Kemstone's Journal

We all project our feelings and motivations on other people—it’s the most natural thing in the world. Ascribing to others the same kinds of thoughts and emotions we experience ourselves is not only unavoidable, but psychologically necessary. You couldn’t go through life if you assumed that every other person in the world has completely different ideas and thought-processes than you. We all think alike to a certain degree because we all have human brains, and the closer we are to other people in terms of our genes or our culture, the more likely we are to be accurate when we project our feelings onto them.

Projection gets us into trouble because we all too often falsely project thoughts and intentions onto other people. We assume that because we would react a certain way in a certain situation, others will naturally have the same reaction. We think that because we have certain reasons for doing and believing certain things, other people have the same reasons.

When it comes to politics, I often run into problems when I project some of my own qualities onto conservatives whom I try to engage in debate. Because I value rationality and approach every issue with an open mind, I unthinkingly assume that my political opponents are also interested in getting to the truth even if it means discovering that they’re wrong. I’m always willing to admit when I’m wrong, but that doesn’t mean my conservative friends are—in fact in most cases they’re only interested in winning an argument and are happy to ignore whatever facts and sound arguments they have to in order to maintain their pre-existing opinion.

I approach politics from a standpoint of compassion, especially for those less fortunate than me, but I can’t assume that my conservative opponents will respond to the same kinds of emotional arguments as I do. The emotions they respond to tend to be hatred, fear, and greed, and they make their arguments accordingly. They mistakenly assume that I’ll respond to fear-based arguments the same way they do just as I mistakenly assume that they’ll respond to appeals to human decency in the same way I do.

That much is obvious, but there are a few concrete issues in which I believe conservatives project their own ways of thinking onto the rest of us, and I feel it’s worthwhile to point them out. Though I’m sure there are countless examples, I’ll cite five of the most prevalent.

1. Hate. I always hesitate to make broad generalizations like, “Conservatives are often driven by a hatred of the Other” because this is certainly not the case for all conservatives or even most conservatives I know personally. That said, most conservatives—at least the kind I read online and see on TV in interviews—won’t hesitate to make broad generalizations about liberals without any qualifier. Many of them genuinely hate liberals and make all kinds of assumptions based on that hatred.

If I hate a person or group of people, it’s natural to project the same feelings onto them and assume that they hate me right back. Conservatives who hate liberals assume that all liberals hate conservatives, and that’s just not the case. Some of my favorite people in the world are conservative. I don’t even hate the Tea Party people who are demanding that the government stop spending money to help the less fortunate. As frustrated as these people make me, I don’t hate them. I just wish I could get them to see things differently.

But most of them probably wouldn’t extend the same courtesy to me. I’m not a “real American” in their eyes. I’m the Other that they hate so much. And because they hate me they assume I hate them and all they stand for. Since they believe they’re the ones representing America, they believe I hate America. The whole idea that liberals hate America is, I believe, I product of projection.

2. Race. Again I’ll begin with the qualifier that not all conservatives are racist. In fact, I’ll be generous enough to assume that most of them aren’t. But there is certainly a great deal of racism within the conservative movement no matter how much they deny it.

What’s interesting is how they deny it: by accusing others of racism. “We’re not racist” they’ll say. “It’s the minorities who are the real racists!” The prime example is Glenn Beck’s now infamous quote that Barack Obama is a man who has a “deep-seated hatred of white people.”

I’m not saying Beck or his followers necessarily have a “deep-seated hatred” of black people that they’re projecting onto Obama (though some certainly do), but it’s safe to say that these people look at the world through race-tinted lenses. They think in terms of black and white and different ethnic groups competing with each other. They assume that because they want white people and the “white culture” to predominate in America, these other groups must have similar aspirations for themselves.

Hence the widespread belief that Obama’s main objective is reparations, and that he wants to hand the country over to minorities and make white people second-class citizens. They want minorities to remain second-class citizens, so they think minorities want to do the same to them. It doesn’t occur to them that it’s not a competition, that most minority groups are simply interested in coexistence and cooperation.

3. Welfare. One opinion almost universal among conservatives is that welfare recipients are lazy moochers who are sponging off the hard work of everyone else. They are the first to buy the argument that unemployment benefits create more unemployment because people would rather sit on the couch all day doing nothing than go out and look for a job.

Maybe they believe this because they would be more than happy to sit in front of the TV all day and collect unemployment if they had the opportunity. They project their own laziness onto everyone else and assume that the only reason anyone might be unemployed is because it’s their choice.

Now, I’ll definitely concede that being able to collect unemployment causes many people to wait around longer and not try as hard to find a job as they otherwise would. I live in Germany where the Hartz-4 benefits people get when unemployed really do give them an incentive to not get a job. The naturally lazy people spend all day sitting outside and drinking beer with their lazy friends. But the majority of people aren’t so lazy. The majority want to work and they feel like they’re wasting their lives when they aren’t. The same is definitely true for Americans, and while there are just as many lazy liberals as there are lazy conservatives, the latter need to stop projecting their own laziness onto everyone across-the-board.

4. Electoral fraud. One of the things conservatives are always howling about is the alleged liberal plot to steal elections any way we can. We all remember the ACORN fiasco during the 2008 elections in which the organization was ripped to shreds by the conservative media because a few of their workers filled out fake voter-registration forms (fraud that was discovered and punished by ACORN itself). Just this morning, by complete coincidence, I got an e-mail from the Tea Party Nation warning me about liberals trying to steal the election and calling for conservatives to go to the polls armed with video cameras in an attempt to catch us in the act.

Naturally, they think that the only way liberals can win an election is to steal it because they’ve projected their own political beliefs onto the nation as a whole and are under the impression that the vast, vast majority of Americans are just as conservative as they are. (For a full refutation of this theory, check out these polls.)

But more than that, they’re so concerned about liberals stealing the election because they would steal the elections themselves if they could. These people think they’re so right and we’re so wrong that they’d be justified in using any means necessary to gain power. After all, what’s a little election-fraud when the lives of so many unborn fetuses are at stake? If they have to stuff the ballot box to stop gays from getting married, so be it. The ends justify the means.

Naturally, they think that liberals suffer from the same lack of principles and that we’re therefore out to steal elections. Never mind the fact that it’s mostly liberal organizations that have been fighting against the Diebold voting machines which leave no paper trail and thus leave the results of any election in the hands of the corporation that owns the machines.

5. Indoctrination. Finally, we come to the issue of influencing children to think the way we do. Conservatives are constantly complaining about the liberal elites at the universities twisting the views of their students [by getting them to actually study history]. Not only that, but they’re worried about schoolteachers as well. “Mrs. Parker taught you what?! That our founding fathers owned slaves and helped wipe out the Indians? That filthy America-hating lib!!” Even in kindergarten: “She taught you to share what you have with others?! That communist!!”

