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Wednesday, January 05, 2005

If this is what conservatives are, I'm proud to be a liberal
Posted by Jill | 10:21 AM

What a nasty, petty, mean-spirited bunch conservatives are. Via Digby, comes this exchange from Rush Limbaugh's radio show:

"CALLER: (Giggle) Well, I was pretty upset and even getting madder the more coverage I watched, and I was thinking, 'Why am I not feeling so charitable, and I'm seeing all these bodies,' and then I see this picture on the Internet that was sent to me, and it was them carrying a body along in Sri Lanka, it said Galle, G-a-l-l-e, Sri Lanka and they had a crowd of people watching and this guy in the middle is standing there looking at the body wearing an Osama bin Laden T-shirt.

RUSH: I saw that picture.

CALLER: And I thought, it just validated the way I felt and I thought these are the same people that were the cheerleaders on 9/11, and we're going to go rebuild their world for them.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Now, I love President Bush. I respect him. I voted for him, but when I saw him come out and I realized they were asking for more money --

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: -- I got even madder, and I thought, 'I don't think we should be asked to give any more.' "


What the fuck kind of sentiment is this? Are we now so mean-spirited that we demand loyalty oaths to George W. Bush before we'll donate to help people who have lost everything?

We love to crow about how good we Americans are, and how we are so much better than everyone else. And in fairness, most of us are good -- certainly the ones who opened their wallets immediately without wanting to know if the victims were Muslim and who they supported in Bush's war. But there is a nasty streak of bigotry and tribalism that runs from wingnut talk radio right through to the heart of the Republican Party and to the leadership of this country. One kid shows up in a photograph wearing an Osama Bin Laden T-shirt, and it means an entire country is unworthy? Sounds like an excuse to me.

Digby nails it:

Yes, which countries am I allowed to get "madder and madder" about and recoil at the idea of "bailing out" their innocent children, again? It's so hard to remember which ones to openly hate and which ones I have to pretend to give a shit about. (And besides, those Sri Lankens are... well, they're rather dark, aren't they? )

Let's not kid ourselves about the base of the Republican party, the dittoheads, the alleged Christian Right. A vast number of them are primitive tribalists at best and racists at worst. There have always been many Americans who are racists and many of those have always been and remain very political. It is part of our national psyche. They are now fully sewn into the fabric of the Republican party's big tent (as they once were the Democrats') and they wield considerable clout. They have made strides in accepting those African Americans who agree not to discuss race into the fold. (And the leadership have learned how to effectively neuter this entire debate by hoisting the left with our own petard by accusing us of racism whenever we criticize a Republican racial minority.)

But at the heart of their reaction to 9/11, the invasion of iraq, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror in general is a knee jerk racism that says "those people" are our enemy and they must die. Ann Coulter sells millions of books that say it right out loud. Michelle Malkin and Daniel Pipes are both making quite a respectable stir making the case for "muslim" internment. And people are getting all steamed up about illegal immigration again.

It is intense tribalism that fuels the right wing, not ideology. In fact their ideology mostly flows from their tribalism. It fuels their resistence to redistribution of even the smallest amount of wealth (the "wrong" people will be helped) and it fuels their hyper nationalism (those "other" people are our enemies.) They make no distinctions between the "wrong" and the "other", it is anyone who isn't like them.

The reason that the Senate of the United States is about to confirm a man who designed an illegal system of detention and torture against any Muslim or Arab (and others to come, no doubt) is because a fair number of people in this country believe that "they're all alike." Terrorists today, commies yesterday, japs, gooks, wogs, niggers everyday. It is a measure of progress, I suppose, in the fact that this hispanic man is even given the opportunity to make his bones with executions, torture and lifetime detention for public relations purposes. Still, one wonders how long it would take, were he to stray from the party line, for someone to call Rush and say, " I couldn't understand why I disliked him so much..."

There are many cosmopolitan writers and think tank intellectuals on the right who have come up with some elegant ideological arguments that explain all this to each other in salons and greenrooms. But in barrooms and factories and churches in Republican dominated parts of America, the reason is pretty simple. Us against them. And basic human empathy for anyone who isn't a strict member of their tribe is in short supply. Hence, this.

Too bad about this whole globalism thing. These people are going to be very, very angry for eternity. But then they always have been, haven't they? At one time I thought our history of immigration and assimilation would be what kept us on top during this transition. I was wrong. Our original sin of slavery is probably what's going to lead to our downfall. It's infected us much too deeply for us to be able to handle the responsibility of being the world's only superpower. When you get right down to it, it's why a majority of the country supported the invasion of Iraq -- all Arabs are the same --- and that horrible miscalculation is very likely to be our Waterloo.
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