Forgive my not watching Glenn Beck on Saturday, when he and his Freep-mustachioed army crossed the Potomac, entered the city, cast the congressmen out of the Temple of America and ratified the new Bible of Rights with blood taken from the incorruptible corpse of Ayn Rand, all to finally defeat 9/11. His 9/12 Project came off exactly as expected. By that, I mean nothing happened, but it was really loud, obnoxious and ignorant in the service of nothing.
I can barely handle the man in the best circumstances, and I wasn't going to try while hungover. I needn't have bothered anyway. Beck repeats himself ad nauseam, and there's really no reason to devote new effort to record his mass-distributed hysteria. The purpose of Beck's 9/12 Project is to bring America back to the way we all felt on the day after 9/11, but Beck is mistaken about almost every detail.
At the time, the United States reeled from violent dislocation, banded together to save even the least of our own from the direst straits and in the process cast off political labels for a temporary unity of purpose. Beck's crusade, however, demonizes taxes as slavery, lawful representation as criminal usurpation, Democrats as complicit with terrorists, the president as alternately Stalin or Hitler and pretty much everything he doesn't approve of as apocalyptically dire.
Because I've written about the teaparties of April 15, Beck's live broadcast on the same day and the July 4 teaparties, it's a waste of my time and yours to go into their particular ills with the same level of detail again. What you need to know about what happened on 9/12 are the following three things:
1. These people do not know what fascism, socialism or communism are, other than the fact that they're all bad.
These three isms are essentially interchangeable, and you can combine them in a single sentence that explicates the thought process driving most attendees. To wit: "Anything I don't like is the worst evil in the world, like Hitler, and the reason I don't like it is because it reminds me of Stalin, who was bad because he was a socialist." There you go. Socialism is Stalin, and how bad is that? That's Hitler bad. And because it's all bad, it must be the same, right? Q.E.D. Unfortunately for these people, as I've written before, there are numerous problems with their protests, not the least of which is that fascism is so inimical to communism that it was created specifically to destroy it. But that's literally the kind of major blackwhite distinction that these people either cannot or, refuse to, understand: if you've ever wondered what people who think Coke and Pepsi taste exactly the same look like, here they are.
Their other problems are less obvious. For example, they're protesting socialism on a weekend, which is something all Americans owe to the crusades of American socialist parties. The five-day work week is a socialist blessing on America, sprung forth from the skulls of many labor activists at the hand of free-market capitalism's paid truncheons, who presumably only made The Hand visible around a deadly bat because they couldn't trust that The Market would regulate the life or death of their opponents fast enough. Second, they almost always stage these protests on public grounds. In this case, these people were milling about the D.C. Mall, a beautiful park arrayed with museums, all free for everybody thanks to socialist redistribution of wealth and the conviction that even the poorest of us are bettered by free access to the highlights of our history, technology and culture.
Secondly, their lack of understanding of what fascism comprises and effects just makes the whole thing a parade of ironic cruelty. Consider:
2. It's funded by FreedomWorks, an astroturf organization founded by Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich and half-billionaire Steve Forbes.
About half the list are well-known dumping grounds for conservative "action" money against whatever sounds more dangerous to liberty than a bed tax on tourists in hotels, and the rest read like generic sops to some ideal of poor people caring about the overburdened wealthy. Naturally, we have no idea what it really takes to be a Platinum, Silver, Gold or Bronze member of the 9/12 Project. It could be anything; but, let's be honest, anything looks better than, "We're here because Steve Forbes cut another $5 million check out of the wealth he earned from coming out of his mother after she got knocked up by the son sired by his granddaddy." And, anyway, just look what our money is doing for all those poor people who can't take it anymore. Which brings us to important issue #3:
3. We the People: Which Is the Majority of Americans, as Prescribed by Our Constitution... Unless We Lose.
This — more than anything else besides genuine ignorance of American history, law and economics — defines the teaparty and 9/12 Project phenomena: this presumption that any abridgment of their values is an explicit contravention of the Constitution and American destiny itself. To call these people sore losers misstates the point: they don't "lose" because there is not actually a viable alternative to what they represent. To suggest they lost implies that a government espousing different values could be lawful. There is only the acceptance of their program or the illegal and pernicious subversion of it.
I can barely handle the man in the best circumstances, and I wasn't going to try while hungover. I needn't have bothered anyway. Beck repeats himself ad nauseam, and there's really no reason to devote new effort to record his mass-distributed hysteria. The purpose of Beck's 9/12 Project is to bring America back to the way we all felt on the day after 9/11, but Beck is mistaken about almost every detail.
At the time, the United States reeled from violent dislocation, banded together to save even the least of our own from the direst straits and in the process cast off political labels for a temporary unity of purpose. Beck's crusade, however, demonizes taxes as slavery, lawful representation as criminal usurpation, Democrats as complicit with terrorists, the president as alternately Stalin or Hitler and pretty much everything he doesn't approve of as apocalyptically dire.
Because I've written about the teaparties of April 15, Beck's live broadcast on the same day and the July 4 teaparties, it's a waste of my time and yours to go into their particular ills with the same level of detail again. What you need to know about what happened on 9/12 are the following three things:
1. These people do not know what fascism, socialism or communism are, other than the fact that they're all bad.
These three isms are essentially interchangeable, and you can combine them in a single sentence that explicates the thought process driving most attendees. To wit: "Anything I don't like is the worst evil in the world, like Hitler, and the reason I don't like it is because it reminds me of Stalin, who was bad because he was a socialist." There you go. Socialism is Stalin, and how bad is that? That's Hitler bad. And because it's all bad, it must be the same, right? Q.E.D. Unfortunately for these people, as I've written before, there are numerous problems with their protests, not the least of which is that fascism is so inimical to communism that it was created specifically to destroy it. But that's literally the kind of major blackwhite distinction that these people either cannot or, refuse to, understand: if you've ever wondered what people who think Coke and Pepsi taste exactly the same look like, here they are.
