Cannonfire

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

A season of madness

At this point, I don't much care who wins the nomination. I can't even bring myself to care (at the moment) whether McCain wins the general. America's netizens have gone insane this election season, and I just want an end to the entire annoying mess.

In the past, I've said that I don't like Obama. That's not really true -- I don't like his supporters, those fainting, mouth-foaming fanatics for whom the Clintons have become a dual-headed version of Emmanuel Goldstein. No matter what Bill or Hill do or say, the Obamabots will chant "HATE! HATE! HATE!"

You remember the Richard Burton version of 1984? Remember the agit-prop telecasts directed against Eastasia (or was that Westasia)? The anti-Hill diatribes appearing daily on TPM or DU follow the same script and convey the same aura of political psychosis: "The enemy has committed atrocities in the past, but never before have they stooped to such inhumane, degrading, brutal acts of sheerest barbarism..."

A few posts down, I chided Obama for allying himself with Friedmanesque economic gurus. You'd think that the connections to the (gasp!) DLC and (yelp!) Skull and Bones and (AIEE!!) the Cato institute would have set off some alarms in progland. But no -- a reader assured me that Barack's Bizarre Buds simply demonstrate the man's breadth of mind.

Meanwhile, Hillary is a fiend for hiring Mark Penn.

For your homework assignment, kids, please define these terms: "Double standard" and "special pleading."

I love the way this blogger puts the matter:

You people can keep calling her a "bitch", "evil", "worse than Nixon", "worse than Cheney", etc. because I'm sure you have no doubt about how justified you are.

But there's a practical problem with all that: charisma

Obama may have it - you guys surely don't.

You guys got a big case of anti-charisma you're all working on.

This is what really worries me about an Obama presidency - not that he's going to have a tough time, or that he's going to give the re-thug-nicans too much of a honeymoon.

No.

It's the steamroller-like, purposefully aggrieved zealots that have to peck at absolutely anything that could conceivably be twisted into a cause for offense. You guys are creeping me out like a bunch of snake-handlers. I read your posts and I hear an unflinching gleam in your eyes. (to mix metaphors a bit)

This behavior and all the "victim" tones of righteous offense you guys waft off only fulfills the caricature that Republicans have been trying to pin on the Democratic donkey since time immemorial (or at least as far back as I can recall).

"Anti-charisma." That neologism sums up the entire Obama movement. Every time I hear that puerile "Yes I can!" crap, I want to scream at the tube: "Will you please address me as an adult?" (Then again, screaming at the teevee is itself a rather puerile thing to do.)

Yet one must admit that the Republican attacks on Obama have reached even lower depths of uncivilization. These right-wing savages seem to have degenerated into pre-human life forms.

On Fox News, a lying bitch named Caroline Shively suggested that Obama had claimed that he had been a Christian for "two decades now." In fact, he has always said that he was never a Muslim.

Another popular reactionary blogger recently opined that Obama hopes to be the "first gay president." Someone should tell that fellow about Jeff Gannon's strange visits to the White House.

Rush Limbaugh, who never disappoints, has offered the obscene opinion that Obama resembles a famous cartoon monkey.

The most popular meme making the rounds in right-wing circles holds that Obama is a socialist, Yep, the GOP actually hopes to hold onto the oval office through old-fashioned red-baiting -- in this day and age! How can anyone square this nonsense with the fact that Obama's mentors in economics have ties to the Chicago School and the Cato Institute?

Madness.

The country has finally achieved unity -- of a sort: Almost everything that anyone has to say about Obama or Clinton or McCain bears little linkage to reality.

In 2004, I jumped into blogging because I wanted to do whatever small thing I could to get John Kerry, whom I have always admired, into office. This election season, I just want to flop onto a sofa with a good book. A novel. About any subject except politics.

posted: 1:17 PM

10 COMMENTS - CLICK HERE

Comments:

People are tired of bullshit. Hillary did her part in burying the USA neck deep in bullshit when she helped to vote us into this Iraq war mess. And alot of us get the impression that the Powers That Be prefer her over Obama... so that is another reason people want her out. She has no one to blame but herself for giving voters the impression she is a phoney and not brave enough to back her convictions. Obama may turn out to be a phoney too. Time will tell.

CapnDudeGuy

posted by

Anonymous : 2:47 PM

BTW... comments like this:

"It's the steamroller-like, purposefully aggrieved zealots that have to peck at absolutely anything that could conceivably be twisted into a cause for offense. You guys are creeping me out like a bunch of snake-handlers. I read your posts and I hear an unflinching gleam in your eyes. (to mix metaphors a bit)"

There's a term for fearmongering whiners like that : Vichy.

This is all illusion. Flowery words intended to paint a picture on the target.. to smear it by association.

Obama supporters are no different than anyone else. They are certainly less dangerous to this country than McCain or Bush supporters which will simply drag the U.S. into more insane nutcase wars in the middle east. But the Vichy Media Propaganda Machine has chosen the Anti-war Obama supporters to smear as "zealots, cultlike."

People see through it. What is more cult like than the people that have started this human sacrifice we call the Iraq War?

So Obama supporters are the only ones saying to the Powers That Be... yeah we get it.... we understand this game you're playing... now shove it up your ***.