We all remember when conservative parents kept their children home to prevent them from hearing Barack Obama’s address to the nation’s schoolchildren. Apparently his message of working hard and staying in school was too much liberal propaganda for them and they didn’t want their kids being brain-washed.

So of course they would never try to indoctrinate children to their own way of thinking, right? They just present their kids with all of the facts and arguments on all sides of every issue and let the children decide for themselves, right?

Hah! The reason they’re so afraid of teachers indoctrinating their kids with liberal ideology is because they are hell-bent on indoctrinating kids into their own ideology. Just look at the Tea Party coloring-book and see for yourselves. Look at all those kids at Tea Party rallies holding signs like, “Mr. Obama, stop robbing my piggy bank!” I won’t even mention how religion fits in to all this, but I will ask you to consider how many of these parents encourage their kids to learn about faiths other than their own.

When you try so hard to make sure your kids think exactly like you do, you project this on to everyone else and think that they’re trying to influence your kids as well—that others are trying to turn your kids against you.

In conclusion I’ll admit that most conservatives probably won’t respond to this line of argument. Introspection and objective self-reflection aren’t exactly the kinds of qualities I’d expect to find in most Tea Party folks, and they’d probably just get angry and deny it without ever stopping to consider whether it might be true.

But I do think it’s useful for liberals to consider these points in order to better understand where conservatives are coming from. Remember that whenever they accuse you of some kind of nefarious motive, it’s probably because it’s something that motivates them. When they purport to tell you how you think, they’re actually telling you something about how they think.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember voting for Glenn Beck for president. I don’t think many Obama supporters, upon casting their vote in 2008, were hoping that once president he would bend over backwards to do everything he possibly could to appease Fox News. I could be wrong—maybe Obama voters were really hoping for a president who would ignore progressives and listen only to the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity—but somehow I find that hard to believe.

Excuse me for ranting but I’ve got the need. Cenk Uygur’s epic rant over the Shirley Sherrod debacle on Wednesday’s Young Turks got me fired up. Between that and a dozen other columns and blog entries I’ve read these last couple of days, it’s clear that this story is far more significant than I initially realized.

At first my anger was directed almost entirely at Fox News. I couldn’t believe how so many people can still see them as an actual news organization when they clearly have a political agenda and will rush to broadcast any story that fits their pre-existing narrative with a deliberate disregard for what the actual facts are. Their #1 agenda is to do political harm to Obama. When presented with a heavily-edited video that seemed to show an employee of Obama’s department of agriculture boasting about how she discriminated against a white farmer, they didn’t waste a single moment checking to see whether it was what it appeared to be.

They could have found the entire unedited video but didn’t. They could have tried to contact Sherrod for her side of the story but didn’t. Most egregiously, they didn’t even try to contact the white farmers who were supposedly the victims of this discrimination, as if they had they would have learned—as the rest of the country learned when actual journalists stepped onto the scene—that Sherrod actually helped them save their farm, and that the story she’d been telling in that video was about how she learned that it was wrong to discriminate based on color.

But the Obama White House fired Shirley Sherrod before any journalism was done—before any basic questions were even asked. Sherrod told reporters that she actually had to pull over to the side of the road and submit her resignation via text message because she had to be gone by the time Glenn Beck went on the air.

Brillliant move on the White House’s part. Obviously they learned their lesson from the Van Jones fiasco, when they let Fox News hammer them for days before finally getting rid of him. No doubt they were patting themselves on the back for swift, decisive action when they got rid of Sherrod within a single news cycle.

Surely they had fixed everything. Fox News, upon seeing how quickly the administration caved in to them, would undoubtedly give him all the credit in the world and begin reporting how they’d been wrong about him all along—that he’s really not a reverse-racist and that he should be applauded for getting rid of Sherrod.

Of course not. Their number one agenda, remember, is to harm Obama politically. So when he did exactly what they wanted him to do, they hammered him for that! How could he fire her so quickly before checking all the facts? I can’t believe he just threw that poor woman under the bus like that. I mean, we’re Fox News so it’s not our job to check the facts but surely the White House has a responsibility to get the whole story before taking action.

And on that, they’re absolutely right. It’s not Fox News’s responsibility to report the truth—they are a propaganda network, not a news organization—but the White House does have a responsibility to make sure that the actions they take are based on hard facts and solid evidence.

But apparently that’s not how they operate. It would seem that they’ve got their eyes on Fox News at all times and stand ever poised to deflate whatever criticism that network might be leveling against them. They say Van Jones is a communist? Get rid of him. They say ACORN is full of criminals? Cut off its funding. Just please don’t hate us, right-wingers. We swear we’ll do whatever you say, Glenn Beck. Just stop saying mean things about us. What is it you want us to do? Just tell us who to fire and they’ll be out of here by 5 p.m.

Last year, in the midst of the health care debacle, I asked whether Obama was a pussy or a sell-out. I keep going back and forth on that question, but this drove me firmly back to the pussy side of the equation. Running the country based on Fox News talking points? How weak and pathetic can you possibly be?

What the hell do you think you’re actually accomplishing with this strategy? You think that if you keep caving in to Fox News, one day conservatives are suddenly going to change their minds about you? That if you keep compromising on all your progressive ideals and delivering watered-down, industry-friendly legislation, that right-wingers are going to start saying, “You know, maybe we were wrong about him. He might not be a radical socialist after all.”

News for you: That. Will. Never. Fucking. Happen.

So deal with it. Give up this absurd act of chasing your own tail all day long, turn off the goddamn Fox News channel, and run the country the way you would run it if there were no such thing as the Glenn Beck program.

Or better yet, listen to both sides. Progressives have criticisms too, and theirs are actually based in reality. Instead of only taking Bill O’Reilly’s advice, try listening to Rachel Maddow for once. Her advice is actually designed to help you.

The Shirley Sherrod thing, in itself, is just a small story. But taken in the larger context of the way Barack Obama has been conducting his administration, it’s one of the most important political events of his presidency. It’s one of those Wizard of Oz moments when the curtain is drawn back and you see who’s really running the show.

The strategy is clear: Don’t waste any time worrying about what liberals and progressives are saying because liberals and progressives don’t matter. They will never vote for republicans, so you gain nothing by doing anything more than the bare minimum to appease them. You win elections by appealing to swing-voters, to the moderate center, to the people who want to see both parties working together in a bipartisan fashion to accomplish things in Washington. When conservatives criticize you, you should immediately respond to that criticism in order to show how much of a centrist you are and how much you’re willing to listen to the other side.

The strategy is also dead wrong. I don’t know who this imaginary moderate centrist voter is, but I’ve never met him. Is there a single American voter who wasn’t sure about Obama until he dropped the public option, watered-down financial reform, called for more offshore oil drilling, fired Van Jones and de-funded ACORN? Seriously, I want to know how many people will go to the polls and vote for democrats this Fall because Obama proved to them that he’s not ‘too liberal’.