Their other problems are less obvious. For example, they're protesting socialism on a weekend, which is something all Americans owe to the crusades of American socialist parties. The five-day work week is a socialist blessing on America, sprung forth from the skulls of many labor activists at the hand of free-market capitalism's paid truncheons, who presumably only made The Hand visible around a deadly bat because they couldn't trust that The Market would regulate the life or death of their opponents fast enough. Second, they almost always stage these protests on public grounds. In this case, these people were milling about the D.C. Mall, a beautiful park arrayed with museums, all free for everybody thanks to socialist redistribution of wealth and the conviction that even the poorest of us are bettered by free access to the highlights of our history, technology and culture.
Secondly, their lack of understanding of what fascism comprises and effects just makes the whole thing a parade of ironic cruelty. Consider:
a proper [historical] definition of fascism is of a populist and right-wing movement that is anti-science, anti-reason, anti-socialist and anti-liberal, that defines the nation's life through a vision of glorious palingenesis (basically, "Self-Rebirth"; think of the myth of the phoenix). Traditionally, these groups harness the disaffection of a specific ethnic or economic group and blame their economic suffering on non-native ethnic or "non-patriotic" groups, who they view as being supported by predatory liberal or socialist organizations that have tacitly declared war on the nation and nation's history. Historically, fascist groups do not achieve power on their own. Instead, a bedeviled conservative elite, fearing the erosion of their power at the hands of socialist or leftist elements, appeals to the fascists to take action against them and join in a pact of mutual interest, seeing eye to eye on the need for the elimination of leftist political power and an alliance of government and corporate interests for the regeneration of the state. (Hitler and Mussolini were both invited into government by existing conservative leadership, remember: neither of them ever "won" anything significant.)This definition is important because it flows to the second major thing you need to know about the 9/12 Project:
2. It's funded by FreedomWorks, an astroturf organization founded by Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich and half-billionaire Steve Forbes.
There you have two wealthy members of a recently ousted conservative elite and one never-was of the same — all of whom seek to combat what they perceive as a rising tide of socialism and liberalism by harnessing the populist hatred of those who would seek a "re-Birth of a Nation." Hence the tragicomic irony of a bunch of middle- and lower-middle-class Americans marching against their economic self-interest — namely a new tax system that reduces their burden — in service to disenfranchised elites who seek to subvert a majority power they've lawfully been excluded from. The fact that some of these people swaddle themselves in uniforms only adds insult to injury.
Of course, right-wing media like FOX News has been clever enough to turn the tables on those who've mentioned this pernicious intrusion of objective reality by claiming that anyone who supports capitalism or Republicans is being written off as non-existent by liberals who can't believe anyone would believe in their cause. It leads to signs like this, from 9/12:
This sense of victimization produces lashing out such as this:
Now, I don't know what "hang all of congressman" means (although I would purchase an adult Congress Man action figure if it featured a kung-fu grip and realistic briefs), but I do recognize further unintentional irony as regards George Soros — in this case, a bunch of angry right-wing populists assuming that some liberal cabal funded by an international Jew financier is secretly destroying the government. By that, they mean that he's doing so through MoveOn.org, which they picture as being wholly funded with his socialist-Jew dollars, which is itself inimical to democracy of any kind. To their minds, he's the sole source of income, one giant hydra-headed Heeb pulling the strings of the state to destroy the folk* and just sending out massive checks to his loyal servants, even if America doesn't support them.
___________________
* — Hence, again, the painful ironies of their not understanding communism beyond "Communism is bad; all bad things are Fascism; Fascism is Hitler." They seem to think Hitler was sprouted fully-formed out of the head of The Anti-Semitism God as a perfect Jew-killing machine. The question they never ask is why he wanted to kill Jews. Sure, they've already got half the answer right: that he was a racist madman. But the other half is what resonates politically down through the decades. If you explained the Dolchstoßlegende to them — the conspiracy tale that Germany was poised on the brink of its greatest triumph over its enemies when communist Jews, who illegally influenced the government, "stabbed the troops in the back" for their own internationalist gains — you might spark something like a dawning of horrified recognition.
Of course, right-wing media like FOX News has been clever enough to turn the tables on those who've mentioned this pernicious intrusion of objective reality by claiming that anyone who supports capitalism or Republicans is being written off as non-existent by liberals who can't believe anyone would believe in their cause. It leads to signs like this, from 9/12:
This sense of victimization produces lashing out such as this:
Now, I don't know what "hang all of congressman" means (although I would purchase an adult Congress Man action figure if it featured a kung-fu grip and realistic briefs), but I do recognize further unintentional irony as regards George Soros — in this case, a bunch of angry right-wing populists assuming that some liberal cabal funded by an international Jew financier is secretly destroying the government. By that, they mean that he's doing so through MoveOn.org, which they picture as being wholly funded with his socialist-Jew dollars, which is itself inimical to democracy of any kind. To their minds, he's the sole source of income, one giant hydra-headed Heeb pulling the strings of the state to destroy the folk* and just sending out massive checks to his loyal servants, even if America doesn't support them.
* — Hence, again, the painful ironies of their not understanding communism beyond "Communism is bad; all bad things are Fascism; Fascism is Hitler." They seem to think Hitler was sprouted fully-formed out of the head of The Anti-Semitism God as a perfect Jew-killing machine. The question they never ask is why he wanted to kill Jews. Sure, they've already got half the answer right: that he was a racist madman. But the other half is what resonates politically down through the decades. If you explained the Dolchstoßlegende to them — the conspiracy tale that Germany was poised on the brink of its greatest triumph over its enemies when communist Jews, who illegally influenced the government, "stabbed the troops in the back" for their own internationalist gains — you might spark something like a dawning of horrified recognition.
