Rush Limbaugh, never one to shrink from looking like a complete douche and already angry because he had to cancel his annual trip to the Dominican Republic to avoid their cholera epidemic, vomited up another spittle-flecked rant against all that is good and decent. Or, to be more accurate, showed his hatred of anyone with an IQ higher than 40. Shortly after Obama’s speech at the memorial for the victims of the Tucson shooting, the Fox “News” show Special Report had a panel of bloviators (Brit Hume, Charles Krauthammer and Chris Wallace) who had the unmitigated gall to suggest that Obama had given a good speech. Limbaugh, practically choking on the bile rising up in his corpulent throat, spewed the following fascinating statement.
”They were slobbering over it for the predictable reasons. It was smart, it was articulate, it was oratorical. It was, it was all the things the educated, ruling class wants their members to be and sound like.”
Now, Krauthammer, who looks a bit like a cartoon child molester, didn't really appreciate that statement. But he actually managed to make sense in his response for once."As one of the three slobberers...I find it interesting that only the ruling class wants a president who is smart articulate and oratorical in delivering a funeral oration. It's an odd and rather condescending view of what the rest of America is looking for in their president.”Unfortunately, there’s a portion of the American people who feel exactly that way. It’s a strain of anti-intellectualism that’s all too common in the right wing.
Joe (the "Plumber") Wurzelbacher, known liar and serial wife beater, got his fifteen minutes of fame based on a complete lack of understanding of government, taxes, or pretty much anything else. Sarah Palin, an articulate but sadly undereducated woman, seems to appeal to the great unwashed because she's "one of them" (despite having all her teeth and a seven figure income).
Ignorant of history, opposed to science, they hate anyone who seems to be "better than us." Which, for the most part, is anybody who can read at better than an eighth-grade level.
You know, I wasn’t particularly impressed by ABC’s recent revamping of “V”, but I used to watch the original show avidly when I was a teen. Still, there was one plot device that I never liked (I thought it was a little weak): one of the tactics employed by the aliens in their quest to enslave humanity was to demonize scientists and educated people as "enemies of the people."
But looking at America today, I’m suddenly seeing it in a whole new light.
Isn't that the recipe that was use during the Dark Ages? Make science heretical and therefore evil? Still bakes up good and judging from Sarah's and Rush's bank account, still sells obscenely well.
ReplyDelete"Sarah Palin, an articulate but sadly undereducated woman, seems to appeal to the great unwashed because she's "one of them..."
ReplyDeleteA bit of a correction here, if I may, NC, just for accuracy's sake. Sarah Palin is "articulate" only when she reads someone else's words. When she relies on her own, she's mostly unintelligible, as this recent comment shows:
"I want to help clean up the state that is so sorry today of journalism. And I have a communications degree." --Sarah Palin
Inarticulate.
And this is just plain stupid:
"Go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant -- they're quite clear -- that we would create law based on the God of the bible and the Ten Commandments." –-Sarah Palin, arguing that Judeo-Christian belief was the basis for American law and should continue to be used as a guiding force for creating future legislation, interview with Bill O'Reilly, May 6, 2010
It's stunning how Palin can get away with such statements when the truth is so hilariously different. I doubt she's read Jefferson or Madison in their condemnations of Christianity. Of course if you ask her, she'll raise holy hell about ambush journalism, but the sadder story is that the American public is too damned stupid to have read much of anything at all, so she gets away with it.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, Shaw. "Articulate" was the wrong word. My point was that she can hold a crowd, and seriously defines the term "Cult of Personality." So I'm not sure what the right word would be. "Speechifying," maybe?
ReplyDeleteShe attended five colleges in six years to earn her bachelor's degree, by the way.
Nameless,
ReplyDeleteI can't help but notice how "dumbed down" so much of American political talk is in comparison to the great Victorian culture critics' discussion of it. Just about everything we hear blathered about today on the news and the Net (a few obvious high-tech issues aside) was dealt with in a far more nuanced, intelligent manner in the books and popular journals of the Victorians. Arnold, Ruskin, Darwin, Huxley, J.S. Mill, Oscar Wilde, and many others had their say, and what a say it was! The matter of "ee-vo-loo-shun," for example, was dealt with in a definitive way long, long ago, and only the bone-crushing ignorance of new generations could revive such a debate. Moreover, much of today's "libertarian" twaddle sounds like baby talk in comparison with what Bentham and J.S. Mill wrote in the Utilitarian line.
Nameless,
ReplyDeleteIn trying to understand the appeal of Beck, Joe the Plumber, and Palin et. al., the only thing I can come up with is this: The celebrity of the mediocrity. I have commented on this idea previously.
Perhaps Christine O’Donnell said it best in her now infamous TV ad: “I’m not a witch. I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you” (my bold).
To say, “I am you,” is an appeal to the angry and disaffected, to persons of no accomplishment or expertise, to self-preoccupied parents who don’t spent enough time with their teenagers (who then get pregnant), to the Joey Buttafouco types who send racist and pornographic email to their cronies every morning as a joke and then vote for their hero, Carl Paladino.
This is the other face of America, where the margins of our population transcend themselves through the likes Palin and Company. It also explains their antipathy to accomplishment, education, science, liberals, and the media, including establishment Republicans.
Well, there are a few good signs. Hannity and Beck have been knocked off their NYC radio stations and Beck has also been knocked off the philly station. Palin's latest approval ratings are down to 14%. She's toast. I'm joining the pledge to not mention or write about her during the month of Feb. - a drive started by Milikin at the WaPo.
ReplyDeleteI rarely agree with Charles Krauthammer but the description of him as looking "a bit like a cartoon child molester" is a bit over the top, imo. Just saying - gently.
He looks more like Dick Tracy's old nemesis, Pruneface.
ReplyDeleteWhy is it that so many Fox Folk look as though their faces were paralyzed and their makeup applied by morticians? I'm serious. The robotic dummies at Disneyland look more real.
Anyway, I stumbled into an Aryan Nation site not long ago and read a post about how to tell if someone has a "Jewish Name."
You can tell Krauthammer is a Jew because the name suggests hammering on the Krauts and them Jee-yews don't like Germans, said one "intellectually challenged" gentleman. (That's a liberal euphemism for dumb shit, BTW.)
So in light of this sort of thing and the millions who find such discussions intellectually stimulating, I have to abandon all hope. In your heart, you know I'm right.
I did post anonymously explaining that since a great number of German names are place names, and just as places in England often end in Ham which is a Saxon cognate for the Hochdeutsch Heim (home) -- and since there is a city in Baden-Württemberg called Krautheim, a more plausible explanation would be found there.
(nor have the Germans ever called themselves Krauts, but I didn't go that far for fear of exceeding the attention span of the average skin head)
I never went back to see what they said.
"...there was one plot device that I never liked (I thought it was a little weak): one of the tactics employed by the aliens in their quest to enslave humanity was to demonize scientists and educated people as "enemies of the people." "
ReplyDeleteThe original V was intended as an allegory of the rise of Nazism.
Well, yeah, "allegory of the rise of Nazism" - fairly obvious. But scientists?
ReplyDeleteI understand that they were trying to stay away from the touchy subject of racism, but still. Scientists?