If one look at poll
results saying that most Republicans think Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim
enacting a secret plan to destroy America and think, “What the hell is wrong
with these people?”, one have to understand that it gets reinforced day after
day after day by media sources they believe to be lonely islands of truth amid
a sea of lies.
Yes, they hear it from politicians like Rudy Giuliani, who seems to be on some kind of mission to prove himself to be America’s most despicable cretin. But that only reinforces the river of political sewage that flows into their ears each and every day.
Yes, they hear it from politicians like Rudy Giuliani, who seems to be on some kind of mission to prove himself to be America’s most despicable cretin. But that only reinforces the river of political sewage that flows into their ears each and every day.
To wit, here’s
Republican uber-pundit Erick Erickson, filling in for Rush Limbaugh and telling his millions of
listeners what they want to hear:
“Barack Obama believes
that for the world to be more safe the United States must be less safe. For the
world to be more stable the United States must be less stable. Barack Obama
believes the United States of America is a destabilizing, arrogant force in the
world, we need our comeuppance and we need to be humbled. And so everything
Barack Obama does domestically and in foreign policy is designed to humble the
arrogant crackers who have always run the United States.”
Yes, that’s right,
“arrogant crackers.” How on earth anyone could get the idea that the attacks on
Obama by people like Erickson are meant to stoke their audience’s racial
resentments, I have no idea.
As a general rule,
whenever you hear a conservative pundit start a sentence with “Barack Obama
believes…” you’re about to hear something that not only bears no plausible
relationship to reality but is also meant to play on the worst instincts of his
or her audience? And it is simply impossible to overstate the ubiquity of this
particular theme in conservative media: Barack Obama hates not just America but
white people in general, and all of his policies are meant to exact racial
vengeance upon them. This is the rancid stew of fantasy, hatred, and yes,
racism in which millions upon millions of conservatives have spent the last six
years marinating.
To my conservative
friends: I know that you are obsessed with the idea that conservatives are
constantly being unfairly accused of racism. And there are certainly times when
some liberals are too quick to see racist intent in a comment that may be
innocuous or at worst unintentionally provocative. But you make heroes out of
people like Giuliani, Limbaugh, and Erickson.
You applaud them, honor them,
extol them, and when other people occasionally notice the caustic hairballs of
bile they spit onto waiting microphones, the most you can say is, “Well, I
wouldn’t go that far.” So you have nothing to complain about.
Aniket Dutta
Msc.Media || PG:1
No comments:
Post a Comment