But for that to happen, they'd have to be willing to listen, which is antithetical to the teaparty dynamic of yelling as loud as possible so that nobody can hear someone you don't like. For that to happen, they'd have to be willing to accept fact over fantasy. But most importantly, for that to happen they'd have to be willing to possess some facility for self-evaluation and -awareness, which are probably alien processes to people dressed up like Paul Revere, carrying a mobile of "lynched" teabags and screaming, "This is for you!" at a black president.
___________________
Regardless, the wealthy funding-hydra criticism cuts back on these people far more sharply than it does on MoveOn or Soros. Neither Armey nor Gingrich nor Forbes is as rich as Soros (presumably trusting unquestioningly in the market led them to get soaked recently in a way that the shrewder Soros didn't), but they are basically FreedomWorks, and FreedomWorks is basically the 9/12 Project. There aren't tens of thousands of dopey college students, scruffy hippies and graying Doonesbury fans sending them cash. I don't know where the protesters' checks are — I'm too busy giggling at the thought of a self-interested oligarchy doing anything more to bankroll outrage than providing the signs and sticks — but I do know that when they question whether they're well-funded astroturf, the answer can be found on the brand name on the promotional t-shirts that different protestors purely coincidentally wore and on the logo on the podium:
Regardless, the wealthy funding-hydra criticism cuts back on these people far more sharply than it does on MoveOn or Soros. Neither Armey nor Gingrich nor Forbes is as rich as Soros (presumably trusting unquestioningly in the market led them to get soaked recently in a way that the shrewder Soros didn't), but they are basically FreedomWorks, and FreedomWorks is basically the 9/12 Project. There aren't tens of thousands of dopey college students, scruffy hippies and graying Doonesbury fans sending them cash. I don't know where the protesters' checks are — I'm too busy giggling at the thought of a self-interested oligarchy doing anything more to bankroll outrage than providing the signs and sticks — but I do know that when they question whether they're well-funded astroturf, the answer can be found on the brand name on the promotional t-shirts that different protestors purely coincidentally wore and on the logo on the podium:
About half the list are well-known dumping grounds for conservative "action" money against whatever sounds more dangerous to liberty than a bed tax on tourists in hotels, and the rest read like generic sops to some ideal of poor people caring about the overburdened wealthy. Naturally, we have no idea what it really takes to be a Platinum, Silver, Gold or Bronze member of the 9/12 Project. It could be anything; but, let's be honest, anything looks better than, "We're here because Steve Forbes cut another $5 million check out of the wealth he earned from coming out of his mother after she got knocked up by the son sired by his granddaddy." And, anyway, just look what our money is doing for all those poor people who can't take it anymore. Which brings us to important issue #3:3. We the People: Which Is the Majority of Americans, as Prescribed by Our Constitution... Unless We Lose.
This — more than anything else besides genuine ignorance of American history, law and economics — defines the teaparty and 9/12 Project phenomena: this presumption that any abridgment of their values is an explicit contravention of the Constitution and American destiny itself. To call these people sore losers misstates the point: they don't "lose" because there is not actually a viable alternative to what they represent. To suggest they lost implies that a government espousing different values could be lawful. There is only the acceptance of their program or the illegal and pernicious subversion of it.
The conspiracies about ACORN thus explain themselves: no American polity faced with a choice between the sublime destiny of this exceptional land and the befouled torment of Something Else involving minorities and catamites would choose the latter without a nationwide fraud perpetrated on choosing. If anything, the birthers evoke something like pity because they've come as close as possible to conceding that they could lose. They almost understand that elections involve more than one option. Thank God that option must be fraudulent!
But this attitude explains protesters and posters like this:
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"We the People" have been perverted by being represented by someone we didn't choose. It doesn't matter that he clobbered our ass with a decisive electoral mandate, because the results must be wrong. He's not voting with the majority, because I am the majority, irrespective of ivory tower "counting" math. He is ipso facto a tyrant because he wasn't what we wanted, even if the man hasn't achieved really anything. Hence, time to scurry off to rhetoric about murdering him to refresh and reinvigorate the nation and the folk, an empty and horrible token of Jeffersonian hyperbole that issued from a mouth that I and countless historians have taken pains to mention was quite satisfied with federal power and the suspension of liberty so long as it was the one giving the orders.
But this attitude explains protesters and posters like this:
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"We the People" have been perverted by being represented by someone we didn't choose. It doesn't matter that he clobbered our ass with a decisive electoral mandate, because the results must be wrong. He's not voting with the majority, because I am the majority, irrespective of ivory tower "counting" math. He is ipso facto a tyrant because he wasn't what we wanted, even if the man hasn't achieved really anything. Hence, time to scurry off to rhetoric about murdering him to refresh and reinvigorate the nation and the folk, an empty and horrible token of Jeffersonian hyperbole that issued from a mouth that I and countless historians have taken pains to mention was quite satisfied with federal power and the suspension of liberty so long as it was the one giving the orders.
And even if all those explanations for their ire are too amorphous, there's always the fact that Obama's a goddamn darkie.
This, then, is the empty foundation of the 9/12 Project, the rage at being inconvenienced by facts — what Ronald Reagan once wrote off as "Stupid things" — circumstance, and when the latter happens because of the foul implacability of the former. It's the constant torment of what isn't and the superimposition of the, at best, imaginary. Watching the 9/12 Project is like walking into the anxiety closet of people with little imagination beyond the resolute belief that ghosts are real and can be punched if you just swing hard enough in every direction. America is a vast incomprehensible fabric on which these people wipe their snot while beating blindly with small fists after falling off the bookshelf because WANTING hard enough didn't enable them to fly. America sucks now because some dumbfuck managed to attach it to Planet Earth again, and gravity and geology ain't liberty.