It’s complete and utter bullshit, and it’s so frustrating that Obama is so wrapped up inside his Washington bubble that he can’t even see it. He thinks that Bush’s approval ratings were so low because he spent too much time appeasing his base and never compromising with the other side. Wrong—Bush’s approval ratings were so low because everything he did as president was a total disaster. But at least he got shit done.

Why don’t you try that strategy for awhile, Obama? Why don’t you take a “Bring ‘em on” approach to Fox News and let them say whatever the hell they want to say while you deliver on the Change you promised? The Washington punditocracy will no doubt say you’ve gone off the deep-end, that you’re drifting perilously to the left and that this center-right country won’t stand for it. But you know what? You might find that in the Fall, liberals and progressives will actually come out and vote instead of staying home. You might even find that these all-important centrist-moderates you’re so concerned about actually come out and vote for democrats as well because…golly gee…it turns out they didn’t actually care about bipartisan posturing as much as they cared about government actually getting shit done.

Wake up, Obama. You’ve handed control of the country over to Fox News and you wonder why you’re heading for a failed presidency. In 2012 you should just let voters write in Glenn Beck’s name instead of yours so he can run the country directly without a middle-man.

So much has been written about the Shirley Sherrod saga that it’s almost not worth it for me to put my two cents in, but here goes.

For those of you who don’t watch cable news, here’s the basic run-down of the story. Conservative activist Andrew Breitbart posted what he claimed was video evidence of reverse-racism in the Obama administration. It was from a speech given by Shirley Sherrod, who until yesterday worked in Obama’s department of agriculture, in which she talked about not wanting to help white farmers keep their property because she didn’t think any white people deserved her help.

At the drop of a hat, Fox News picked up this story and ran with it, hyperventilating all day long about this vile racism and what it says about Obama’s back-door reparations agenda—the completely bogus narrative the network sells to its viewers. Other networks followed suit and before you knew there was so much pressure that Shirley Sherrod was fired by the Obama administration before she even knew what hit her.

Later in the day, the entire video came out. It turns out that what was previously released had not only been taken out of context, but edited so heavily that the entire message of her story had been completely reversed. Sherrod was talking about how her first inclination upon seeing this white farmer was that she didn’t owe him any help, but upon delving deeper into his situation she realized that he was just as much of victim of the broken system as black people—that it’s not about black vs. white but rich vs. poor—and that from that day on she no longer judged people purely based on race. The whole point of the story was completely anti-racist—the exact opposite of what Brietbart and Fox News were saying it was.

Not only that, but upon contacting the supposed “victims” of her racism—the farmer and his wife—the news media learned that they are eternally grateful to Shirley Sherrod and consider her a friend for life.

This is not just a harmless mistake on the part of a news organization. This was a deliberate, calculated effort to add to the perception that Obama and his administration are racist and that they’re out to financially harm white people. There was a definite agenda behind this reporting, and that agenda was not to report the “fair and balanced” truth.

There used to be something called journalism in this country. It used to be that a news organization didn’t run with the story until they looked into it and made sure they knew the facts. When presented with an edited video clip, there are a number of steps that an actual journalist would take before jumping to conclusions and ranting about it on the air. For one thing, you could look for the entire video—it was available. You could contact Shirley Sherrod herself—she was available. You could contact the farmers who were the supposed victims of the racism—they were available too.

But instead of doing any of this, they leapt on the air and hammered home the “Obama is a racist” point as much as possible before real journalists could do their job and they’d have to quietly issue their corrections—but not until the damage was done. Shirley Sherrod, as of the time of this writing, is still without a job.

You can not consider Fox News a “news” organization. It just isn’t. It’s not a real news organization. Yes, other networks are blameworthy for picking up on the story before all the facts had come to light, but Fox News deliberately ran with it because it was exactly the kind of story they needed. Fox News is not news at all. It’s corporate-conservative propaganda. It’s a tool for the power-elites to keep the people under control by misdirecting their anger away from those truly responsible for their suffering—multi-national corporations—and towards fake boogeymen like a racist president hell-bent on taking money from white people and redistributing to black people. No such president exists—it’s a fictional character dreamt up in corporate think-tanks—but if all you watch is Fox News you’d have no way of knowing that. You’d really think some angry black politician is gunning for you.

ACORN, Van Jones, and now Shirley Sherrod have fallen victim to this despicable game. The Obama administration ought to be ashamed for just buckling at every turn and throwing these people and organizations under the Fox News bus before even checking to see what the actual facts are.

But it’s supposed to be the job of news organizations to check facts. They could have easily done it, but Fox News didn’t check the facts, and for that reason no serious, honest, objective person could possibly consider it a real news organization.

UPDATE: Living in Europe means I’m usually about 24 hours behind the news cycle. Since writing this I’ve heard some new insight, particularly from the Rachel Maddow show, that present this incident in a broader context than conservative perceptions of the Obama administration. This is primarily about the effectiveness of the southern strategy—the idea of the angry black man coming for the white man’s privilege—which has been used by politicians to win elections long before the world was controlled by multi-nationals. However, corporations no doubt recognize the benefits of this idea in terms of its divisiveness and power of misdirection, and they are consciously keeping it alive by using Fox News as their tool.

Over the weekend, I was one of the many voices calling out Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams for his blatant racism in writing that mock letter from the NAACP to Abraham Lincoln, in which he suggested that blacks were better off as slaves. I wrote that unless other Tea Party leaders condemned him and forced him to step down, all charges of racism against the Tea Party would be legitimized.

It would seem they got the message. Mark Williams has been ousted from his position, and other Tea Party leaders are rushing to say that his views do not represent those of the movement as a whole. Maybe I’m being too fair, but I’ll accept them at their word for now. They could have defended him, but instead they threw him under the bus where he belonged, which means they at least deserve a little anti-racist credit.

Of course, I still think the Tea Party Movement as a whole is a deeply immoral organization. Even if you completely ignore the racist elements within it, the movement itself is controlled by wealthy corporate interests who harness the anger of middle-class Americans and turn it against those who are actually trying to fix the problems they’re so angry about. Conservatives stood against health care reform based on the Tea Party’s lie that it was a massive government takeover of the system, and they stood against Financial Reform based on the Tea Party’s lie that it was a plot to socialize the banks. In both cases, their protests helped create a political climate in which the legislation had to move further to the right until it was too weak to accomplish anything. These people were duped into standing against their own best interests.

So even if the Tea Party isn’t racist (and that debate is nowhere near settled), it’s still completely and utterly contemptible.

There was a bit of an uproar this week over a parody letter written by Mark Williams, a right-wing talk show-host and Tea Party Express organizer. It’s a mock-letter from the head of the NAACP to Abraham Lincoln, and it was so offensive that Williams has since removed it from his website.

