So why am I bringing up such old news? It's possible that I may attract more viral e-mails than anyone else, but I doubt it and in fact you may also have seen the one titled Queen Michelle in your own mailbox recently.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but the theatrical display of shock and offense certainly is a one way thing, because I'm hearing none of it on the subject of Republicans openly calling for the murder of Mrs. Obama and her "Stupid children." I am hearing crap about how Democrats are playing some kind of "race card" to defend against valid criticism, but incitement to riot, incitement to murder and deadly threats against a President are a felony, not a playing card. Where's the protest from Republicans?
Our former First Lady was treated with a great deal of respect and bipartisan praise. Very little was made of her history or background or of having been the first and only First Lady to have killed someone. Nothing whatever was made of her large staff and payroll.
It's true that Michelle's is not an elected office but there are traditional duties that have long required the services of people from hairdressers to personal secretaries and assistants. Nobody worries much about it since in a great many instances she has to represent the United States here and abroad.
So deep is the desperation of the lunatic fringe that now makes up most of the Republican party that all prior restraints have evaporated in the lust to defame, smear, degrade, insult, intimidate, threaten and humiliate president Obama's family, and the giggling cowards can't turn out the propaganda fast enough.
Queen Michelle is the title, and it begins:
"First Lady Requires More Than Twenty Attendants
July 7, 2009 - Dr. Paul L. Williams"
There is of course, a real Dr. Williams, who writes books about how Islam is plotting to kill us all and about the need for another Crusade and who, like Joe McCarthy uses accusations of harboring Islamic terrorists and nuclear attack plots to throw his weight and his books around.
I don't know that Dr. Paul L. Williams wrote this, but I doubt that the perpetrator of this would ever identify himself or the PAC that employs him. The e-mail goes on to list 22 ( 20 or 26 in some versions) White House staff that Mrs. Obama "employs" at our expense while others of us poor Liberal dominated serfs have to stock shelves at Wal-Mart. Nothing is said about the people who own Wal-Mart or their lifestlye or whether we elected them. Indeed nothing is said of the dodgy Doctor either.
It portrays her as someone much like Marie Antoinette, haughty and disdainful of lesser people, which of course is a confection more airy than the cake Marie legendarily Suggested the French poor should eat.
She has no official duties, it's misleadingly stressed, although it seems that every First Lady since and including Martha Washington has indeed served in many capacities as a diplomat at large, good will ambassador and hostess. Laura Bush was widely praised in that role.
What's not pointed out is that her budget and number of "attendants" is just about the same as Laura Bush had. Nobody called her Queen Laura or threatened to kill her and her children. Only the mind of a Republican could dream up such such ugliness and dare to disseminate it -- and don't expect them to take responsibility or apologize. The best we can hope for is some rhetoric about "Liberals" "whining" about Bush and some foul, rancid, reeking attempt to equate and justify their disgusting behavior because after all "Liberals criticized Bush."
Don't believe it? I politely refuted the claims and replied. My answer from the person who sent my my copy was exactly that - seething fury about how I will
"just have to get used to it and suck it up because you damn communist bastards have been preaching hate for years."These are your "conservative" values, your family values. This is your party of morality and personal responsibility. Good, Christian folk from small towns in the heartland where all the good Christian values come from. What costume will they put on after someone finally acts out their Satanic passion play? I don't want to think about it. God damn them one and all.
More from the crazy-pot, I see: now the First Lady is only in it for the money and the perks. Right. Something I wrote previously about the wingers may be worth repeating in response, at least indirectly and by way of accounting for the vicious hatred of the Obamas that keeps welling up on the airwaves and piping through the pneumatic intertubes: "… Their fear (while primitive, even atavistic) isn't misplaced: giving ourselves decent, near-universal access to health care would undeniably show that we are becoming more cosmopolitan, more 'Euro' in our sensibilities. And that can't happen." So this fight against Obama is perhaps an Alamo-style last stand.
ReplyDeleteSomebody has to gin up the courage to tell the bearers of those Barack-a-Nazi signs that they have forfeited all privilege to the ear of their fellows until they wise up. That's why I brought up the Barney Frank clip. His victim had no chance against his quips, with her (or someone else's?) possibly earnest but misguided plea for a "conversation." Who really wants to talk to someone who thinks a perfectly nice, centrist president is a Nazi? Only another person carrying exactly the same sign, that's who. Certainly not Frank, and his comparison between sign-woman and "a dining room table" played well with his audience, even if as raptorish as the moves of the sharp-taloned malebranche Draghignazzo, Farfarello, and Graffiacane prowling above the Dantean muck for emergent barrators. But it's much harder to pull off this sort of thing in today's environment. You know, in spite of myself, I felt a little sorry for the tension-wracked sign-toter: I suppose she left just as unsatisfied as she must have been when she confronted Barney Frank. Being humiliated does nothing to soften the edges of a person's anger. It is undeniably destructive, and I wish it were less necessary. Evidently, though, it isn't. You just can't let people get away with this stuff.
I do wonder if the young lady felt anything like humiliation. It's been my experience that you can't humiliate a troll and of course that's what she is. I think they feel good when they can gain coup by simply making a jab at the enemy.
ReplyDeleteCertainly her sense of reality doesn't contain the ability to think she's wrong, although you could see her nervousness.
It's also possible she was just acting and was remunerated for it. She certainly didn't seem as angry as someone accusing someone else of being a Nazi would be expected to be.
Barratry: in Admiralty law, it refers to sinking or scuttling a ship illegally, as to make a fraudulent insurance claim, for instance. These people certainly are trying to scuttle our ship of state for their private reasons.
The truth is that Michelle dances out into the White House vegetable garden with happy schoolchildren in tow, and the birds begin to weave ribbons into her hair and adorn her gown with flowers.
ReplyDeleteBeware of the brown acid
ReplyDelete