Friday, July 23, 2010

Racism and Breitbart

The debunking of Breitbart and Fox, by now, is both pretty definitely true and consistent with prior incidents. There's a striking refusal to accept personal responsibility for the mistake, much less in a manner questioning the assumptions underlying the mistake. Obama's response, however imperfect, accepts responsibility. Conservatives will apologize for the former, and attack the latter. They'll ignore even the question of whether, in the end, Obama did the right thing. They'll use rhetoric suggesting overall weakness and failure of leadership which, in the end, boils down not even to ideology but to Obama's dick not being big enough for the job. I'm so goddamned sick of that, even when, at times, I catch myself doing it. Been troubled by my bad habit ever since feminists pointed it out to me in high school. Even 45 years later, it takes conscious effort. The Republican counterexample, being more extreme and embraced even when explicit, has made me more sensitive on the subject.

Krugman today points out the increasingly open embrace of GW Bush amongst Republicans, with only the most casual relationship to reality:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/opinion/23krugman.html?hp

He's been placing GW Bush squarely within the Republican Party's ideology and policy going back to McCarthy and further, against righty suggestions that his failures arose from a failure of sufficient fealty to conservatism rather than its apotheosis. Now, he's working with an emerging denial of those very failures.

The right now asserts that blacks and affirmative action are the only place racism exists, that the only conflict between classes is the parasitic poor's attacks on the innocent rich. Black is white, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Good policy can't emerge from this immoral crock of shit. And, ever more obviously, not much room for compromise with it.

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