I’m not normally one to cry ‘racist’ at every turn, and I often think liberal groups go too far in condemning relatively benign things (like the Chimp Cartoon, for example) but the racism in this letter is so blatant that not even other conservatives could legitimately defend it. It doesn’t merely cross a line—it rips the line to shreds and shits all over it. The only more blatant form of racism than this is that of the Ku Klux Klan variety that claims blacks are genetically inferior to whites. This doesn’t go quite that far, but it comes close.

I’m going to post the whole letter and respond to each section because I believe it provides invaluable insight into how these Tea Partiers think, but first a bit of context. Last week, Ben Jealous, the head of the NAACP called on Tea Party leaders to denounce racism within their ranks. He wasn’t asking for much—merely for the Tea Party to admonish people who carry racist signs and shout racial slurs at rallies. You’d think the Tea Party would welcome this opportunity to push back against the Big Bad Liberal Media’s incessant charges of racism, but instead they dove in head first.

Here’s how Mark Williams imagines Ben Jealous would have addressed President Lincoln:

Dear Mr. Lincoln

We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

Remember, this is a leader of the Tea Party Movement, attempting to cater to his Tea Party base. As such, it provides non-Tea Partiers with insight into how Tea Partiers think. And one of the things that many of them think is that black people were better off under slavery. I’ve talked to people who genuinely believe that. Mark Williams wouldn’t be writing this if he hadn’t had that conversation too.

In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the ‘tea party movement’.

And one paragraph later we get this completely contradictory and laughably absurd claim that the Tea Party Movement would have been on the side of the abolitionists!

The tea party position to “end the bailouts” for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn’t that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us coloreds! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds.

Again, this is valuable insight into Tea Party thinking. They associate the bailouts with welfare—with handouts to lazy black people.

And the ridiculous idea of “reduce[ing] the size and intrusiveness of government.” What kind of massa would ever not want to control my life? As Coloreds we must have somebody care for us otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!

Their opposition to Big Government also has a racial element. Apparently liberals want to expand the size of government in order to tell everyone what to do, and since blacks long for the good old days of slavery when they could just relax and let “massa” make all the decisions, they’re totally in favor of a more intrusive government.

The racist tea parties also demand that the government “stop the out of control spending.” Again, they directly target coloreds. That means we Coloreds would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.

In the mind of a Tea Partier, no black person could possibly have earned his or her position due to merit. It was all affirmative action, from Barack Obama to Al Roker—these people just sat on their asses their entire lives while success was handed to them by guilt-ridden liberals trying to make up for slavery.

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

One—black people pay taxes too, moron. Two—not all black people are obsessed with bling. Many spend their money wisely, asshole. Three—you want to talk about who is and who is not a “productive member of society”? Look in the mirror, you despicable worm. Your job is to spout propaganda that misdirects the anger of white people away from the system of corporate dominance that harms them and towards progressive organizations that are actually advocating reforms that would help them. At a time when this country desperately needs well-informed Economic Warriors, you deliberately-divisive Culture Warriors are the least productive members of society around!

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Sincerely

Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew NAACP Head Colored Person

America can be neatly divided into two categories or people—those who read this and laugh, and those who read this and want to go out and punch someone. “Tom’s Nephew”—I mean, seriously. This unbelievable piece of shit Mark Williams claims in no uncertain terms that blacks were happier as slaves, and has the audacity to suggest that they are the ones being racist!

Even after removing the letter from his site, his explanation clearly shows that he still doesn’t have a fucking clue what people were so upset about. He seems to think it was over his use of the word “colored”. But it was just satire, he cries in his defense. He was highlighting the irony of how an organization so concerned with political correctness—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—uses the word “Colored” in its acronym:

I would suggest to those offended by the term “Colored People” (the phrase that made my article so controversial) please contact the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and join me in calling for an end to their use of the racial slur

Mark Williams, you are a fucking idiot. Your letter wasn’t racist because you used the word “colored”. It was racist because you suggested that black people were better off as slaves, that any successful Africa-Americans didn’t earn their success but were given it by affirmative action, and that they’re all lazy, unproductive members of society who leech off white people’s tax money.

In one regard, at least, Mark Williams has done Tea Party-opponents a favor. As long as the Tea Party Express refuses to fire him and publicly condemn what he said, it can no longer pretend that it’s not a racist organization. You can let them know by going here.

So the right-wing is up-in-arms about a case involving a couple of Black Panthers, Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson, caught standing outside a polling location in Philadelphia on Election Day 2008, apparently to intimidate voters.

First of all, if you type the name “Samir Shabazz” into Google, every single hit on the first page comes from right-wing blogs. The first actual “news” source you come across is Rupert Murdoch’s Washington Times, followed by FoxNews.com, which reports:

The Bush Justice Department brought the first case against three members of the group, accusing them in a civil complaint of violating the Voter Rights Act. The Obama administration initially pursued the case, winning a default judgment in federal court in April 2009 when the Black Panther members did not appear in court. But then the administration moved to dismiss the charges the following month after getting one of the New Black Panther members to agree to not carry a “deadly weapon” near a polling place until 2012.

The inherent allegation is that Obama, who is deeply sympathetic to the Black Panthers due to his secret anti-white radicalism, personally stuck his hand in the case to get his justice department to drop the charges.

Erick Erickson wrote a piece recommending that republicans should tie Samir Shabazz to Obama just like they tied Willie Horton to Michael Dukakis in 1988—an ad campaign that many believe put George H.W. Bush in the White House. There’s nothing like a dangerous black man to turn voters against a politician.

Good luck with that, republicans. This is a complete non-story, and nobody outside of the political right is going to bite. Barack Obama, tool of corporate America, friend to Wall Street, constant panderer to conservatives, just doesn’t strike us as the kind of guy who is going to actively intervene to deny justice to black defendants.

But it fits perfectly well with the right-wing narrative, which paints Obama as a secret racist who got elected in order to destroy the country out of revenge for crimes against his race. And if you spend all your time in the conservative media bubble, you might get enough stories like this to feel like this perception is justified.

The fact that the rest of the media hasn’t paid any attention to this ridiculous non-story might be proof that they’re liberal and in bed with Obama, but it might also mean that it’s just a non-story. Like the ACORN-prostitution scandal, this is something blown way out of proportion by FoxNews and the rest of the right-wing media in the hopes that it will gain some traction, rile up the conservative base, and do more political damage to Obama.

The irony is that there are so many good reasons to criticize Obama—so many legitimate, fact-based allegations to be made against him—that these media outlets could do serious damage to him if they wanted, but it doesn’t fit with their narrative of him being a radical socialist reverse-racist terrorist-sympathizer who is deliberately destroying America as punishment for slavery. So they constantly latch on to this kind of bullshit, which isn’t helping anybody but a few republicans who need help getting out the vote.