Knowing all that preface, hopefully you can appreciate the pictures, which is why we're all here anyway. As usual, captions are in bold. A series of related pictures espousing a particularly flawed reasoning and requiring a longer explanation have been offset by the traditional centered line-breaks.
PICTURES:
This, then, is the empty foundation of the 9/12 Project, the rage at being inconvenienced by facts — what Ronald Reagan once wrote off as "Stupid things" — circumstance, and when the latter happens because of the foul implacability of the former. It's the constant torment of what isn't and the superimposition of the, at best, imaginary. Watching the 9/12 Project is like walking into the anxiety closet of people with little imagination beyond the resolute belief that ghosts are real and can be punched if you just swing hard enough in every direction. America is a vast incomprehensible fabric on which these people wipe their snot while beating blindly with small fists after falling off the bookshelf because WANTING hard enough didn't enable them to fly. America sucks now because some dumbfuck managed to attach it to Planet Earth again, and gravity and geology ain't liberty.
Knowing all that preface, hopefully you can appreciate the pictures, which is why we're all here anyway. As usual, captions are in bold. A series of related pictures espousing a particularly flawed reasoning and requiring a longer explanation have been offset by the traditional centered line-breaks.
PICTURES:
GLENN WE LOVE BECK! ODELAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!!!
"You know, I really struggled with what color would best frame my blow-up photo of the dead fetus. I considered red, but I decided that would have overwhelmed the picture. Black sets the right somber tone, but I don't want to be looped in with those goth kids who are draculas. Pink really hits it, I think, because it offsets the dead flesh where she's been ripped apart. Wait a minute—there are some liberal protesters dressed like soldiers saying the army gets universal healthcare??? How DARE these people exploit Americans who suffer and die to make a political point?!?!?!?"
So, what? Did this guy and this guy just space out on the meeting explaining the difference? Who wrote this thing, then? Fox Mulder?
SOME STRANGER: (to THIS GUY) Of course, you're ignoring the cruel and pretty much totally inhumane fact that your dog probably has a higher standard of living than about 25 million people in the United States and that most people alive on this planet would probably kill to feel the same level of joy that a dog feels every day about food, sun, smells and his own people.THIS GUY: Hahahaha. You know who's a BITCH? Shitlery Clinton.
SOME STRANGER: Have you ever had a dog get a tumor? That's like $4,000 to take care of right there. Unless you somehow magically have Dog Insurance.
THIS GUY: MESS WITH THIS DOG, YOU'RE GONNA GET THE HORNS.
At this point I'm just relieved that the Lady Liberty effigies aren't being raped by a large black man in manacles and a loincloth.
Spent the last eight years bending over backwards trying to explain to people how the FBI's tracking the overdue fees on his library copy of My Pet Goat was keeping Ahmed from jihadding the condo rec center to smithereens, noticed a Democrat got elected, went back to that library and found a Ben Franklin book and started writing down all the quotes outside those chapters about Bennie founding a bunch of socialist institutions like mutual-aid societies and public schools. Fuck keeping people from dying. Politics is all about MY Benjamins.
I love that this dude is consumed with worry that a regulated and transparent health system will comprehensively screw him, while at least half the people in his age bracket will get randomly denied care based on a profit motive so nebulously evil that the decisions made by insurance companies might as well be based on dartboard strikes and which claims adjuster can evilly cackle the loudest. This man's priorities are so completely whacked that I want to offer him a job and guarantee him $100,000 per year—OR this $25 million lotto scratcher in the Lovely Miss Sally's hands and watch him tackle and punch her in the face for the can't-miss opportunity to lose 49,999,999 times out of 50,000,000.
*Waves bible angrily at Capitol. Hasn't read the second half.*
Also, you've gotta love the "Spreading the Wealth Since 1917" complete with a picture of Karl Marx, who had been dead for 34 years before this timeline began. Someone get her a t-shirt that says, "America, Riding into the Frontier Since 1776," complete with four pictures of cowboys and, on the far left, Ghengis Khan holding a raygun and standing on, like, a Willy's Jeep or something.
It's kind of a bummer because most of those places have spent the last three centuries or more having their most valuable resources systematically stolen or exported at cripplingly low prices, but you know it's a pretty sweet gig in most of Western Europe, where they exceed us in pretty much every economic mobility metric, lifespan, education, etc. You know: in bullshit. You know what they don't have? A fuckton of cool-ass planes. Kill me at 35: I don't wanna live longer than the most bombass jet invented.
THE GREATEST GENERATION: WHAT A BUNCH OF LOSERS
This deserves its own little section because I don't know how to react to it. Put simply: I don't know if this is a very, very subtle counter-protest, because the web address goes nowhere. Here:
Shep Smith is the leading anchor on FOX News. He gets better ratings than any other anchors, although editorializing personalities like O'Reilly and Beck draw a larger audience when you account for all FOX News programming. Still, Shep is their reporting big dog: personable, attractive, quick on his feet, profitable. Perhaps more importantly, even non-conservatives tend to agree that Shep's fairly levelheaded. Which effectively means that Shep can get away with murder. And he does, at least by the standards of his own network's programming. Below are two videos of him live on air. The first is just two minutes of Shep openly ridiculing Glenn Beck, staring loopily into the camera, faking breaking down in tears and referring to Beck's set as "The Fear Chamber." In the second, he condemns the increasingly crazy emails he's getting from FOX News' own viewers, trading in far-right conspiracist thought on the same day that American Nazi James Van Brunn shot a man at the Holocaust Museum (the coverage of which I wrote a real-time diary about):The reason why I suspect that sign involves a subtle trolling counter-protest against these people is that during the 9/12 protest there was no shortage of birthers or people who considered Obama a crypto-muslim, and the rhetoric of their signs echoed the rhetoric of the letters read by Shep on air. More importantly, most of these people heard about this protest from Glenn Beck. The idea that any one guy there would support Shep Smith after he condemned these people's far-right conspiracism and ridiculed The Oracle is so bizarre that either he's exquisitely dumb or a masterful satirist. Maybe one day the web address will work. Until then, who knows?
