Post a Comment On: Internal Monologue

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From Pandagon. We live in interesting times. There seems to be a rapid collapse of the political power of social conservatism. (The plutocrats seem to be doing just fine, as usual.) This is a good thing, but this collapse is leaving a lot of people confused and dispirited. A lot of ugliness is starting to come out:
What’s startling about this is that it didn’t take long for a right wing nut to go off the deep end during the Obama administration. Because Obama offends the right in many more ways that Clinton ever could---being black, being urban, being a health nut, having a really tall wife, etc.---this shouldn’t come as a surprise. It took the right wing years to come up with enough paranoid theories about how evil the Clintons supposedly were before the proper air of non-stop paranoia had been established. But all the paranoid urban legends you could ask for about Obama were established during the campaign. Plus, you have something now that wasn’t around nearly as much during the Clinton administration---mainstream media collusion with the paranoid right. Gary Kamiya at Salon has an article pointing out that no matter how off-the-radar Poplowski’s views were, the fact that they show up watered down in tone but steady in content in the mainstream media gives Poplowski and people like him reason to feel more self-assured about their paranoia. Add to that the oversized right wing media that most of us would probably just choose to ignore, and you have a powerhouse reflecting the worst lies of the paranoid right back into their faces. For more on this topic, see David Neiwert, the blogospheric authority on the intersection of violence and far right-wing politics.

We're not even three months into an Obama administration. I hate to think what things will be like after another year of bad economic times. Is there any way to reassure these folks on the paranoid right that Obama isn't going take their guns away and force them into a homosexual marriage? We need to reach out to these people somehow while they're still reachable. I'm the last person for this job; my contempt for the fringe right-wing makes me a poor ambassador. But they're people, they're afraid, and they're becoming scary. Maybe someone like Rick Warren can help calm them down or something.