"something odd is going on with the healthcare debate"

[Pirate Smile]

Race, Taxes, Birth Certificates, and Eugenics

by Hunter
Share this on Twitter - Race, Taxes, Birth Certificates, and Eugenics
Sun Aug 09, 2009 at 02:00:04 PM PDT

The Rise of A Postmodern Racist Movement?

A Friday email cited by Ta-Nehisi Coates, at the Atlantic...

Yesterday evening I was to attend to the Health Care summit with(D) Rep Betty Reed and(D) Rep Kathy Castor, I'm a Precinct Captain (203) in Tampa and we received our talking points to rebut any NEGATIVE GOP talking points on healthcare. I never made it in the building. I've never in my life really experience outright racism in a public place. Signs of Obama hung in effigy, racial slurs on signs, people chanting negative words ( too many to list) and outright screaming at Obama supporters. The hatred was in their eyes and they actually scared me for a moment. At first I was shocked, then a little scared and then I got outright mad in the span of 1 minute.............. I actually left (the "hood" would have come out). I was totally blown away it was a mad house. I'm kinda mad at my self now, because I left. I'm still shaking my head in awe....................I'm still cold inside.

There seems little question that something odd is going on with the healthcare debate. Foremost is the ridiculous extent to which the debate has been entirely commandeered by flagrant, outright lies -- things about euthanasia, and death panels, and the like, abject propaganda peddled directly from House and Senate offices. We have had lying in our discourse since the beginning of that discourse, but it has been a long while since the fabrications have been so blatant, so absolutely without even the smallest grain of truth. To take a Republican-sponsored healthcare provision that rather innocently and uncontroversially extends insurance coverage to those that want to create their own living wills and turn it into a declaration that the government will decide every five years whether or not you should be euthanized is something out of the Protocols, or out of Saddam's Iraq, or a mimicry of the worst and most stupid and most absurd of North Korean propaganda towards their own citizens.

Likewise, the explicit instruction to protestors not to debate, but to aggressively attempt to shut down the meetings entirely -- not normal. It is perhaps the best possible approach for insurance lobbyists to take, if their goal is to protect the profits of their industry -- but it is still not normal. We have always had the fringes of such speech, but I cannot recall a time it has been so celebrated as the formal solution to political debate. Certainly not by a major political party, coupled with the majority of their most popular pundits and talking heads, coupled again to lobbyist groups with long histories of corporate astroturfing. And the proud shuffling just-up-to-the-line-of-violence, right in the very faces of their own representatives of Congress, requiring police protection in order to escort those elected representatives safely from the meetings -- that part is new. That part is not normal.

It is more than a little troubling that each of the recent, most explicitly aggressive and loud and factless "movements" to appear on the scene since our first black American president took office appear to be, in large part, made up of the same people. Categorizing them informally there are the birthers, people who do not believe President Barack Obama is truly an American. There are the teabaggers (our name for them, cough, not theirs), a group that suddenly came to the conclusion that a tax structure that was begrudgingly tolerable in 2008, under Bush, is now the highest form of tyranny a mere handful of months later. There are the deathers, those that seem to quite firmly believe the propaganda of eugenics and euthanasia being cheerfully peddled to them by national leaders, and who take the conspiracy theory to absolute heart as being the nearly unavoidable result of any attempt to reform the straining, hyperexpensive and increasingly incompetent American healthcare system.

But these are not three disparate movements with three different practitioners, three different conspiracy theories that simply happen to share the same summertime stage. In practice and organization they are one movement, a single collection of the same set of animated citizens and televised leaders, and their signs decrying fascism, Naziism, communism, taxes, euthanasia and outrage over 1960's-era Hawaiian government paperwork mingle freely at every protest. If you find a newly minted tax protestor, you are as likely as not to find a birther and a deather as well, all tucked neatly inside the same polo shirt. They are nearly exclusively white, predominantly middle aged and elderly, and unambiguously conservative. Many of those shouting against their government are already participants in the same "socialized medicine" they decry, but to a person will not consider their Medicare to be of that evil ilk.

