A friend of mine forwarded an email he received from a right wing acquaintance about Obama. I won’t quote from the email, but I think it’s fair to say that any reality based person reading it would wonder what planet the person lived on. Among other things, the writer claimed that Obama has spent all his time blaming George Bush for the state we are in. Setting aside the fact that he would be perfectly justified in doing so, it’s a charge that seems peculiarly divorced from reality. From a purely political perspective it would have been great if Obama and the Democrats had spent the last year and a half invoking George Bush at every turn, but it’s asking too much to expect the Democrats to coordinate anything these days.
Part of the reason these things happen, I think, is that rightwingers are allowed to make these charges in environments where they know they will not be questioned. Consider Steve King, idiot Congressman from Iowa:
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is standing by his comments that President Obama has a “default mechanism” that “favors the black person” in a dispute — and says that Americans need to talk about this.
The natural follow up question would be: What on earth are you talking about? But that question never gets asked, because comments like this are always made while the person in question is safely ensconced in a right wing radio host’s studio, or in the friendly confines of Fox and Friends. In this case, the comment was made to G. Gordon Liddy, convicted criminal.
The one example King gave was Obama’s defense of Louis Gates, Jr., a matter in which Obama took no official action (and to which his first reaction was absolutely correct), but King charged, without a single example, that there is an “inclination on the part of the White House and the justice department and perhaps others within the administration to break on the side of favoritism with regard to race”.
Can there be any doubt that if there was a scintilla of truth to this charge that the actual facts would have been bruited about by the right wing? But we live in a world in which the right, at least, really is allowed to have not only its own opinion, but its own facts, which go unchallenged when asserted, and which are then amplified by repetition by a “mainstream” press that sees its duty as merely to report what is said, and not to provide context or correction. Have you ever heard one of these folks moaning about socialism being asked to define the term, much less being asked to give concrete examples of any actual Obama initiatives the real socialists approve?
As a result of this fact free discourse, we are a nation of politically deluded people. Maybe that’s appropriate, since we are also the most religiously deluded people in the Western World. It makes for a toxic mix, and doesn’t leave much margin of error for the rest of us, since if the info at the link is true, rational people are a minority in this country that depend for their survival on their ability to induce a certain percentage of the crazy to cast rational votes.
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