A recent change in my schedule giving me Fridays off has led to what I think will be a good blogging routine of Friday and Saturday devoted to specific news-of-the-week topics and Sunday to a more broad, universal issue. As such I’ll close out this blogging weekend with a look at the issue of race and how it lies hidden beneath many of the opinions held by conservatives. Almost all of them will swear they’re not racists, and I believe that they believe they’re sincere about this, but on closer examination you’ll often find racism lurking just below the surface.

As any avid viewer of The Young Turks is aware, a couple of recent studies have indicated that bias against members of another ethnic group can exist subconsciously. In one study, subjects were shown videos of a hand being pricked with a needle and had their brain waves monitored to indicate the level of empathy they felt. When the hand being pricked was of the same color as the subject’s, more empathy was felt in most cases. Another study was less subconscious, as they tested whether black people have a harder time selling things online by posting ads on sites like Craig’s List or ebay in which either a white hand or a black hand was holding an Ipod to be sold. Not only did black sellers receive fewer responses than white sellers, but buyers were less likely to use their own name and more likely to express concern about making long-distance payments when contacting a black seller.

I doubt that any of the people who withheld their names or expressed concern about payments to the black sellers believe that they are racists. And I’m sure if you came right out and asked them, “Do you think white people are superior to black people?” they would say no, of course not. But there’s still no denying that racism was a factor in their behavior.

I believe that racism is also a huge subconscious factor when it comes to many people’s political beliefs. They might not recognize the racism, and they’ll almost certainly deny that it’s there, but it is there whether acknowledged or not. I’ll look at five major conservative attitudes or opinions in which racism is a factor—I’m sure you can probably think of many more.

1- Opposition to welfare

It’s a perfectly legitimate position to be opposed to welfare, but how much of that opposition is a result of an underlying psychological connection between the word “welfare” and the image of an overweight black person sitting on a couch all day? That’s the image that pops into my head when I hear that word because I grew up among conservatives who overtly associated welfare with black people. I’m sure not everyone has that association, but I can assure you from firsthand experience that a whole lot of people do.

We can argue about the underlying principles behind liberalism and conservatism all day, and conservatives can make some legitimate points about how people who refuse to get a job should not be entitled to a portion of the earnings of those who work hard, but when all is said and done I think we all feel better off with some kind of social safety-net than we would without one. Not everyone on welfare is just leeching off the system—some people are just genuinely down on their luck, and since we all might find ourselves in that position due to circumstances beyond our control (just ask a Louisiana fisherman) I think we could all agree that welfare is necessary.

But there are those who go to the extreme and rail against any government assistance programs whatsoever. Some of these people will come right out and say that they don’t want no goddamned ACORN taking the white man’s money and handing it out to black folks. Most of them won’t be so explicit, but I would definitely wager that somewhere in the back of their minds is the same sentiment. If you passed around a collection tray to help out a white family down on its luck, I’m sure they’d give without reservation. But say that the donations are for a black family and they’ll instinctively feel put off. Those black folks get enough help from the government with their affirmative action and social assistance programs, so why should they give them any more help?

2- Immigration furor

When it comes to immigration, racism is hardly hidden at all. Right-wing radio commentators don’t even bother to hide their hatred of Mexicans, cracking racial slurs and jokes whenever the issue is brought up. But there are plenty of commentators who insist that this is purely an issue of principle and that they have nothing but sympathy for Mexicans who come to this country in search of a better life.

It has nothing to do with race, they insist. It’s just that when people come here illegally, they take jobs from legal residents and enjoy the benefits of taxpayer-funded institutions including schools and hospitals. Well, most American citizens probably aren’t interested in working out in the fields or cleaning hotel rooms for a living, and even illegal immigrants pay taxes so I’m not sure how much force those two arguments have. It’s certainly unfair that some people wait years to immigrate legally while others just bypass the law altogether, and there’s no doubt that having a significant portion of illegal workers willing to work for below minimum wage drives wages down for everyone—but these problems can be addressed in a sane and rational manner.

But the conservatives’ solution to the problem is just to round up all the brown people and ship them back to Mexico if they can’t produce proof of citizenship (and then build a big fence to keep them there). You can’t honestly believe that there’s no element of racism behind the support for Arizona’s new “papers, please” legislation. If the law mandated that everyone be asked to produce proof of citizenship, support would plummet. It only remains popular because white folks know that they won’t be suspected of being illegal and won’t be harassed. They just don’t care if Mexicans are harassed, even if many of them are hard-working citizens.

3- Torture and denial of rights

In the same way most conservatives can’t or won’t put themselves in the shoes of a Mexican immigrant, they refuse to put themselves in the shoes of an Arab who might have been falsely accused of terrorism, thrown into Guantanamo for years without a trial and subject to torture. Even if the Arab in question didn’t personally commit an act of terrorism, conservatives seem to feel, they probably support those who do. After all, they were dancing in the streets after 9/11.

They just can’t seem to get past the idea that Muslim = Terrorist. As such, they’re all for racial profiling at airports, the denial of Miranda rights, and even outright torture of terror suspects with names like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab or Faisal Shahzad. Ask them if you think the same should be done with white terrorists with names like Tim McVeigh or Joe Stack.

It used to be that Americans across the political spectrum were opposed to torture because it was against the principles which America supposedly stands for. But since 9/11 there has been a massive wave of anti-Muslim sentiment and the demonization of anyone from the Middle East. We used to put ourselves in the position of the person being tortured, understanding that no matter how great their crimes might have been there’s no justification for inflicting that kind of suffering. But conservatives are either unwilling or unable to put themselves in the position of a Muslim being waterboarded. No sympathy is felt. It could be argued that anyone who carries out an attack that kills innocent civilians deserves no sympathy, but it’s hard to see anyone being tortured and feel nothing at all. I suspect conservatives would sympathize with a white terrorist under torture, whereas they couldn’t care less about a brown one.

4- New Orleans apathy

It’s been awhile since Hurricane Katrina, but immediately afterwards there was no doubt that conservatives were tripping over themselves to blame the victims. New Orleans has a high black population, and it seemed that most of the people caught in the storm were black. Why didn’t they just get out? They were stupid enough to stay behind, so they deserved whatever they got. How dare they demand that the government be quicker in its response? Can you believe the sense of entitlement of these people?

Conservatives would snicker whenever a black face came on the TV to complain about the government’s pitiful response, as if in the same position they wouldn’t be on TV complaining just as loudly. If it had been a rural town full of white folks trapped on their rooftops, however, I’ll bet they would have been just as adamant in their demands to get those people some assistance and just as outraged when that assistance didn’t come fast enough.

Today we’ve got an oil-spill threatening to destroy the marshlands that serve as a natural barrier for New Orleans in a hurricane, and still nobody cares. They probably feel that those black people who are stupid enough to still be living there deserve whatever they get.

5- Obama hatred

As anyone familiar with my blog knows, I’m no big fan of Obama, but I try to keep my criticisms based in fact. As much as the Tea Party shouts and screams about how it’s not racist and their opposition to Obama is rooted purely in policy, any actual look at Obama’s policies would reveal how hollow such claims are.