It is, in short, a movement made up of the enfranchised and enabled; people who have gained every benefit from the politics of America and yet who feel in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones, the ones who have nothing left to lose, so rapidly is America falling away from them. It is rare to run across any movement so deeply angry -- or more to the point, a movement which explicitly celebrates anger as the primary mission of their activism. They are not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs in whatever dark conspiracies have been peddled to them; they have in fact made it their publicly proclaimed mission to block any such explanations from even being attempted.

That seems the operative element of discourse, of late. It is angry beyond any objective rationale. It is actively hostile to fact. It finds the mere premise of debating a political argument to be deeply offensive.

-snip-
It seems at first a bizarre thought, a mere freeform hiccup of the brain, but between a half-dozen different commentators I am apparently already far from the first to have it: it seems to me like the last time we saw public discourse be as intentionally devolved as it is today was during, of all things, American desegregation.

That was the last time you had deeply conservative southern governors and states yelling about secession because the federal government was forcing things on them that they couldn't tolerate, and making belligerent anti-federalism statements over the slightest little thing.

That was the last time America so prominently saw, on television, shouting white mobs and the threats against lawmakers, all explicitly intended not at debate, but as efforts of pure intimidation in order to stop the debate from ever taking place.

That was when you had phalanxes of very dumb but very loud people weeping in front of the cameras that the fabric of America was being destroyed, though they couldn't begin to actually tell you why or how, only that it involved black people rising above their place in the world and the subsequent corruption of their government.

That was when you had men with fervent political beliefs walking into "too-liberal" churches and murdering in cold blood those who they disagreed with.

Why on earth would a southern governor choose to raise the specter of secession over something as asinine as a policy dispute over nuances of a financial stimulus package? Is that all it takes, is that the end-all issue of issues, over these last long decades, the final thing that brings the rallying cry of "too much!" from the head of state of, well, a state? And we are to believe that the American public, which wants a public option in heath insurance by margins ranging from sixty to eighty percent or so, in various polls, is at the same time is so enraged that the government would dare offer such a thing that they want nothing to do with even holding meetings on the subject? And we are to believe in government-mandated Death Panels, now, if government dares assure you that your health insurance will optionally cover living wills, if you desire to have one?

Now, how it is that a healthcare reform debate has managed to raise a viciously angry, assertively fact-hostile and debate-hostile political climate that brings back national memories of American desegregation seems outright baffling. Except that many of the paranoid healthcare protestors are "teabaggers" as well, and many of those "teabaggers" are "birthers" besides, and the whole parcel is, from polling, clearly a fringe movement based most substantially in the southern states, the only remaining stronghold of the party that contains them. And -- there is no way around it -- America has just now elected the first black president. The very first, after two centuries and then some, and even though I am in the terribly liberal, very nearly socialist hellhole of California I can still go no more than a few miles from my home and see the confederate battle flag hanging from a living room window, or stuck to the bumper of a worn and battered truck.

-snip-
There is not a conservative politician or talking head in the country that would not deny it up and down, of course, and be red-faced that anyone would even suggest it. But the current climate is the current climate, and has been documented on every television screen. We've got governors yelling about secession, and major politicians peddling stories of imminent threats to your family and your children by the very government they are supposedly a part of, and every day the town hall footage just seems to look more and more like a modernized version of the mob attacks against citizens and legislators during old anti-desegregation rallies, and we don't need to say "sooner or later someone will be shot" because it has already happened, and multiple times, and in truth it never really left us, these last fifty years.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/8/9/763919/-Race,-Taxes,-Birth-Certificates,-and-Eugenics

[nightrain]

1. FWIW--change is scary, and people become unhinged when they feel threatened by new ideas etc.

[Pirate Smile]

3. You should read the entire thing at the link. The reactions are incredibly weird.

It just makes no sense - the scope of their reactions to what the issues are. It is bizarrely off.

[nightrain]

4. I did, and I still think some folks are losing their center as we make this transition

into a more multi-cultural existence. If White power and domination over certain others is all one has to hold it together, then a Black/mixed-race President is going to jolt the heck out of some folks. We gotta move through this piece consciously, confronting our own deepest fears, or the unhingedness is the acting out result. FWIW

[Kablooie]

31. In particular, the new idea that the president is African American.

[mascarax]

34. Agree - it's not about health care

It could be any topic.

