Paranoia for Breakfast

A few years ago I fell
in with this circle of people - a high proportion of which are certifiably
insane - who correspond by email with each other over politics.
I would call it a seriously mixed blessing, except that I'd never
go far enough as to use the 'b' word to describe the experience.

I can honestly say that
when I was originally baited into participating in the group I came
with an open mind, and I still have not met a single person on the list.
About half the correspondents are regressives, most of them from right
out of central casting on the set of the movie "America Neanderthal".
They rarely cease to astonish me. The level of thuggishness, hypocrisy,
ignorance, proud ignorance and ad hominem insult from those quarters
is staggering.

More on that some other
day perhaps, but there's one additional aspect of that behavior set
that floors me. It's the capacity to simply make things up out
of whole cloth, and then just have it become 'truth'. Period.

Here's an example.
As usual, the dittoheads on the right (and how could any self-respecting
person not see that term as a monstrous insult from Master Rush?) regularly
trot out, in 5.1 Surround Sound chorus, the latest tropes assigned them
by their marionette string-pullers. For quite some time now, those
have included the silly one about how President Obama (who's not really
president, of course, since he was secretly born in Kenya) runs around
the world apologizing for America.

Let's leave aside for
now the inferred premise that America has never done anything wrong
(for example - just choosing a period at random here - over the
previous eight years), and therefore why on earth would we have anything
for which to apologize? I stay reasonably up to speed with the
news. I watched the president travel the world. I remember
some refreshingly quasi-honest rhetoric from him every once in a while,
stuff that was hardly news to anyone outside the American Insular-o-Sphere.
But no apologies.

So I asked. "Could
you folks who continually say that the president is apologizing for
America all over the world, could you please just quote me a couple
of examples? It's not that I doubt your veracity or anything
[who could imagine regressives being dishonest?], it's just that this
claim of yours is not fitting so well with my understanding of the facts."

Oh man, you should have
seen what gyrations that little toe-dipping into empirical reality produced.
One person said I should "do my own research", even after I explained
to her that I had indeed looked, to no avail, even though I always thought
that one making an assertion bore the burden of proof, and even though
one would assume it would be easy to present myriad examples, given
the plethora of apologies supposedly tossed off by the president, like
so many sets of Air Force One souvenir cufflinks.

Mostly there followed
an obstinate silence, or personal attacks on anyone, like me, who would
dare ask for examples. But my very favorite response was the proof
finally generated by one of the regressives in the group. That
President Obama apologized continually to the world for America was
proven by the fact that - wait for it, now: "He traveled to
Europe".

You probably think I'm
kidding you, but this was dead serious, and nothing I could say was
capable of pointing out the absurdity of the assertion, not even mentioning
that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (and every other modern president)
"went to Europe".

To be sure, making fun
of dittoheads is like shooting elderly fish in a barrel filled to the
brim with Quaalude-laced molasses and left in the fridge for a couple
of days. But something profoundly unprofound is going on here,
and I keep encountering it everywhere I go in Regressive World.
These folks start and end any discussion with their paranoid ideas,
and cannot be dislodged from them by mere evidence or logic, if they
can be dislodged at all. I'm not sure a bunker buster bomb would
do the trick, or even a moderately-sized nuclear device, planted close
in.

If a conservative government
ran the country into the ditch in every conceivable way, they would
still tell you how great it was. (Oops, that already happened.
Never mind)

If Republicans were shown
to be pedophiles and closet queens, they would still support the party
for its strong stand on sexual morality (Oops, that already happened.
Never mind.)

How utterly frightened
of some existential threat does one have to be in order to cling to
sheer nonsense like the notion that going to Europe is apologizing for
America? Indeed, how frightened must one be to actually seek out
having such inanities delivered directly to your door, by flipping on
Fox Lies?