1. Symbol representing the ultimate expression of sacrifice from a loving god?
2. Support beam for the half-built rec room?
3. Poorly conceived and executed prop for a tired sociopolitical debate?
This man's cross has come a long way, baby.
Free Market Jesus learns to optimize his cross to get ahead of the lollygagging and exhausted condemned.
Why do these people fetishize, unquestioningly celebrate and feverishly defend elite institutions they have no chance of ever joining? And no, it doesn't make any more sense when they do it with college football, either.
I love torture. I love the way a man's eyes roll back in his head white with terror when he feels his lungs fill with fluid. I love the blossoming scent, rising upward from the floor to fill the entire chamber, of his piss mingling with his shit while his pants fill with waste, as he feels all control of life slipping away. I love the gentle creak, like a slowly bending but as-yet-unbroken pencil, of a man's fingernails being pulled backward and up from the nailbed as his throat froths and gurgles with the scarlet foam that comes from screaming until it begins to bleed. I feel hard: my penis engorges, like his throat, with blood. Nothing heightens the sense of life, of being palpably undeniably alive, like feeling a man relinquishing his own anima, allowing it to emanate from his body in surrender, just as your own tool of creation swells with fecund possibility. I am The Alpha. I am The America. I stand for two straight hours clapping at my son's soccer game, why can't these fucking ragheads stand for two straight days? If anything, it should be easier for them, convinced as they are that their Allah will save them. But there is no Allah here. I have cast him from the room, because here only I have dominion. I am the Americallah. My phone rings. The caller-ID says that it is "Johnny." He tells me the team has a game tonight. Go Cougars.
You know what? It's time to make this process a little less scattershot. Because a lot of what goes on fits into easily recognizable patterns. Let's look at each one individually. For instance, it wouldn't be a teaparty protest without a ton of...
MISSPELLINGS:
Why are these relevant? Bear in mind that probably every single one of these people:
Awwww, will you look at that? We ended on a twofer: Hitler and a misspelling.
But perhaps it's unfair to blast people for "typos," even though they sat there and had to patiently trace, ink and fill out foot-tall letters by hand. What other preparation and research have they done? Let's look:
RESEARCH:
Quick question: what do the following four images have in common?
That's right, they're all about OBAMACARE: something that doesn't exist.
But the rest is good, right? Hitler was really trying to provide affordable and guaranteed healthcare to the Jews, expanding their rights vis-à-vis the Krupp Insurance Works, Zyklon Beneficial, and Blue Cross/Yellow Star. Also, Barack Obama strangled the life out of Terri Schiavo. He did 9/11. Goddamn, that dude gets around.
But, again, Ronald Reagan said something about how facts suck, and honestly they're not Job 1 when it's time to rescue the republic from the tyranny of poor people who don't die more expeditiously,Barack Obama, welfare and ACORN the blacks. Let's ignore the message for a moment and look at the messengers. People can come up with statistics to prove anything: forty percent of all people know that. Let's look at character. What do they believe?
THOU SHALT HAVE NONE OTHER GODS BEFORE ME, REAGAN, OR THE MILF IN THE WOLF SHIRTS:
One of the recurring themes of conservative — and especially teapartier — criticism of Democrats is that they uncritically worship Barack Obama. It started during the campaign with "Obamessiah" and "The Chosen One" epithets, and it seemed to stem from the resentment that George W. Bush never generated crowds that size without their being filled with people objecting to some new war. The tactic has had surprising stamina in political theater, and it showed up on 9/12. Here, take a look:
It's dumb for so many reasons. "Sorry Obama is yours"? Can you think of a burn any weaker or more reliant on a desperate assumption? It's like getting into a back-and-forth trading yo-mama burns and calling a thin guy fat in the hope he'll put on weight, making four-eyes jokes about a dude with perfect vision because macular degeneration will kick in sometime around 40, calling someone with a ponytail "baldy" while adding "just wait," and then ranting and raving about hobbitses or something else totally imaginary.
But it's especially dumb because the worship charge ignores the fact that 400 of his own campaign workers, 25,000 volunteers and 40,000 donors took out a $100,000 ad in the NY Times telling him that his abandoning the public option was not the "change they believed in." It ignores that he's been routinely condemned by gay activists for failing to rescind Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and he's been blasted by the ACLU for backtracking on Guantanamo. In fact, some of the sharpest critics of Obama are members of the far left, if for nothing more than things they're blasting him over actually exist in reality. But the right has to ignore that and go for the entranced-acolytes characterization of Democrats, because they need to maintain the illusion that there's literally no other way someone could support Obama. These are the sort of tactics that become imperative when rigorous examination of data isn't favorable to your side about, well, almost anything.
