Saturday, October 11, 2008

The face of the GOP: A pathetic old lady who calls Obama an "Arab"

"How did it come to this?" someone asked me yesterday in reference to the Republican party's rallies this week that have featured crowd members shouting out and even telling news crews the following comments about Obama: "He's a terrorist!" "Bomb him!" "Kill him!" "Off with his head!" I think you get the point: These "people" are filled with the type of ignorant hatred that is a threat to American values, even as they wear their flag pins while cheering and calling for the DEATH of the first potential African-American president. Indeed, that is what this country has come to precisely because of the calculated "culture war" the Republicans began in the Reagan years and perfected in the 2000 campaign. The Republican party has sadly been reduced to, ironically, the very rich and the very ignorant. My friends who grew up Republican because they favored limited government and low taxes have nothing in common with this new party that uses billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out Wall St. criminals, nor do they relate to people who are so controlled by evangelical religious superstitions that they endorse the government telling us whom we can sleep with, what women do with their bodies, whom we can marry, what drugs people take, what scientists can do, what basic truths are taught in schools etc.

This new GOP is nothing like the Goldwater party of the 60s and 70s, and the current Republicans have literally destroyed this country because of their overt embrace of ignorance as something to celebrate(Bush is their poster boy). Case in point: I was talking with someone the other day about the overwhelming support Obama has in places like Berkeley and Boston, locations of some of the top universities in the world. My friend said, "What do you expect, it's Berkeley?" My response was, "Exactly." Think about what it says about our country when the most educated scholars and future leaders are overwhelmingly Democratic, while Billy Bob's Bible College is where you find the McCain supporters, and not coincidentally, where many of the Bush crowd came from. Monica Goodling and her mail order law degree from Pat Robertson's college is just one example. What does it say when the educated class is Democratic and Joe Sixpack and his racist buddies are the ones who knock down a few brews and show up to the McCain rally to shout "Kill him!"? Is this the America you want for your kids? Is the uneducated class the role model for your children? One glance at the electoral map will confirm everything I have noted here, as the McCain "safe" states speak for themselves(Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, Utah...), while the West Coast and East Coast and sites of every celebrated university in the country are solidly Obama. What does this say about the ideas these parties represent? Even Karl Rove couldn't spin the reality that the GOP has become the party of rich greedy individuals and poor, uneducated whites who claim Obama is an "Arab" or "scares them" simply because they don't want to come right out and say that they hate black people. That's the bottom line that the media is afraid to confront because they want the money that comes from these ignorant, toothless inbreds who sit around and watch TV all day, ranting about how their plight is somehow the fault of blacks and immigrants.

Let's be brutally honest about what is going on: McCain found himself so down and out last week after getting whipped in another debate that he had his campaign brazenly tell the media that the campaign was going to "go negative," and it was very clear what that meant: Their last, best hope was to turn the country against Obama because of his race, so they began their guilt by association nonsense, calling a Chicago professor a "domestic terrorist, " even though the man has never been convicted any kind of domestic terrorism, with the intention of creating a white lynch mob that would put McCain and Palin on their shoulders and carry them across the finish line and into the White House. However, someone forgot to remind McCain just how successful these tactics would be when it comes to motivating all the racists to crawl out from under their rocks to "get the black man"("Kill him" "Bomb him"). The hapless Palin began firing up the lynch mob last week, claiming that Obama "pals around with domestic terrorists" and she and McCain continued attacking all week, even as the stock market dropped over 20% in seven days. Instead of pushing a plan to save the country's financial system, they wallowed in race baiting until it reached its logical conclusion on Friday with the overt comments about being "scared" of the "Arab." Of course, the GOP talking heads tried to defend their voters, even while McCain himself attempted to save a shred of his dignity by telling the truth for a few minutes. I have nothing but disdain for McCain, Palin, and this new Republican party, but let me be very clear: I certainly don't want any of them to be killed, bombed, or have their heads cut off, nor do I think McCain or Palin are terrorists. No, I simply recognize that they are bad people who deserve to be rejected by the American people on November 4th so that they can fade from our memory and Obama can begin the ominous--and perhaps impossible--task of rebuilding this country's economic system before all of us suffer the consequences of the worst financial collapse in the nation's history. Make no mistake about it, that is what is at stake here; this is no time for ignorant observations about "terrorists" and "Arabs." This country needs a COMPETENT leader to step up with a viable plan or all of us will endure a catastrophic future that will result in the complete and utter disintegration of our society. That's what is at stake when you vote, not whom you would rather have a beer with. We saw how well that guy did...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

High academia fosters naiveté and dangerous idealism.

The face of angry rednecks may be that misinformed old lady, but the face of academic elitism and disconnect is none other than America's "top academic", Noam Chomsky.

In any case I would prefer the old lady to Chomsky.