They decry him for being a socialist when all he does is bend over backwards to private industry. They accuse him of being soft on terror when he continues to fight Bush’s wars, leave Guantanamo and Bagram open, and agrees to military tribunals for terror suspects. They say he wants to take their guns away when he’s done absolutely nothing to touch the second amendment. They scream about how he’s redistributing the wealth from the rich to the poor (read: black) when all of his policies actually serve to solidify the system that funnels wealth from the lower classes to the upper.

Just admit it already. You hate him because he’s black. You can’t stand the fact that a negro is your representative to the world. Obviously, he didn’t earn the job. It was affirmative action and the liberal media that put him where he is. He’s not smart—he just reads from a teleprompter. He’s actually the most incompetent president we’ve ever had.

All of these nonsense criticisms of Obama must be rooted in something, and reality surely isn’t it. Almost nothing of substance has changed in this country since Obama took office, and yet all these people are just now taking to the streets to yell and scream in protest. As far as I can tell, the only major difference between this administration and the last is the color of the president’s skin. Sure, there are minor differences in terms of tone and substance and Obama’s policies are a bit more liberal than Bush’s, but not nearly enough to justify the over-the-top hyperventilating from the right. If we had a white president doing exactly the same things that Obama is doing, you’d have to be in serious denial to believe there would be just as much momentum behind the Tea Party movement as there is now.

Conclusion

To be called a “racist” is now one of the most offensive things you can be called in America, and in many ways that’s a good thing. It’s nice that we no longer live in a time when you can be proud to be a racist and celebrate your racism as a virtue. But on the other hand, it forces racism below the radar to hide in the cracks of our political discourse where it can’t be confronted so easily.

Nobody wants to be called a racist, so almost nobody admits to racism. They’ll deny it to everybody including themselves, but it can’t be escaped. So much of the feelings that lie behind conservative opinions are inextricably bound up with race whether they like it or not. I think they should have to acknowledge it.

In some of my more advanced English lessons, I occasionally like to mention the news of the day from the United States and see how my German students react. In most cases, even the most conservative students will have a viewpoint that would be considered quite liberal in the United States, as Europe has no equivalent to Fox News and the right isn’t being constantly led further and further to the right, but the reaction I got to the Arizona legislation requiring police to check the I.D. of anyone they suspect to be an illegal immigrant surprised me and made me reconsider my initial outrage.

The law doesn’t seem at all strange to the Germans, who have a similar policy themselves. People are supposed to carry I.D. with them at all times, and if the police suspect they might be in the country illegally they have the right to demand to see it. What’s so strange about this?

Indeed, the spirit of the Arizona law isn’t actually as far-out as many in the liberal media are framing it. However, the letter of the law definitely goes too far, and there’s a skin-color component that exists by default in America that is not so much the case in Europe.

The fact that the police are required to ask for I.D. if they have a reasonable suspicion that someone may be illegal is too much. German police are entitled to ask, but they are certainly not required, and the idea that an officer can be sued for not asking is a tad insane. In my mind, the strongest point made against this legislation is that Mexicans will no longer turn to law enforcement for anything out of the fear that they or someone they know will wind up deported. Crimes will almost certainly go unreported, and this is bad for everybody.

If you eliminated the requirement aspect and simply made enforcement of this law voluntary for police officers, you’d still have plenty of officers more than happy to enforce it. That in itself leads to the other problem, that of racial profiling. Defenders of the law are being completely ridiculous to suggest that it can be enforced without racial profiling. “You can tell someone is illegal by their behavior, how they dress, what shoes they wear, etc.” Give me a break. No one believes you—not even you.

Of course there’s going to be racial profiling. Illegal immigrants, by in large, tend to be Mexican. Many Mexicans—not all, but many—have darker skin. In Germany, illegal immigrants are just as likely to be white as dark-skinned. There is a significant population of Russian immigrants where I live, many of whom are illegal, and apparently they commit crimes at a higher percentage rate than other ethnicities (I have not attempted to verify this—it’s merely an assertion by one of my students that met with agreement from the others). So if an officer hears a group of people standing around and speaking Russian, he’s likely to ask for identification.

Police in Arizona don’t even need to listen for what language is being spoken—they can spot a Mexican even behind the wheel of a car. Overzealous police officers will almost certainly start pulling people over for the crime of driving while brown. If I were an Arab or an Indian, I’d definitely stay the hell out of Arizona.

Which brings me to the final thing about this legislation that makes it far less sensible than the German law—it’s exclusive to one state. At least in Germany, the law applies nationally. But Arizona has practically made itself into its own country by implementing this legislation on its own. You’ll need a passport just to drive through the state or you risk imprisonment.

What befuddles me most about all this is how the very same people who are always railing about the big intrusive government are the ones most in favor of this kind of law. But what could be more intrusive than giving agents of the government the power to demand identification papers and to throw you in jail if you can’t produce them? The only reason they support this law is because they don’t think they’ll be targeted. But just wait until a few of them find themselves pulled over and asked for I.D. while driving home from a BBQ at which they spent a little too much time in the sun…

Still, I don’t think it’s all that crazy to let police ask people for papers. I just think that if it’s going to be done at all, it should be nation-wide, and if enforcement is compulsory they should be forced to demand papers from everyone they encounter—not just the brown ones.

But finally, while this may reduce the population of illegal immigrants by a slight margin, it’s hardly a solution. Comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level is badly needed, but even that won’t really solve the problem. We can debate all we want about border security and a path to citizenship for those already here, but as long as we refuse to address the source of the problem, Mexican citizens are going to continue to enter the U.S. illegally as long as they can’t make a decent living in Mexico. Two things must be done to solve the problem. 1- Legalize drugs to cut off the source of income for drug cartels which have a stranglehold on the Mexican government. 2- Implement a Marshall-Plan style program to help Mexico improve its economy so that its citizens will no longer need to immigrate.

Of course, the people who complain about immigration the most are also the least likely to support drug legalization or giving money to the Mexican government. But if you won’t accept the only solution to the problem, it’s a bit like complaining that you have no food while refusing to go out and buy some.

Last night I finally watched Michael Moore’s latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story. I watched it for free, streamed from one of many video-hosting websites that enable those of us with no moral qualms about obtaining entertainment illegally to do so. If capitalism is a system in which the best products earn the most profit, people like me are totally fucking things up.

But apparently capitalism has been fucked up from the very beginning, and Wall Street has done more damage to the underlying principles of capitalism than online pirates could ever do. It’s the story of capitalism and its hijacking by giant financial institutions that Moore tells in his film. It’s a story I’m already quite familiar with, but told in Moore’s unique style of film-making whereby you find yourself laughing and shouting in anger at the same time. The problem is that the story is incomplete, and what happened after the film was shot has destroyed its chance of having an effect. I’ll briefly tell the story in my own words, then explain why Moore’s call to action has failed.