Obama is African American, and that is a very big problem for these racists. That's the bottom line.

[spanone]

2. america has lost it's love of the truth. i'm old enough to remember when it mattered.

[Cha]

6. I guess we're

fortunate in that respect.

[BlooInBloo]

8. Or unfortunate, in a Flowers For Algernon way.

[kelly1mm]

16. Great book BTW - read it in middle school. NT

[depakid]

9. I'm old enough to remember as well

Throughout the nation on many levels- from its media to Wall Street to Main Street to the person on the street, dishonesty has become acceptable (and even admirably rewarded) behavior.

Worse, it's not just people and institution's motivations that are suspect and have suffered- it's their very ability to discern fact from fiction- even when they want to.

[Still Sensible]

10. I think the MSM's pursuit of ratings

through controversy, regardless of the truth, has caused this. It is now apparently okay to say anything... and the more ridiculous the better. In Walter's day they called bullshit on bullshit. The "birthers" would have been a funny story about the fringe that got two minutes of air time 18 months ago--they'd look into it, report it was wholly without merit and moved on. They would have covered Palin's latest crap and then confronted her with the facts.

Between the pursuit of controversy and the misguided notion that somehow any bullshit anyone spews is entitled to equal weight whether it has any factual basis or not, this is the result.

[Birthmark]

14. Bingo

You hit it on the head. Without the irresponsible "news" media, most of the craziness of the last couple of decades would have dissipated. Instead, the BS built on itself to the point where the Republicans are utterly cut off from reality.

And they appear to be unhappy with the imaginary landscape that they've constructed.

But at least the media are making a few bucks. :grr:

[nolabels]

27. Actually M$M has been promoting many fantasies in their attempts to keep hold of their franchise

Without M$M much of the booty the wealthy have looted is going to be lost. They know it and will gladly pull any stop to keep it that way

(snip)
You have to remember of course, that Berlusconi – as well as being the head of the government and the biggest party in the country – controls the entire universe of Italian television. He owns three private television channels, because he never felt duty-bound to get rid of them on entering politics; and the three public stations over which the party in power, whether left or right, has always exerted control. But the current monopoly of mainstream television is without precedent. It has led to the elimination of the modern agora, that public space for information and debate in which the delicate free market of consensus develops in the West.

Just consider the fact that 73 per cent of Italians (according to data from Censis research institute) made up their minds about who to vote for in the last elections through the television, and you have a concrete idea of what conflict of interest means.

The new element that the latest scandal has exposed is that the television monopoly does not only guarantee a favourable presentation of the prime minister, it can actually cancel out reality, prevent things from becoming part of the public consciousness. This week, the week of the escort tapes, six prime-time TV news bulletins did not let their viewers know what the Spanish, the English and the Germans were able to read about in their papers.

The Italian bulletins eventually include Berlusconi's exasperated reaction to the news, but without ever explaining what that news was, what he was reacting to. "I am not a saint," the prime minister said on Wednesday after the recordings of the night he spent at his home with the escort, Patrizia D'Addario, emerged. This headline finally made it on to TG1 (flagship news programme of the Rai state network) and TG5 (the main news programme of the Mediaset empire owned by Berlusconi) but their viewers had been told nothing about the tapes that prompted it.
(snip)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/silvios-sex-life-why-italians-dont-care-1760716.html

[stuball111]

5. Well put, nice post...seems to me

just standing back and having a look at the whole thing, that neither the electorate nor the elected representatives IN the government, democratically elected by the process, wield any power whatsoever. Although the Republican party seems to be on the ropes, the "muscle" behind it is being flexed rather effectively, that being corporations, and it's money, right wing talk show hosts, and ex politicians like Palin, Rove, and Cheney. The Republicans seem to be sitting back and letting big money and propagandists make all the noise. It's weird, it's like the government is being pushed aside and something altogether different is running the country, like PR firms and insurance companies. Feels dangerous.

