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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Chickenshit Little Crybabies
Posted by Jill | 6:19 AM
Last week I linked to Sara Robinson's terrific post from August about the dynamic behind the frightened little children who talk like tough guys but see al-Qaeda around every corner and long for a Big Tough Daddy to protect them from the bogeyman. It's what created the Worship of the Codpiece and it puts this nation in real danger of continuing this madness with the aspiring fascist dictator Rudy Giuliani. Yesterday Lower Manhattanite over at the Group News Blog weighed in on this syndrome:

There is a term that right-wingers, particularly right-wing men like to toss around about the Left, and Dems in general, referring to us as “The Nanny Party”—a pejorative intended to feminize the idea of caring and empathy, using “nyah-nyah” sexism and chauvinism to denigrate those humanistic traits. Allow me then, to counter that with an analysis about our obviously machismo hung-up buddies on the right. The odd lust for a brusque, iron-handed, emotionally remote and psychologically and sometimes physically abusive “father” figure on their part is undeniable. The projection of infallibility of those figures is well-documented, particularly in the case of the knee-jerk defense of the most heinous actors on that red-lit stage—namely the sexually abusive Catholic priests involved in the vile church sex-abuse scandals. The Catholic League's odious William Donohue has been known to spin that evil on its ear by asking questions of victims like, “Why didn't you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn't allow themselves to be molested. So why did you?”

This fealty to the rough daddy figure manifests itself again and again in the above-shown and easily Googled additional shilling for Rudy by Matthews, via his constantly going on and on about Rudy's appeal to those who share in his and Giuliani's hyper-paternalistic religious beliefs—those “northeastern ethnic suburb-dwellers” he keeps citing as key to the Rudester's taking a couple of big states electorally. Note the references to manly-man, tough guy stuff like “Who'd win in a street fight?” The almighty, two-fisted “Father Infallible.” We saw it in Giuliani's vile defense of his post-death abuse of police-murder victim Patrick Dorismond, where he fell back on those old, “Big-Man-o-centric”, good vs. evil tropes when he said of the dead Dorismond that “he was no altar boy”. It doesn't take a Freud to note the quasi-religious fervor these nitwits have for the brute-as-father/leader trope. Matthews however, is a brilliant example of the right's addiction to these in the end, empty size-48 suits full of angry hot air. He and many of his co-horts in their eternal idiocy go right back for more “punishment”, even after “moving away from home” and leaving Papa Bush behind, only to shack up with another blustering, over-compensating, mean daddy in their backing of Rudy.

It goes again to that feminization of “feeling” again. Bill Clinton was mercilessly ridiculed for saying “I feel your pain”—evidencing empathy and care. And that was so anathema to the activist right that rose up against him that they opted for the evil, root opposite of Clinton's phrase.

Not “I don't feel your pain”, but rather, “I shall cause the pain you feel.”

It's why the hatred for Clinton and Gore is so virulent and never far from the surface for them. Thought has never been a selling point for wingnuts. Anti-intellectualism is the coin of their realm. Bush's down-home stupid, and Rudy's thoughtless yammering on this and that plays better for them than thoughfulness.


I used to say in the 1990's that the right's hatred for Bill Clinton was a function of them still being angry at the guy in high school who got all the girls. And there is certainly an arrested development aspect of this yearning for a Big Tough Daddy figure -- even if he's a bully. But then, most bullies are really frightened children underneath anyway, aren't they? That so-called "toughness" is all bravado.

As I keep pointing out, people in New York and the surrounding suburbs go to work every day in the city. They go through the tunnels by car or train or bus. They take the elevators in skyscrapers, descend into the subway, cross the bridges. It isn't that they've "forgotten 9/11"; after all, many of them pass the big hole in the ground every day where the towers once stood. But when faced with a REAL risk, you have a decision to make: you become a recluse and never leave your house (in which case the bank will foreclose because you have no way to pay for it), or you suck it up and accept that this risk is an unfortunate part of life.

