Beauty is Imperfection

A short note, because I don’t enjoy Schadenfreude as much as I used to:

The backlash has already started, and instead of the soul-searching you might expect from a defeated party, Wednesday saw a lot of GOP wags and conservative Web sites positively refusing to come to grips with what happened to them on election night and refusing to blame the proper parties: themselves. For the past four years, in the middle of a recession with high unemployment, the party had avoided analyzing a flawed deregulation policy and instead rushed to denounce the masses of resulting unemployed people as “takers.” It was a classic “blame the victim” mentality, a textbook example of psychological transference on display in a user friendly, Museum of Natural History-style diorama form. A sick strategy embraced not only by the fringe elements but by the party’s very presidential candidate. Wasn’t this the crew that used to say they were on the side of crime victims?

Here’s a page you might want to check out: “Republican Tears.” Here you’ll find out that gays, brown-skinned people wanting handouts and oversexed females took over the country last night so that the American taxpaxer could fund their nonstop government cheese eating and fucking. (You’ll also see, if you watch one telling video, how Karl Rove forced Fox News to hold off calling an Obama victory when everybody else had. There’s no big conspiracy theory about why: He had personally put millions of donor dollars at stake.)

You might say I’m wrong to overlook good-hearted conservatives by posting the Republican Tears link, and the comments by what is apparently the most extreme element of Republican ideology, tossed in with a few pictures of crying white women. ( Incidentally, I have seen a preponderance of crying white women in the election news photos, even though women overwhelmingly broke for Obama. It looks like somebody’s trying to skew the grief incorrectly. What gives?) But anyhow this Web site isn’t a portrait. It’s a mirror. It’s Republican sentiment taken at face value. Everywhere from Fox News to the vile RedState.com, conservatives are making extremism their identity: The new paradigm after a Wall Street financial collapse caused by complicated debt instruments is to blame welfare mothers and immigrants. This transparent, obvious, age-old smear tactic has somehow become our main talking point in the last few months. It’s as wrong as the kneejerk patriotism argument was during the Iraq War. Wrong, wrong, totally wrong. If you have ever said “takers versus makers” during this election, you are part of the problem.

And I hate to say that by “welfare mothers and immigrants” that it’s a not-so-subtle code for black people. You be the judge. The site Jezebel has been collecting all the uses of the word “nigger” used by angry Republicans on Twitter since Tuesday’s Obama victory.

Again, this kind of argument enrages fair-minded conservatives who insist that their real concern about American debt is short-circuited by horrible liberals playing the race card. I am only a tiny bit impressed by this argument. It’s true, if that kind of argument were really happening. (Specifically, that argument never really happens.) Nevertheless, good-hearted conservatives, you must take note: if you are not racists, the racists are hiding among you. They are using you as human shields to avoid being called out. Their birther, immigrant (and even socialism) rhetoric is a very thin disguise, and if you play into such phony arguments, your supposed good-heartedness is being used against you as a tool of somebody else’s will. There was no honest debate about our recession. The conversations had all turned stupid. It was the Republicans’ fault. That’s why they lost the election. Go to RedState.com (and especially read the comment section of this story) to see if anybody is learning that lesson for 2016.