Interesting take from Charley James ... I think we're seeing the same thing in microcosm right here on ECCIE!
http://www.laprogressive.com/talking....sOHNzTlC.dpbs
Danger: Talking Heads Exploding!
By Charley James
The City of New York had a huge mess to clean up Wednesday morning, and it had nothing to do with Sandy remains or trailing effects from the Nor’easter lashing lower New England. Rather, it’s the result of all of the talking heads on Fox and other right wing media exploding. People heading to work outside Fox’s building on Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan the morning after the election found themselves sidestepping bits of flesh and bone.
Indeed, from Bill O’Reilly to The National Journal, the punditocracy on the right cannot fathom how their world fell apart so completely, and so devastatingly. Not only did the socialist Kenyan Moslem Nazi Marxist win reelection, he won it decisively. He won a majority of the popular vote and thumped Mitt Romney in the Electoral College.
O’Reilly’s comments Tuesday night would be funny if they were not so sad.
“The white establishment is now the minority,” O’Reilly whined election night. “You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”
Entitled?
The point that O’Reilly misses is that his “white establishment” has felt entitled to things since the nation was founded, beginning with the right to own other human beings.
They feel the same entitlement about not paying their fair share of income tax. They feel entitled to not have their businesses subjected to environmental, and health and safety regulations to protect both workers and the general population. The “white establishment” feels entitled to tell everyone else how to live, how to treat their bodies, what religion to worship and whether their children will be sent off to fight an illegal war simply to enrich the people who dispatched them to a faraway land.
Alright, so rational people know Fox is buffoonery writ large. But The National Journal wants to be treated seriously.
Yet mere minutes after the networks – including Fox – as well as the AP called Ohio for the president, it posted a lead item headlined “Obama Victory Comes With No Mandate.”
Calling his campaign “small bore and brutish,” Ron Fournier fumed “Obama hurt his cause by running a hard-edged and negative campaign against Republican Mitt Romney, hoping to convince recession-weary voters that his rival was unworthy of the job. He gave lip service to an agenda, publishing scaled-back and repackaged ideas from his first term in a 20-page pamphlet. Obama’s message was often microtargeted to Democratic coalitions rather than the broad electorate.”
In fact, it was just the opposite: It was Romney who ran a hard-edged and negative campaign. For some reason, he thought a combination of barely-disguised racist slurs, outright lies and appeals to what Sen. Lindsay Graham once called “angry old white guys” would pull out a victory.
Romney believed that calls for “self-deportation” of Hispanics would endear him to frightened Anglos, that not running away from Republican candidates talking about “legitimate rape” and babies of raped women being “gifts from god” would appeal to some narrow slice of Evangelical Christians, and that calling for another Middle East war would pass unnoticed by people still smarting from the last Republican president who sent Americans to the region to die for no reason.
Troll Fever
At Red State, where a large number of right wingers live when the moon’s not full, Michael Hammond listed 30 reasons why Obama won, beginning with the laughable Republicans “allowed Democrats to pick their nominee for them.”
“Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich – were bright, attractive, and have compelling narratives,” Hammond notes. “Instead, Republican voters … bought into this Democratic mantra that only a liberal stand-for-nothing Republican can win a presidential election.”
Who is he kidding? Beyond the fact that no one else has ever accused Palin, Bachmann or Santorum of being bright, Democrats would have loved to run against any of them or Gingrich; Romney was seen as the one Republican with a decent chance of defeating President Obama. But such is the self-delusion occurring on the right in the aftermath of Tuesday’s shellacking.
For a chuckle, Hammond then actually argues Romney lost by running to the left. How? By picking Paul Ryan as his vice president? This is the same Paul Ryan who called people who need help looters. By demanding even lower tax rates for the already-wealthy? By calling for an end to providing access to health care for 50-million Americans?
Still, at least one commenter at Red State, who calls himself Repair Man Jack, clung to a sliver of reality by noting, “I just got bread-trucked. And then the truck backed-up and did a few doughnuts on my meticulously-manicured lawn.”
Beyond Elections
Despite what National Journal maintains, or the self-delusional lies folks hanging out at Red State tell themselves to feel better, the fact is that the country handed President Obama – and itself – a huge victory mandate.
The country rejected not just Romney’s treasure trove of lies, it rejected the entire right wing agenda of “We have ours and you’re on your own.” We saw clearly that Americans do not believe those of us who need a helping hand are “looters.” The electorate told Washington that it wants the people’s business actually conducted. They did this not just by re-electing the president but by sending true progressives to the Senate and tossing a bunch of mouth-breathers out of the House.
Now it is time for Democrats, and especially the president, to move on a progressive agenda.
TALKING HEADS EXPLODING OVER OBAMA VICTORY