But out in the early-primary states and the Republican strongholds in the south -- in the communities too insignificant for al-Qaeda to bother with -- there are those ripe for the picking for a fearmongering fascist like Rudy Giuliani. These are the people living in fear that Islamic terrorists are going to bomb their kids' school, or the local Wal-Mart, or the multiplex. These are the people clamoring for the Tough Daddy to assuage their nightmares. I'm not sure if they just want a piece of the fear-action, or if there's something in the very makeup of the socioreligious structure in these places that makes them want to remain as five-year-olds forever.

But it's also these places from whence Faux Noise draws its audience, and they are ripe for the picking for the Fox Fearmongers to find al-Qaeda's fingerprints in the California wildfires -- even after Glenn Beck all but called Californians al-Qaeda sympathizers:

DOOCY: You’re looking live at pictures from San Diego — Santiago, CA, where the wildfires continue. We were talking earlier in today’s telecast with Adam Housley and apparently police officers in a hovering helicopter saw a guy starting one of these fires. And Allison Allison Camerota, an FBI memo from late in June of this year is popping up this morning and it is ominous.

CAMEROTA: This actually has happened for many years in the past as well. An FBI sent out to local law-enforcement said that an al Qaeda detainee had given them some information that the next wave of terrorism could be in the form of setting wild fires. Adam Housley said lots of people on his block were asking him about it. Obviously this is something the FBI has looked into. They will continue to investigate it.

CARLSON: If they have this person in custody it probably won’t take long to be able to develop a link if there is one.

KILMEADE: A June 25 memo from the FBI’s Denver offices reported three days ago, excuse me, five days ago, by the Arizona Republic, that is a newspaper, they have been carrying the story and they continue to expand upon it.

DOOCY: Brian, the plot they say, according to this detainee, and they don’t know if the detainee is telling the truth. The plot was to set three or four wildfires. But they don’t mention California. They mention Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming. We do know for a fact that a number of the fires in southern California are of a suspicious nature and they are investigating arson.


Raw Story picked this up yesterday for the ridiculous nonsense that it is:

Later Wednesday, Fox anchors returned to fanning the terror fears, digging up a four-year-old FBI memo and presenting it as new information relating to an al Qaeda link to the fires.

In June of 2003, FBI agents in Denver detailed an al Qaeda detainee's discussion of a plot to set forest fires around the western United States, although investigators couldn't determine whether the detainee was telling the truth, and his plot did not include setting fires in California.

Such small discrepancies in dates and details proved to be no obstacles for Fox anchors, who reported that the memo was from "late June of this year" and "is just popping up this morning."

The memo was first reported by the Arizona Republic in July 2003, although a Fox anchor said it was reported "five days ago." That confusion seems to stem from an inability to read the date on an Associated Press account of the memo from the time it was first reported.

A July 11, 2003, AP story, still available online via USA Today, reported, "The contents of the June 25 memo from the FBI's Denver office were reported Friday by The Arizona Republic."

On Fox, that information became, "The June 25 memo from the FBI's Denver offices was reported three days ago, excuse me five days ago, by the Arizona Republic."

Further distorting the report, Fox failed to mention a key caveat from the 2003 AP story they appear to have ripped from.

"Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, told The Associated Press that officials there took note of the warning but didn't see a need to act further on it."


But as is typical of Faux Noise, why bother with things like facts, when you can serve the agenda of turning the U.S. into Soviet-era Russia by citing four-year-old articles as current?

And like Pavlov's dogs, Faux' audience eats this stuff up, refuses to expose itself to anything that might FACTUALLY debunk its fears, choosing instead to look towards the Big Strong Daddy. And Daddy trumps everything, which is why the same self-righteous morons who decried the Clintons for going to counseling instead of divorcing, are now willing to look past Rudy Giuliani's marital peccadillos because they believe he is the Big Strong Daddy who will keey the bogeyman at bay...even if the bogeyman has no interest in them whatsoever.

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