Basically, America had a good run for a few decades after World War II, generating all kinds of wealth due to a lack of competition from the world’s other great powers who were busy rebuilding their war-torn nations. The rich had a tax-rate of a whopping 90% and all that money went into infrastructure and improving the quality of life of a thriving Middle Class. An average family could actually get by with just one source of income, freeing up mothers to stay at home and actually raise their children. Unthinkable today, I know, but it really happened. Just ask grandma.

Then along came Ronald Reagan, the perfect corporate spokesman, who sold America on the idea that if we took less money from the rich to pay for social goods, it would somehow benefit everybody. The more wealth the wealthy had, the more would trickle down to the rest of us. Never mind that before it didn’t need to trickle at all—we just took it. But everyone went along with the idea because, after all, Free Enterprise = God’s Way, and if we just work hard enough don’t we all have the opportunity to become multi-gazillionaires? And why should the government take 90% of our gazillion dollars, leaving us with only 10% of a gazillion, which is just a petty zillion or so. How could anyone truly be happy with only a zillion dollars? The government was punishing people for their success!

Well, there’d be no more of that. Reagan completely transformed the American economy to one that favors those at the top, and over the next two decades the Upper Class got richer and richer while the Middle Class somehow, inexplicably, got poorer and poorer. How did that happen? Must be the government and all those regulations on the financial industry. We should keep deregulating so the wealthy can get wealthier and more of that sweet sweet wealth can trickle down to us!

Removing regulations such as the Glass-Steagall Act, which basically prevented banks from gambling with our money, somehow led to banks gambling with our money. Who woulda thunk? The country’s smartest minds went into finance because that’s where the money was, and the methods of gambling got more and more sophisticated until, lo and behold, one day the bubble burst. And it just happened to burst two months before an election in which a candidate promising fundamental changes and a return to an America in which “spreading the wealth” was actually acceptable looked like he was going to win. I’m sure this was a complete coincidence. I’m sure that the 700 billion dollar bailout was, as they said, absolutely necessary to prevent the economy from crumbling into oblivion, forcing us all out on the street to eat from garbage cans for the next hundred years. I’m sure that tying the new president’s hands around his back before he could take office, demonstrating that if he didn’t play ball Wall Street could plunge the nation into Great Depression 2.0 at the drop of a hat, was merely an unintended consequence of the financial bubble bursting when it did.

So Obama gets elected and everyone is jumping up and down and shouting in excitement that things are finally going to change. Economic and social justice was finally making a comeback. All we had to do was get behind the new president as he led us towards that bright and glorious future where every child born in America could once again hope to enjoy a higher standard of living than their parents, where the promise of a home, a well-paying job, decent health-care, and plenty of money for retirement would once again be available to anyone who worked hard and played by the rules.

That’s where Moore leaves off. I can’t wait for his next film, where he explains what went wrong.

But since that won’t come for a few years, I’ll just tell you now. The power-elites who rigged the system so brilliantly came up with their most diabolically brilliant idea to date. They knew there was a growing unrest in the country, an anger brewing over the loss of the old America that threatened to destroy them if it got out of hand. They had to do something, and that something was not going to be submitting to regulations again and giving up the gambling, especially now that the precedent was firmly set that all gambling losses would be subsidized by the taxpayer. Luckily, the script was already in place. It’s what they’d already been doing for decades, only now they had to step it up a knotch because the anger was so much greater.

And thus the Tea Party was born. Conceived by corporations, born of faux-grassroots websites, nurtured by Fox News and strengthened by religion, conspiracy-theories, and racism, the Tea Party movement is the perfect antidote to populist rage. It takes that rage and directs it away from those truly responsible for their suffering and squarely at those who might actually try to alleviate it.

Angry at Wall Street for wrecking the economy and rewarding themselves for it? Well, turn that anger towards those who are trying to regulate it. They’re enemies of freedom! Angry at private health insurance companies for taking more and more and paying out less and less? Well, turn that anger towards those who want to introduce a public option to take the profit-motive out of medicine. They want to kill your grandmother! Angry that you and your wife have to work two jobs each and still can’t afford to pay your mortgage? Well, turn that anger towards those who would raise the minimum wage. They’re socialists! Angry that people are being tossed in prison without due process because it boosts the prison industry’s profits? Well, turn that anger towards anyone advocating judicial reform. They’re destroying the constitution!

Of course it’s much more than that. Angry that there’s a black president? Did you know he’s not even American? Did you know that he’s actually a Marxist and a fascist and a Stalinist communist Maoist? It’s true! He also hates the constitution and sympathizes with terrorists. He’s actually a secret Muslim. It’s a fact! Also, he hates white people. His agenda is basically to take all the money from hard-working white people and give it to fat black ladies who spend all day on the couch and all night making babies. Oh, and speaking of babies, he hates them too. He wants to make abortion mandatory. It’s right there in the health care bill—look it up! And speaking of the health care bill, that’s actually a plot to eliminate society’s weakest members, just like Hitler tried to do. Obama and Hitler actually have an identical political philosophy. I heard it from Glenn Beck—it must be true. After all, he’s on the only fair and balanced network on television. I don’t even bother getting my news from any other source, except my church pamphlet. Did you know that Obama is also the Anti-Christ? Yep, he’s secretly planning to help Muslims destroy Israel, at which point Armageddon can finally begin. There’s no doubt about that—it’s right there in the Bible.

I could go on. But you get the point. Legitimate anger + lies from politicians + lies from the media + racism + religion = 0. Anger alone might accomplish something, but anger mixed with all that other crap will get us nothing.

Michael Moore ends his film by calling on everyone to stand up and do something, to get out and fight the powers-that-be, the people who destroyed the middle class and got extremely wealthy and powerful in the process. And we’re all mad about that. At least, the 95% of us who have less money than the richest 1% combined. We’re all angry at that 1% and if we all joined together and got out there and marched on Washington, marched on Wall Street, demanding a return to economic justice, they would not be able to stop us. The people, when united, always have more power than the institutions that preside over them.

But we are prevented from uniting because half of us have been duped into believing crazy horseshit, and they won’t even allow themselves to listen to reason. As long as the only ones out there marching are those who are calling to block the reforms that would help them, the people are losing the fight. The Tea Party is often looked upon as some benign curiosity, often treated as a source of amusement for liberals, but it’s actually much more insidious, much more significant, much more destructive than that. It is the biggest thing standing in the way of the America we have now—of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation—and the America that once existed, the America that they themselves long to have again.

This story will continue, and it can go either way. Perhaps the wealthy will one day go too far and the bubble will burst, Fox News will be exposed for what it is and the right-wing Bible-thumpers will come around and realize who’s side they should have been on all along. These people are not our enemies—they’re victims just like us. Maybe if we keep reaching out and seeking new ways to explain to them what’s really going on, they’ll redirect their anger back where it belongs.