This is much deeper than
an election or even a partisan tendency across an era. We are
talking here about a population somehow so traumatized that the very
rationality which is utterly foundational to the Enlightenment project
of democracy has been squashed down to invisibility, never again to
inconveniently impede full-bore delusion. Perhaps 'twas ever
thus - I mean, one can hardly account for endless millennia of religious
belief otherwise - but right-wing freaked-out reality-defying delirium
has gone so mainstream these last three decades, it's seems most times
like we've entered some parallel and not so lovely alternative universe.
Nowadays, it's paranoia for breakfast, paranoia for lunch, and paranoia
for dinner. Want a little snack before bedtime? Guess what's
on the menu.

Consider the right-wing
media machine. Clearly, these folks have gotten very good at dishing
it up for the hoi polloi cruising along in their pick-ups. But
I wonder if some of them don't actually have a heaping helping themselves
every day of what they're serving to the bots. Two recent articles
from the toxically regressive National Review make the point nearly
as immaculately as does the "Go to Europe, Insult America" bumpersticker.

Editor Rich Lowry starts
the fun with a piece called "The Bush Blame Game". I was especially
interested in this because of my observation that the Obama administration
hardly ever blames the Bush administration for current problems.
Just for a point of reference here, for ten years I watched Tony Blair
during Prime Minister's Question Time, and I was struck by how often
- and how long into his own government's tenure - he kept referring
back to the eighteen miserable years of Thatcherism. I've noticed
that Obama pretty much never does the same, even with Udickuitous Cheney
running around practically begging for a good whack, or six, upside
the haid. And I think it's a strategic mistake of large proportion
for Obama to adopt his perennial nice guy posture on this question.
For one thing, it perpetuates massive untruths, but for another, it
allows a nearly extinguished cancer the opportunity to rally for a comeback.
As if we need that. It's like letting the planet's last remaining
sample of Smallpox out of the deep freezer every once in a while -
just so it can stretch its legs a bit.

Anyhow, I was curious
to see if maybe I was being unfair and had missed something. Was
Obama really out there slinging it, and I just missed it somehow?
I knew for sure that I could count on Mr. Lowry to set the record straight.
If you read his piece, however, you'll find lots of not-so-funny attempts
at humorously skewering the president, but nary a single example of
the administration doing what it is accused of doing in the article's
thesis. You'll find verbiage like, "At this rate, when Obama
writes his post-presidential memoir, it will be titled: An Audacious
Presidency, or How I Saved America from That Bastard Bush" (hah-hah,
eh? - it gets worse), but the only quotation of a president dissing
his predecessor comes from... John Adams! Unless, of course, you
count Obama, describing the economy he inherited as "somebody else's
mess", as some outrageous - and outrageously dishonest - slam
on the Bush administration. That's what constitutes "Obama's
perpetual campaign ... to scorn and berate" Bush, according to Lowry?
That's the best he's got? That meets his test for describing
Obama as "graceless, whiny, and tin-eared"? Wow.

Lowry goes on in his
article to disagree with Obama's positions on a variety of issues,
and sing the praises of Bush - for example, because the latter gave
us the Iraq surge - never mind that is was of course simply a partial
bail-out from the disaster he himself had created. That's fine,
even if Lowry's politics are about as thoughtful and welcome as...
well, a third Bush term. He's certainly entitled to his policy
preferences. However, when you write an article assailing a president
for the incessant and grossly unfair blaming of another president, you're
kinda expected to give an example. Maybe even two. Heck,
I'll go even further. If you do this whilst tossing around highly
inflammatory language - such as claiming with respect to Obama's
public rendering of Bush that, "no calumny is too much to heap on
him, and no defense is ever offered" - then you really ought to
produce four or five doozies to illustrate your incendiary claim, shouldn't
you? Lowry - along with the research staff he presumably presides
over as editor of a major publication - provides a whopping zero.
Not a single one. Instead, he tells us that Obama "impugns his
immediate predecessor with classless regularity". Hmm.
Very strange. Apparently Obama's highly regular epithets are
so classless they can't even be printed in a family magazine.
That's the only reason I can think of for Lowry to leave them out.
Maybe, for example, Obama didn't just refer to the "mess" he inherited,
but called it a "darned mess" instead. Disgusting. I
wouldn't publish such filth if I was Lowry either.