[proud2BlibKansan]

7. They are afraid

There's a black man in the White House.

[eridani]

11. This is actually a far more relevant comparison than the Nazi brownshirt analogy n/t

[Pirate Smile]

12. True.

[Caliman73]

30. Actually, I think that the analogy fits right in there.

The Nazi's as part of their indoctrination pushed the idea of Aryan power and racial purity. Same thing seems to be happening here only it cannot be done overtly because of the effects of WWII and the holocaust. People angry that the US is changing are typically White men who see their power having to be shared with people they feel are inferior to them. The Brownshirts were typically young, or very ideologically driven people who went out and disrupted the processes of government as an open show of Nazi power and willingness to do outrageous things to consolidate that power. The various movements (which I agree are all part of the one covertly racist and nationalistic movement) are all out there trying to do the same thing. They are trying to intimidate a vastly larger group of people in an attempt to maintain the status quo.

In that way I think the analogy fits well if you substitute "trying to gain power" with "trying to keep power".

[Pirate Smile]

13. "Obama Has Cut Taxes for 98.6 Percent of Working* Households"- say what Crazy-Teabaggers!

Obama Has Cut Taxes for 98.6 Percent of Working* Households**

by Nate Silver @ 9:00 AM


One thing I don’t quite get has been the White House’s reluctance to highlight the non-infrastructure parts of the stimulus package. Oh sure, people wanted more investment in roads and trains and energy grids and all that good stuff – I did too, and thought the stimulus package spent an inadequate amount of money on them. But you’re left with the impression that the rest of the stimulus was just thrown down a well somewhere. In fact, it was not. The extension in unemployment benefits that the government provided under the stimulus, for instance, is turning out to be highly useful to a lot of people. I don’t necessarily expect the people receiving extended unemployment insurance to turn around and write Obama a thank-you note – but the White House might want to at least occasionally make the point it’s their initiative that is helping them to keep putting food on the table.

Likewise with the tax reductions in the stimulus – which collectively made up $288 billion, or about 37 percent of the package. Most of those tax cuts are targeted at individuals. And while the they aren’t terribly deep, they are impressively broad.

The broadest tax cut in the stimulus package is the “Making Work Pay” tax credit, worth about $116.2 billion (see the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center for this and other figures) and applicable to the vast majority of working Americans. Indeed, all single filers making less than $95,000 and all joint filers making less than $190,000 are eligible for this tax cut. Most of them, in fact, are already receiving it in the form of lower withholding on their paychecks.

The well-to-do are benefiting too – or at least they will once it comes time to file their taxes next April. That’s because, as part of the stimulus, the government extended the alternative minimum tax (AMT) “patch”, which reduces the tax burden for some 24-26 million Americans who would be subject to the AMT. Most people who would be hit by the AMT are doing pretty well. The median income among people who would be subject to the AMT is about $130,000, and the average is about $165,000. This has the convenient property, though, of starting to kick in right where the “Making Work Pay” credit phases out, meaning that a great number of Americans who won't benefit from former program will benefit from the latter one.

Finally, there are a number of smaller tax rebates and credits that are more highly targeted – to buyers of new cars and new homes, to small businesses, to low-income families with children, to the unemployed, and so forth. We’ll focus principally on one of these, which is the credit for new car purchases.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/08/obama-has-cut-taxes-for-986-percent-of.html

[Gregorian]

15. Well, all I can say is a harmless substance is illegal, and a deadly one is legal.

I don't see how this is any different a situation.

We've all seen Reefer Madness. And so, that's how it goes. The medium is manipulated, and people are duped by it in the same way they were with the snake oil salesmen. I can kill myself as long as I pay a corporation to do it. There's more to it than that. I can't put my finger on just what it is. It may not even be the specific thing, but a general sense that some things must not be had, for fear of losing the dependency upon the corporation.

We can see that dependency upon the corporations is important enough that it appears to transcend that of the actual citizens who comprise the country. People don't earn money, corporations do.