Or maybe that will never happen, and they’ll continue unwittingly serving the interests of the very people who are making their lives miserable, and their misery along with ours will continue in perpetuity as earning a living becomes harder and harder, our rights and freedoms diminish further and further, and we slide ever so gradually into serfdom.

Capitalism, when all the players are honest and have society’s best interests in mind, may actually be the best social system. But when all the key players are dishonest and have only their own best interests in mind, capitalism leads inevitably to slavery.

This past week, town hall meetings on health care reform have been disrupted and reduced to shouting matches and ranting sessions by hardcore right-wing lunatics spouting ridiculous lies about the proposed legislation. Everything about these so-called protests pisses me off, and each thing pisses me off more than the last.

First of all, a town hall meeting is probably the last thing this country has even resembling true democracy, and these protesters have to go and fuck even that up with their tactics of screaming and shouting their Limbaugh/Beck talking points just to disrupt—as opposed to participate in—the process. It would be one thing if they made their bullshit point and gave the speaker a chance to respond with the facts, but they are operating according to tactics specifically designed to prevent that from happening.

Second of all, these talking points are completely and utterly false. A provision that funds optional counseling sessions regarding a living will does not mean that ACORN is coming to kill your grandmother. Funding for abortions does not mean mandatory abortions for everyone. And a public option does not mean the government will completely take over the system and start rationing care based on a person’s perceived social utility. Oh, and Barack Obama is not trying to kill Sarah Palin’s child with Down Syndrome, one of her favorite political props.

But if the lie is big enough and stupid enough, then a bunch of stupid people are going to believe it, and as a result you get these half-wits showing up at town-hall meetings and having nervous-breakdowns, throwing temper-tantrums and hissy-fits about how “their America”—the American they knew and loved and grew up in (i.e. a majority white, Christian nation) is being destroyed and how it scares the shit out of them.

I might even sympathize with these people if they weren’t so fucking obnoxious. They can’t be blamed for their poor intelligence—that’s genetic—but they act like they’re the smart ones and everyone who “uses big words” is just trying to bamboozle and trick them into not believing what they know in their gut to be true. After all, if it wasn’t true then why would they be so scared?

I just want to grab them and slap them in the face repeatedly shouting, “What the fuck are you so afraid of? Why are you such a fucking coward that you’re afraid of a president who can’t even convince members of his own party to vote for his bill? You’re afraid of a president who can’t even regulate the banks because he doesn’t want to make any enemies on Wall Street? Who can’t overturn Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell because it’s too risky? You’re afraid that Barry Obama is really going to take all of the white man’s wealth and redistribute it to minorities, to turn this country into a Stalinist dictatorship and set up concentration camps to kill off the weak and disabled? Really? You’re really afraid of that?”

Well, they are, and unfortunately this country will always have its share (like any country) of backward ignorant religious folks who will believe anything and cower in fear over the slightest suggestion of any kind of change. So as angry as they make me, I can’t be too angry with them.

I’m much angrier at the people who, with complete awareness of what they’re doing, are manipulating and exploiting these people for their own financial gain at the expense of the good of the country, including the very “take your goddamn government hands of my medicare” idiots that they’re using. I’m talking about these groups like Americans for Prosperity and Conservatives for Patient’s Rights that spend all kinds of money first lying to wingnuts to make them believe these absurdities about the health-care bill, then bussing them around to districts they don’t even live in so they can express their outrage over these absurdities, and finally arm them with instructions for how completely disrupt the meetings and prevent any actual democracy from happening.

There really ought to be a law against this kind of thing, as it’s not just “dirty politics” but downright despicable human behavior as this eats away at the very foundation of democratic society. The people barely have a voice at all in their government in the first place—every few years they get to say “yay” or “nay” to their elected representative about whom they know only what they are told, and half of what they hear comes from the representative in the first place. But every now and then they get to meet the representative, pose questions, demand answers, and perhaps make some suggestions about how they-the-governed would like to be governed. But when you’ve got entrenched interests who are currently earning a fortune off the broken system deliberately undermining democracy in order to perpetuate that broken system from which they are profiting—well, it just seems like the kind of thing that really ought to be illegal. If undermining the foundations of democratic society isn’t against the law, then why even bother having laws in the first place?

But the biggest villains in this whole mess that I can see are those in the mainstream media who know damn well that these protests are manufactured by giant lobbying firms on behalf of the industries benefiting from the broken system, yet they choose to just play along and present this as though it was a genuine grass-roots uprising of intelligent, informed Americans who understand the health-care plan perfectly and are patriotically rising up to do whatever they can to kill it and thus save America from the evil forces of fascism and socialism. That is not what this is. It should not be reported at such.

Kudos must go once again to Rachel Maddow who has made a clear presentation of the facts, following the money trail and tracing the roots of these protests all the way to their architects, many of whom were (surprise surprise) key players in the Bush administration and are now lobbyists for the health insurance industry.

On Thursday night Maddow interviewed Timothy Philips, the head of Americans for Prosperity, to confront him with the accusations she’s been making. Clearly a master of spin, Philips painted a picture of his lobbying firm as a champion of community organizing, bringing together real people with real grievances from all over the country and allowing them to make their voices heard on this issue. Sure, his company takes lots and lots of money from the oil industry and other such powerful interests, but according to Philips, corporations are people too and why shouldn’t they have a voice in the democratic process? Rachel seemed as though she was struggling not to laugh at the absurdity, but there are people out there who will swallow that argument without a second thought, thinking, “You know, he’s right. Exxon is in America so why shouldn’t we let Exxon have a say in what the American government does?” As though Exxon and the other mega-corporations including Wall Street banks and Health Insurance providers don’t already dictate what the American government does.

If Maddow were your standard cable-news bloviator she might have shouted him down and cut off his mike, but she gave him treatment that was not only fair, but perhaps a little too fair, as he was able to successfully spin what his foundation is doing—undermining democracy—into its exact opposite: aiding and promoting democracy. But not content with that victory alone, Philips ended the interview by going on the offensive against Maddow herself, saying that “his side was winning” the health-care debate precisely because people like Maddow were talking about things like his organization rather than what’s in the bill itself. And to a certain degree he has a point—even Maddow and Olbermann, two of the most liberal commentators on television, have spent very little time talking about the actual policy in the health-care debate and instead have just gone after its opponents. The opponents, in the mean-time, have actually been talking about actual policies, as fictitious as those policies may be.

Still, while I would like to see Rachel Maddow talk more about policy, it’s still important to have somebody out there talking about the opponents just to broadcast the information about who these opponents actually are and who they are not. Who they are: big corporations and lobbyists in Washington. Who they are not: ordinary Americans concerned about the health care system. It’s a shame that this is only being reported by a couple of shows on MSNBC that conservatives would never watch in the first place, because it’s something every American really ought to know.