Jay Nordlinger gives
his readers roughly the same treatment (or perhaps the same rough treatment)
in his "O's (Latest) Insult", also published in The National Review.
Nordlinger is furious that Obama recently said to some of his supporters,
"Democrats are an opinionated bunch. You know, the other side,
they just kinda sometimes do what they're told. Democrats, y'all
thinkin' for yourselves."

Wow! Can you believe
it?!?! Have you ever seen something quite so egregious in your
life? Next thing you know, Obama will be calling conservatives
something really sickening, like maybe "dittoheads" perhaps!!

As with the Lowry piece,
I kept cruising along, waiting to see the great crimes of the president
laid out in all their horrid glory. Instead, we lucky readers
are treated to a lengthy recounting of some unfinished business from
the author's college days (never a good sign) and some random quote
attributed to the Washington Post - which, last I heard, was still
a newspaper, not Michelle Obama's husband. That's it.
All of which nevertheless prompts our friendly correspondent to end
his piece thusly: "I have 30 more things to say, of course , but here's one more:
Do you recall President Bush insulting Democrats, as Obama has insulted
us, explicitly? Sometimes our post-partisan president can be a
rather nasty piece of work."

Golly, I don't know!
I'd have to think about that. Maybe Bush wasn't so explicit
about verbally trashing Democrats (except, of course by cutely calling
it the "Democrat Party" rather than the Democratic Party), but I'm
still a bit riled up about him stealing the election from "Sore Loserman"
Al Gore, doing it again against John "Flip-Flop" Kerry, and scheduling
the Iraq war vote in late October 2002, in order to turn it into a smear
against that other party in the election just two weeks later.
Call me crazy, but I think those are bigger insults to Democrats -
and to democracy - than is Obama noting that those Republics "just
kinda sometimes" have strong party discipline. Which, of course,
also happens to be just kinda completely... true.

Ah truth. Pesky,
annoying, truth. That's it! That's what's missing
from these unfortunate right-wing rendezvous with reality. A little
truth. You know, like where traveling to Europe just means you
saw Buckingham Palace and ate some snails floating in garlic, not that
you apologized for America. Like where being guilty of continually
blaming your predecessor for the sixteen crises crippling the country
might require that you are actually continually blaming your predecessor.
(Or, heck, even that you are doing it once. And never mind that
your predecessor was himself as fat a target for righteous blame as
ever existed.) Like where being guilty of thoroughly insulting
the other party actually requires a thorough insult, and one that also
doesn't happen to be an accurate statement of fact. That kind
of truth.

I mean, seriously.
Even if we forget the astonishing Freedom Fries arrogance of these cognitive
cripples, is this as clear a case of paranoia as one could possibly
conjure up, or what?

The great irony, of course,
is that they've got themselves all whipped up about Barack Obama,
of all people. If there was ever a guy in the White House who
was more innocuous, less offensive, and more happy-faced than Pleasant
Obama, I can't imagine it. If regressives today are this freaked
out by the Kumbaya Kid, what would they do if they had a pugnacious
liberal like Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson to deal with?

I, for one, would sure
like to find out. And not only for the spectacle it would surely
be.

Let's face it, nobody
wears psychopathologies on their sleeves more proudly than the regressive
right. And nobody's politics are more completely driven by their
sense of wounded social status than these very same clowns.

They've been freaked
out for decades, a epoch of epic paranoia occasionally interspersed
with the ecstasy of witnessing a Reagan or a Bush beat up on one group
of brown people or another in their name.

But now they're so
far gone they've taken to simply making up perceived insults out of
whole cloth, and clinging to them with a ferocity usually reserved for
parachutes at about 300 feet.

Unreal. (Literally.)
Next thing you know they'll be saying that the president is a secret
Muslim trying to convert the country to Islam!

Oh, wait. Never
mind..