That aside, it's still sort of a stupid tactic, because the people most reliant on demonizing their opponents as enraptured zombies carrying banners and graven images in a Cult-of-Personality spend a sizable chunk of time at these things celebrating a woman unaffiliated with them and a man who's been dead since 2004. For instance:
This is a woman who quit the only national-profile job she's ever had, and yet these champions of hard work and responsibility can't labor hard enough to rationalize it. This is a man who was president of the Screen Actors Guild, which not only has a famously desirable health plan and practices redistribution of wealth but is a fucking GIANT LABOR UNION that periodically brings the teevee screeching to a halt, dangerously interrupting the sweet soma-like flow of Bill Engvall to the red states. But all that can be desperately whitewashed to accord with the flawless image of the two conservative representatives. They're practically like gods themselves: why else would someone repurpose an invocation of the sacred by making "What Would Jesus Do?" into "What Would Reagan Do?" Clearly these people have far too much respect for the solemn import of the Son of God to profane him by relating him to a mere mortal?
But maybe hitting them in their heroes is unfair. Those are just the people they believe in. What do they really believe?
THIS PROTEST IS NOT ABOUT RACE—WE JUST DON'T WANT YOU TO REDISTRIBUTE OUR WATERMELON, FRIED CHICKEN, NEWPORTS AND DAUGHTERS:
Combing through multiple Flickr photostreams, website slideshows and picture threads on message boards, I saw only two different placards insisting these proceedings had no racial element. Meanwhile, I saw multiple versions of some of the signs below. I chose these particular few just because the quality is better:
At every one of these, someone has needed only the flimsiest of pretexts to put a black man's head on a stick, and it's frankly astonishing that nobody repeated the previously successful formula of showing something hanging from a tree and then adding "OBAMA = KING GEORGE" for some nauseating grasp at the plausible deniability that they reeeeaaally intended only to lynch a dead Hanoverian. No, indeed, all those accusations of racism are just a liberal invention. It's not at all racist to liken a black man — a person from a race that was repeatedly described as animalistic and subhuman by the perverted science that sought to defend slavery and Jim Crow — to an animal in a zoo. It's not at all racist to assume that all black inner-city political activists must be motherfucking Huggy Bear. It's not at all racist to decide that, since Obama's family is from Africa, he must be some sort of tribal savage. It's not at all racist to suggest that he and his wife lived in shit.
THE FRONTLINE SOLDIERS OF THE THIRD AMERICAN REVOLUTION:
___________________
Why are these relevant? Bear in mind that probably every single one of these people:
• wants to make English America's "Official Language";I guarantee you there's a 12-year-old kid from outside Chicago whose parents moved here from Bangalore two years ago who could edit every one of these flawlessly.
• has equated waiting all of two seconds to press 1 or 2 for a language selection on a touchtone phone with the downfall of civilization;
• explained why immigrants are garbage because they "don't bother to learn English."
Awwww, will you look at that? We ended on a twofer: Hitler and a misspelling.But perhaps it's unfair to blast people for "typos," even though they sat there and had to patiently trace, ink and fill out foot-tall letters by hand. What other preparation and research have they done? Let's look:
RESEARCH:
Quick question: what do the following four images have in common?
That's right, they're all about OBAMACARE: something that doesn't exist.But the rest is good, right? Hitler was really trying to provide affordable and guaranteed healthcare to the Jews, expanding their rights vis-à-vis the Krupp Insurance Works, Zyklon Beneficial, and Blue Cross/Yellow Star. Also, Barack Obama strangled the life out of Terri Schiavo. He did 9/11. Goddamn, that dude gets around.
But, again, Ronald Reagan said something about how facts suck, and honestly they're not Job 1 when it's time to rescue the republic from the tyranny of poor people who don't die more expeditiously,
THOU SHALT HAVE NONE OTHER GODS BEFORE ME, REAGAN, OR THE MILF IN THE WOLF SHIRTS:
One of the recurring themes of conservative — and especially teapartier — criticism of Democrats is that they uncritically worship Barack Obama. It started during the campaign with "Obamessiah" and "The Chosen One" epithets, and it seemed to stem from the resentment that George W. Bush never generated crowds that size without their being filled with people objecting to some new war. The tactic has had surprising stamina in political theater, and it showed up on 9/12. Here, take a look:
It's dumb for so many reasons. "Sorry Obama is yours"? Can you think of a burn any weaker or more reliant on a desperate assumption? It's like getting into a back-and-forth trading yo-mama burns and calling a thin guy fat in the hope he'll put on weight, making four-eyes jokes about a dude with perfect vision because macular degeneration will kick in sometime around 40, calling someone with a ponytail "baldy" while adding "just wait," and then ranting and raving about hobbitses or something else totally imaginary.But it's especially dumb because the worship charge ignores the fact that 400 of his own campaign workers, 25,000 volunteers and 40,000 donors took out a $100,000 ad in the NY Times telling him that his abandoning the public option was not the "change they believed in." It ignores that he's been routinely condemned by gay activists for failing to rescind Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and he's been blasted by the ACLU for backtracking on Guantanamo. In fact, some of the sharpest critics of Obama are members of the far left, if for nothing more than things they're blasting him over actually exist in reality. But the right has to ignore that and go for the entranced-acolytes characterization of Democrats, because they need to maintain the illusion that there's literally no other way someone could support Obama. These are the sort of tactics that become imperative when rigorous examination of data isn't favorable to your side about, well, almost anything.
That aside, it's still sort of a stupid tactic, because the people most reliant on demonizing their opponents as enraptured zombies carrying banners and graven images in a Cult-of-Personality spend a sizable chunk of time at these things celebrating a woman unaffiliated with them and a man who's been dead since 2004. For instance:
This is a woman who quit the only national-profile job she's ever had, and yet these champions of hard work and responsibility can't labor hard enough to rationalize it. This is a man who was president of the Screen Actors Guild, which not only has a famously desirable health plan and practices redistribution of wealth but is a fucking GIANT LABOR UNION that periodically brings the teevee screeching to a halt, dangerously interrupting the sweet soma-like flow of Bill Engvall to the red states. But all that can be desperately whitewashed to accord with the flawless image of the two conservative representatives. They're practically like gods themselves: why else would someone repurpose an invocation of the sacred by making "What Would Jesus Do?" into "What Would Reagan Do?" Clearly these people have far too much respect for the solemn import of the Son of God to profane him by relating him to a mere mortal?But maybe hitting them in their heroes is unfair. Those are just the people they believe in. What do they really believe?