So we are seeing, I am afraid, the duped masses of believers following marching orders. We're seeing, I am afraid, a major transition yet again. I mention the drug war because of how tenacious it has been. You notice that even though it's a ridiculous waste of energy, time, money, and human life, it is still with us. And it's with us because of the same lies that we see in this health care distortion. What I am afraid of is that we will not see affordable health care in our lives now. It could be thirty years before this chance comes again. Perhaps that is too pessimistic. After all, with all of us boomers aging simultaneously, there is little alternative but to try and keep us productive and healthy.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. This is the other side of the Republicans' "creating other new realities"

When they were in power, that meant controlling the news stories (including bribing commentators), manipulating intelligence and so on.

Now they're out, they can't do that (or don't have the government money for it, anyway); so they are trying to create another 'new reality' - that things are on the edge of chaos, and sending people out to disrupt anything, without rhyme or reason, to give that impression; or saying that Democratic proposals 'threaten the Constitution', 'are socialist' and so on.

After Bob Dole in 1996 (who seemed, from here in the UK anyway, to run a normal campaign), the Republicans have abandoned the idea of politics as a way to run the country with (small 'd') democratic values, such as debate, fair voting according to a defined system, an impartial media and so on; it's now about power, for them, and screw the country. Perhaps it started earlier, with Gingrich in 1994 - I'm not sure, I wasn't paying enough attention then. But they're now picking up on the 'disrupt the presidency by any means possible' tactic they used with the special prosecutor for Clinton.

[Omaha Steve]

18. EFCA got smeared in the same way

Many many people here on the DU bought the Republican PR.

[HamdenRice]

19. Great article. But how are these mobs different from Obama haters of the left, Trotskyites, doomers

"let if failers," etc., right here on DU?

Use of twisted facts and outright lies: Check
Demonizing even the slightest opposition: Check
Verbal violence: Check
Paranoid delusions: Check
Visceral hatred of (as opposed to disagreement with) Democrats and the Democratic Party: Check
Creating a "viciously angry, assertively fact-hostile and debate-hostile political climate": Check

[proud2BlibKansan]

21. I think they are very different

I spent Sat morning with the teabaggers. They are incredibly angry. They despise Obama. The far left is frustrated with him and the party. But the frustration I see here is not even close to the hate I saw on Sat. Not even close.

[The Wizard]

20. in a nutshell

".....clearly a fringe movement based most substantially in the southern states, the only remaining stronghold of the party that contains them."

It's time to end reconstruction and let the Confederacy stew in its own juices. They take a disproportionate share of tax dollars from normal Americans. The time to end funding rabid hatred from the Confederate States has come.
To borrow a line from Jim Morrison: "They got the guns, we got the numbers....."

[Orsino]

22. The racist fringe has been quietly harnessed by corporate forces...

...who oppose President Obama and Congressional Democrats for purely pragmatic reasons.

[Pirate Smile]

23. Ugghh.

:(

[Vinnie From Indy]

25. You are correct!

If unleashing the hounds of hate helps the bottom line, so be it!

[Greyhound]

24. Not odd at all, this is SOP in the parasite's playbook.

Whenever their position is threatened they shut down any communication and the preferred method is with violence. Look at every social issue that has threatened them since the 19th century.

[Pirate Smile]

26. kick

[Wednesdays]

28. K&R

:kick:

[Odin2005]

29. The bastards are coming out from under their rocks.

[Cal33]

32. You will understand their behavior better if you read my post

in this forum of some 2 months ago: "National Disease: Sociopaths in High Places."
Many of these are sociopaths.

[rhett o rick]

33. The question is "how do you deal with the irrational"? This is a serious.

I have tried on a personal level and can not. I have tried to find publications that would help but haven't.

We need to know how to deal with the irrational.

[Pirate Smile]

35. We can't. They don't care about the facts or the truth. It is irrelevant to them because their

brains wont even process it.

That was the great thing about this entire post. Hunter, who wrote it, goes through quite a bit of detail showing that their objections, especially the Teabaggers, were not based on reality.

If you only read what was posted above - which was a lot - you might want to click on the link and read the entire thing. Facts are irrelevant.