CapnDudeGuy

posted by

Anonymous : 3:02 PM

capn, you followd the rules, so I can't delete your comment. But you are full of it.

Kerry voted the same way on Iraq. How many times must we explain? The vote authorized a possible military option if inspectors were not allowed into Iraq. But they were.

Vichy media? My ass. The media have bent over backwards to be kind to Obama. You remind me of those rightists who tried to game the system for so many years by claiming that the media were had a left-wing bias.

I've been a member of the anyone-but-Hillary for a long time, at least until recently. I voted for Obama. But the asinine behavior of the Obamabots is NOT an illusion -- I see it every day on the blogs, and it makes me sick to my stomach.

At this point, are you chomping at the bit to accuse me of dissing the Obamabots because I was paid to do so by my Vichy masters? Go on. Make that accusation. A Rule #2 violation gives me an excuse to delete your words.

posted by

Joseph : 3:13 PM

Yeah, I'm being a bit terse in my words. But these are terse times. I'm not accusing you of being paid off.

But I get annoyed by people or groups that come at me with the condescending attitude that Obama supporters are cult like. This meme isn't coming from the average American. It's coming from the "Powers That Be".... they are consciously attempting to paint Obama supporters a certain way so to create a stigma. I believe it is the same technique they use to keep people from talking about 9/11. ie. calling people tinfoil hatters.

The blogger you quoted used the phrase "creeping me out". The "creep" meme started apparently with Joe Klein of Time magazine. Then on it went with the New York Times, etc.

Well thank you CREEPY New York Times. The same CREEPS that helped lie us into war with CREEPS like Judith Miller and her SECRETIVE & CREEPY Iraqi WMD propaganda.

My point? This doesn't wash anymore. People are not falling for it.

posted by

Anonymous : 3:49 PM

They're creeping ME out, dude, and have so crept for a long time now. Not long ago, Hillary said that Obama may lose to McCain because "McCain has experience and Obama has a speech." I don't know if that analysis is true, but those words constitute fair campaign rhetoric in my book. Frankly, she makes a valid argument: The swing voters may not cotton to a candidate with so severe an experience deficit.

What did the Obamabots do? They said that Clinton had "endorsed" McCain.

Creepy? You bet! And deceptive.

posted by

Joseph : 4:17 PM

Like Hillary and her minions have never done anything deceptive or creepy in this campaign. Geez.

CapnDudeGuy

posted by

Anonymous : 4:23 PM

I wasn't around when political campaigns were a thousand times sleazier than 2008's campaign. But I understand.

For the most part, my view is myopic, fixed on Cannonfire, and besides, I've made up my mind, or rather, my heart has. Love Has No Pride. If you want me to beg, I'll fall down on my knees:

Please support and vote for Hillary!

posted by

AitchD : 5:25 PM

I've got to call you on this one, Joseph. It is simply not true that "Hillary said that Obama may lose to McCain because 'McCain has experience and Obama has a speech.'"

Clinton's full statement was, "He [McCain] will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my lifetime of experience. Sen. Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002. ... Everyone knows that John McCain will make this election about national security. That is a given. And it will be imperative that we have a nominee who is able to stand on that stage with Sen. McCain, and I believe I am the person best able to do that."

Taken in full, that was not a statement about experience. It was a statement that McCain is going to "make" the election be about national security, that there's nothing any Democrat can do to prevent that, but that Hillary can at least challenge him on his own ground and Obama can't.

Since Hillary's experience has little or nothing to do with national security, that's conceding the field to McCain right there -- which seems pretty craven.

Whether you want to go further than that and consider it an outright endorsement of McCain depends on whether you think Hillary herself believes that (a) national security ought to be the dominant issue of 2008 and (b) McCain has a genuine edge on the issue.

Even if she does see national security as topping the list (as her 3 am phone ad suggests she might), that's still no reason for her to buy into the McCain image as somebody who will keep the country secure. It would have been very easy to talk about 100 years of war, bomb-bomb-bomb Iran, and McCain's general hot-headedness and inability to negotiate.

But she did none of that. Instead, she propped up the strong-leader image of McCain -- just as the networks unceasingly prop up the "maverick" image of that tired old whore -- and that was a terribly foolish move.

Especially if Obama becomes the nominee, Clinton has given him a much harder row to hoe. And for that there is no excuse.

posted by

starroute : 8:17 PM

This is some of the most ridiculous parsing I've ever seen.

John McCain -- and the right-wing media, and his party, and the mainstream media -- will indeed do everything possible to make the election about national security. That happened in 2004 and it will happen in 2008. To a great extent, it happens in every presidential election.

posted by

Joseph : 11:20 PM

The media's sole function is to legitimize whatever it is that the establishment determines the outcome should be.

When they installed George Bush in 2000, they said it was because Al Gore had the audacity to sigh at George Bush's bullshit during the debate.

When they rigged the votes and assassinated Paul Wellstone in 2002, they said it was because Americans trusted the GOP on national security, because they ran an ad in Georgia that showed Max Cleland next to Osama bin Laden, and because Trent Lott and some other fascist fucks got booed at Wellstone's funeral.

In 2004, they turned to the "family values" voters and claimed that the reason Kerry didn't win. In other words, they've always got some bullshit reason other than the obvious: the elections are fraudulent.

Jamie in Boston

posted by

Anonymous : 10:27 AM