news stories, reads the uncouth letters to the editor (or to this blog!): these people do not distinguish between fact and opinion. They do not discriminate between sources of information. They offer no arguments. They appear not to be amenable to reason.They believe what they want to believe, and they want to believe some ugly and frightening things.
Conservative leadership? For the most part, they seize the opportunity to demagogue*, encouraging the phenomenon. Good grief!One good thing: there's a growing recognition of this (apparent) development and a call to conservative leadership to do something about their unruly herd.
Frank Rich’s piece in yesterday's New York Times:
The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers
WHEN a Fox News anchor … warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington…. ¶ What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.
…
What is this fury [against Obama] about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies….
…This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.”….
But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment….
…
The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is really a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence….
LOCAL VOCAL YOKELS:
• OC's Reverend Wiley Drake Prays for Obama's deathMORE IRRATIONALITY:
Irrationality about health seems to attract people from across the political spectrum. Consider Oprah Winfrey, who resides, I suppose, somewhere on the left. Her advice and influence concerning health issues is disastrous.
Check out a recent article in Newsweek magazine:
Live Your Best Life Ever!
Wish Away Cancer! Get A Lunchtime Face-Lift! Eradicate Autism! Turn Back The Clock! Thin Your Thighs! Cure Menopause! Harness Positive Energy! Erase Wrinkles! Banish Obesity! Live Your Best Life Ever!
…[T]he truth is, some of what Oprah promotes isn't good, and a lot of the advice her guests dispense on the show is just bad. The Suzanne Somers episode wasn't an oddball occurrence. This kind of thing happens again and again on Oprah. Some of the many experts who cross her stage offer interesting and useful information (props to you, Dr. Oz). Others gush nonsense. Oprah, who holds up her guests as prophets, can't seem to tell the difference. She has the power to summon the most learned authorities on any subject; who would refuse her? Instead, all too often Oprah winds up putting herself and her trusting audience in the hands of celebrity authors and pop-science artists pitching wonder cures and miracle treatments that are questionable or flat-out wrong, and sometimes dangerous.
*Yes, I know, only a barbarian would use this word as a verb.
UPDATE:
This isn't really an "update," since the article below was published four days ago. But its relevant:
Conservatives going after Shep Smith
You bet. The delightful Mr. Charles Krauthammer seems to be the ringleader. You know what he's like.
My guess: Shep's days at FOX are numbered.
Good for him.
3 comments:
Oprah? She doesn't know what she's talking about? Who then are we to trust? Guess I'll go eat worms.
The angry white guys are worried about taxes, it seems, more than anything. Some fear the gun grab, but mostly it's hatred of paying for something that they assume does not benefit them directly that gets their respective goats.
11:39, no doubt many are angry in the way you describe, but one worries about the many (in absolute numbers, if not in percentage) who are plainly angry in a manifestly irrational manner--the many, for instance, who seem genuinely to believe that Obama is not a citizen, including our own Wiley Drake here in OC (he is by no means alone). Or those who seem to believe that Obama is a stealth Muslim jahadist. Or those who imagine that socialism or fascism is afoot (part of the problem here is widespread ignorance of the routine ways in which redistribution has been a part of the American way of government for many decades, long before the arrival of Obama). As Rich suggests, these people clearly believe that they are facing an enemy to their way of life--a radical who will take us from freedom to chains and destitution. They are panicky. They are irrational. Increasingly, they are dangerous.
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