THIS PROTEST IS NOT ABOUT RACE—WE JUST DON'T WANT YOU TO REDISTRIBUTE OUR WATERMELON, FRIED CHICKEN, NEWPORTS AND DAUGHTERS:
Combing through multiple Flickr photostreams, website slideshows and picture threads on message boards, I saw only two different placards insisting these proceedings had no racial element. Meanwhile, I saw multiple versions of some of the signs below. I chose these particular few just because the quality is better:
At every one of these, someone has needed only the flimsiest of pretexts to put a black man's head on a stick, and it's frankly astonishing that nobody repeated the previously successful formula of showing something hanging from a tree and then adding "OBAMA = KING GEORGE" for some nauseating grasp at the plausible deniability that they reeeeaaally intended only to lynch a dead Hanoverian. No, indeed, all those accusations of racism are just a liberal invention. It's not at all racist to liken a black man — a person from a race that was repeatedly described as animalistic and subhuman by the perverted science that sought to defend slavery and Jim Crow — to an animal in a zoo. It's not at all racist to assume that all black inner-city political activists must be motherfucking Huggy Bear. It's not at all racist to decide that, since Obama's family is from Africa, he must be some sort of tribal savage. It's not at all racist to suggest that he and his wife lived in shit. And, okay, maybe it isn't explicitly racist to claim that Obama is a sleeper agent for Al-Qaeda who had a hand in the 9/11 attacks and will seek to destroy the United States from within now, but it's a type of character assassination of "The Other" as being in league with those who would destroy the nation that is straight out of the Volkischer Beobachter. Finally, okay, I'll admit that I don't even really know what that first picture is. Is that supposed to be Sammy Davis Junior? "Yes I Am"/"Yes I Can"? Do they think all black people look alike? What the fuck does that even mean?
What all this reminds me of, time and again, is an excellent photoshop someone did mashing up the tea parties with the movie They Live. In the movie, aliens have come to earth and joined up with industrialists and plutocrats to plunder the planet of its resources, render it unlivable and exploit all humans until they're dead. In the movie, a man discovers a pair of sunglasses that sees through the signal that prevents humans from identifying the aliens. Glasses off, everyone looks normal; glasses on, the evil skull-headed aliens are revealed. The creator of this photoshop did something similar with teaparty signs, which embarrassingly only seems more and more appropriate with each passing protest (click to enlarge):
So going by their signs, that seems to summarize the mental and emotional architecture of these people: ragin', Reagan and racial separation. But what do they look like? Come on, gang, let's meet...
So going by their signs, that seems to summarize the mental and emotional architecture of these people: ragin', Reagan and racial separation. But what do they look like? Come on, gang, let's meet...THE FRONTLINE SOLDIERS OF THE THIRD AMERICAN REVOLUTION:
Here's the first thing you need to know about the teaparties: there's potato salad. Someone told these people they were firing the first shot in a war, and they brought the Coleman stove and a pound of the Oscar Meyer back bacon. It's time to march on Washington, but once there, don't worry: there WILL be seating.
This is the day I'm leaning back and my feet go up. If this qualifies as national service, give the Presidential Medal of Freedom to everyone who kept The Dukes of Hazzard on TNN for half a decade.
FIGHT TYRANNY, SUCCUMB TO GRAVITY.
Too easy.
Holeeee Shiiiit. Lady Liberty let herself go. I knew she was supposed to be the lady grabbin the people comin' in off the boats, but I didn't know she played catcher for an NCAA Softball team. Goddamn, girl, that thing you holdin supposed to be a torch and a tablet, not a waffle cone and rice-krispies squares. Someone told you you goin' to a tea party to protest Obama, you thought it was 'cause he ate all the cake and sticky buns. Speaking of sticky buns, last time I heard the noise your thighs make rubbin together, someone sent 200 pounds of lard in a wetsuit down an underlubricated slip'n'slide. Only reason you in chains is so they can take you outta the teaparty by winch. I said god-daaaaaaaamn.
(I went back and forth on whether making these kinds of jokes at a woman's figure was appropriate, but then I remembered that this woman willingly attended a spectacle whose participants have an established record of likening the president to a monkey or something else subhuman. Perhaps she's not directly supportive of that sort of thing, but when you lie down with dogs and get called one...)
"Do not send me a terry-cloth purple dinosaur via your free access to the mail. Gay people are rapist dogs. Barney Frank is a Rapedale Terrier. A Rapingkese. An Africanus. And Oldman Rapetriever. A Rhodesian Rapeback. I am afraid of a gay Mass Stiff. Obama will cry Barney and let slip the dogs of rape. Also, something about my Obamadog having dog healthcare."
"Bring back the preamble of the document that was abandoned and warred against by the people who bore this flag. But don't call me racist: that's heritage, not hate. The heritage of our southern values of states' rights. States' rights to continue to keep owning black people."
LEG LIFTS WITHOUT OBAMACARE CAN'T BRING YOUR DOG BACK TO LIFE
SKEE BALL DOES NOT PREVENT APHIDS
JESUS' FACE INSIDE THE 9/11 SMOKE IS PROOF OF THERMITE
YOU CAN THROW IT LIKE PEYTON, BUT THAT HORSE STILL CAN'T CATCH IT
Ahhh, I get it, because once you give Huggy Bear, Ice-T and WWE's "The Godfather" their own free houses, they're gonna need some workers to bring in tha chedda. And they've already taken all our white women, so our children are next. Hahahaha, black people are such animals.
