Who's Stupid?

Caught with stolen ferret
stuffed in his pants, thief
uses it as “deadly weapon.”

It is obvious by now that no matter what President Obama does, or doesn’t do, some Republican will attack him for either doing it or not doing it. The latest case in point is Cheney’s daughter criticizing Obama for meeting and honoring the caskets of our dead warriors, and taking photographers along. This can be dismissed as just another example of how absurd and petty Republicans can be. But there is a dimension to this ubiquitous criticism that I find of interest, as much of what they have been doing is so stupid I can’t understand why they are doing it.

You are all familiar I am sure with their “birthers” argument. Some of them have claimed, and some still do claim, that Obama was not born in the United States and therefore cannot truly be our President. This claim has repeatedly been shown to be completely false, Obama’s birth certificate has been produced and the State of Hawaii has vouched for its authenticity. Most people have given up pursuing this lost cause but there are still a few who haven’t.

Then there came the “deathers,” who have argued that Obama’s health care plan is really a plot to kill old people. This belief has been expressed not only by the real nut cases but even by some of our Senators and Congresspersons. Here, unlike the birthers, they picked up on a statement in one or another of the proposed health care bills that suggested doctors should be paid for counseling people about dying and death. This made their claim of “death panels” at least remotely plausible, but only if you believe that Obama and Democrats in general really might desire to kill old people (a most unlikely claim). Other forms of this argument had to do with Democrats apparent desire to kill women with breast cancer, handicapped children, and even our veterans, to say nothing of using registration rolls to select out and kill Republicans.

Also recently has been their stated outrage over the fact that in one pre-school, in one state, one time, in honor of black history month the children sang a song about the U.S. and also included lines referring to President Obama. To listen to Republicans on this you would think this was an established, universal, and fully required procedure, akin to the Chinese cultural revolution or the Nazi youth movement. It was, by the way, seven months after this happened that they saw fit to bring it up and raise such a fuss.

Now there is a rumor making the rounds that Obama is going to take over the Internet and thereby control what we can read and write and so on. This one seems to have such little foundation in fact that it hasn’t received as much play as most of the others. I think perhaps the best one of all, however, is the rumor that plans to maybe build a high-speed rail system across the U.S. is really a plot to be able to transport people more quickly to the concentration camps that have been built here and there by FEMA.

What I find of the most interest about all of these rather outrageous claims is not really where they originate, we know they originate with Republicans, desperate to attack Obama at every opportunity. There are many others having to do with false claims of raising taxes, how expensive health care will be, and so on, which might have at least some semblance of validity. But most of them are so completely far-fetched, so virtually insane, so absurd or ridiculous, I cannot believe those who say them can in fact believe them. This would seem to leave only two possibilities: either they do believe them and are completely stupid, or they don’t believe them but think they can get others to believe them, in which case they think the American public is unutterably stupid.

Could anyone actually believe that President Obama, or anyone in his administration, would want to kill old people, women with breast cancer, veterans or the handicapped? If so, how and when did we come to be so suspicious and fearful of our government? I may be wrong about this, but I don’t recall anything like this happening prior to the Clinton administration, when Republicans accused the Clintons of everything including outright murder. It is true that Lyndon Johnson was accused of killing Vietnamese children (“hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today”) but these were anti-war chants, not claims Johnson was about to kill our children or old people or such. I think the use of such outrageous claims can probably be traced initially, and mostly, from the Republican unfounded attacks on Clinton, through Karl Rove and the Bush/Cheney administration until they have now become institutionalized as part of the regular Republican strategy. Yes, I know that techniques such as false accusations can be traced back earlier, certainly to LBJ, but they were never before systematically used by an entire party to destroy the Presidency of another party, no matter who was President. Karl Rove has had much to do with this as he has always seemed to believe that anything at all was fair, as long as it benefitted Republicans and would help to bring about a permanent ruling class (of Republicans). At the moment they do it because they have no record of accomplishment they can stand on, and no ideas whatsoever about solving our current problems. I guess they think it is better to babble idiotically at every opportunity than to actually try to help (which might require effort and would no doubt reveal them as true enemies of the public).

LKBIQ:
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell

TILT:
What was previously known as Bechuanaland is now Botswana.