ABORT MORAL RELATIVISM
Okay, okay, besides a government agency operating transparently and with preexisting guidelines for treatment including mandatory care, what does killing animals because they no longer have any utility for making money and denying them care and allowing them to die of their wounds remind you of?
Despite the fact that this lady is complaining about the Illuminati, this is probably the most terrifying sign at the entire protest because it makes people think watching Matrix sequels might become mandatory.
In that case, I'm sure you won't mind if he goes into hiding so successfully that no one ever finds him, while the government bombs the shit out of the FOX News offices, slaughtering all the big names inside, changes the station's programming to celebrate social liberalism, makes Arianna Huffington the Chairman of the FOX Television Group and—what's that on at 8 and 11?—it's The Olbermann Factor!
THIS IS NOT A KIBBUTZ!!! NAZIS OUT OF THE USA!!!
Favoring another form of extraordinary rendition at the hands of the military, without an opportunity for trial? You got to give them this: at least they're consistent. Except for all the parts where this is wildly unconstitutional.
Hey, look, this lady uses Wikipedia.
Uh-oh, homegirl shoulda checked with her Wikipedian buddy about the whole "king" thing. You know what else you can find on Wikipedia? "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." I didn't know much about this constitution thing these people keep going on about, but you wouldn't believe how much relevant shit is in there!
Friendly reminder that Chiang Kai-shek was a murderous autocratic thug to whom the United States gave over $8.8 billion in adjusted dollars by 1948, a man who squandered that money on lavish gifts for himself and his wife, lavish sybaritic entertainments and mercenaries who raped and slaughtered Chinese peasants with wild abandon. Friendly reminder that the Republican Party had a huge man-crush on Chiang, especially the epically cretinous Henry Luce, whose Time magazine joined forces with Joe McCarthy in blaming the "liberals" for "losing" China, a nation we never "had" — resulting in the purging of excellent career Far East experts in the state department, leaving us blind and stupid when Republican Dwight Eisenhower inherited a piece of land from France called "Indochina" and later named Vietnam, allowing us to mistake an anti-imperialist war for a global-communist war, firebomb and otherwise murder millions of their people and kill about 60,000 of our own in the process. All of which was somehow ALSO the Democrats' fault. Chiang went on to found Taiwan, which remained under martial law from 1948-1987, the longest period of martial law in modern history.
Oh, whoa! Sorry, kid! I didn't see you there! Of course you must know all this stuff, right? Viva, Joe, huh? Anyway, I gotta go, man, I hear this Obama guy is stealing all my hollowed-out watermelons, and that's where I keep the microfilm I have proving red-Chinee spy activities on America's reality shows.
Don't let the flag bother you. You should see what the copies of the first and fourth amendments in the public bathrooms look like.
And you know what else I hate about you, Obama, you fuckin' assjack? No Child Left Behind, you fucking pinko prick. Way to teach them how to fail. If you don't leave them behind, you don't teach them how to catch up. You stupid nanny-state fuckhole.
Blah blah blah... something about PATRIOTS NOT TERRORISTS and how if I was getting proper Obamadogcare, vets would know the difference... yada yada.
Jesus Christ, Obama, nobody likes a spendthrift unless you give us a little taste of tha swee'ness. Pass a huge tax cut BEFORE the spending spree. We'll all get a little drunk, get a little happy, we won't notice. Hell, distract us from everything. Have you ever thought about bombing the everloving shit out of a ton of brown people? Look, it doesn't really do anything, and it costs a ton, but do you have any idea how fucking rad it looks?
Ahahahaha I wish I were making this up, but this is literally a picture of the Shah of Iran. (Go on, click it. It's the exact same picture.) You know, the guy who banned the hijab, democratized Iran to some degree, opposed sharia law. I mean, granted, he was an enormously corrupt fuckhead with a brutal secret police, but the Shah ranks pretty highly on these people's fondness scale since he's not a "homicide bomber" but rather a "freedom fry." What kind of encore do you pull off for a fuckup like this? Accidentally put Al Jolson's face on the body of Stonewall Jackson and label the photo "Orbma"?
Friendly reminder that World Net Daily spent the last six months of 1999 running editorial after editorial claiming that Y2K was an invention by the Clinton Administration to shut down all internal defenses within the United States so UN "Peacekeeping Forces" could take the country in a swift coup and initiate the New World Order.
Yes, I'm pretty sure a president whose first significant act as the leader of the federal government was taking an army to crush a bunch of hillbilly assholes who refused to pay taxes on their whiskey would probably wonder what the fuck you morons are doing.
I don't like being able to mail things on Saturdays either, and I too live in a fantasyland where private companies who no longer have to compete with an efficient government service that's prohibited from running at a profit won't immediately jack the price of a postcard up to a buck fifty and then tell you if you don't like it to cram it up your ass or buy a plane ticket and hand-deliver the bitch.
I've been writing this a long time, and I'm pretty sure my next stop is to get an assload of java at Traitor Joe's.
Here's one for you, chica: land ain't people. For example:
This is what a map of the 2008 U.S. election looks like when you adjust all those red and blue areas for the size of the population. In conclusion, go fuck yourself.
Okay, play me off, teabaggers! This is your time to shine! You get to state your case to the American people in your own words!
What is your program?
Can you elaborate on that with data collected in reality via a scientific method and use it in the context of arguments relevant to recorded history?
THANK YOU, GOD BLESS YOU, AND GOD BLESS AMERICA.
