The Teabaggers' Truth Goes Marching On

[monk222]

The rise of the Teabaggers is a story that has legs and will live with us for a while. It is an elite-driven movement that apparently resonates with a lot of real folks, or at least with those people who probably could have been identified with the conservative base in the first place - white, fundamentalist, and proud - including a lot of people inclined to be excitable about an uppity black president who is supposedly destroying everything that is true and beautiful and American in the world.

Matthew Yglesias notes that it was not unusual during the Dubya years to get notes and screeds from people that purported to show America was being turned into a fascist society under the Republicans. Who would deny that there was a lot of Bush-hate and even fear of a Fourth Reich? But he goes on to argue that there seems to be something different going on with these right-wing demonstrations:

Overreaction to policies you don’t like is a pretty understandable human impulse. The difference is that mainstream, prominent outlets usually try to restrain that kind of impulse. But this sort of over-the-top rhetoric isn’t burbling from the grassroots up, it’s being driven the very most prominent figures in conservative media and also by a large number of members of congress.

Of course, we are largely talking about Fox News. Those of us in the reality-based community, for whom facts and logic still hold pride of place in our philosophy, understand that there is some question about Fox News being categorized as a center of serious journalism.

Quoting David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush who has become disenchanted with conservative politics of late, “Yet to listen to Fox News and other conservative media, you’d think we were living in Czechoslovakia in the final hours before the 1948 communist coup.”

Unfortunately, as easy as it is to mock Fox News, they do dominate in the ratings for cable news. Even I watch Fox News about as much as I watch the others, though I do so because their info-babes wear short skirts and Fox is not too shy about showing off those sexy gams. More happily, these cable news outlets, including CNN and the more liberal MSNBC, as well as Fox News, still only constitute a very small universe. Most of us are apparently watching reality TV shows or ESPN sports shows, or else we are surfing the Net.

I have also heard rumors that some people actually have real lives, go figure! They must be the good-looking people.

Nevertheless, it is often the intensity of interest that trumps other factors in democratic politics. Obama has had his fervent fans and admirers, but they do not seem to really match the intensity of the gun-toting, right-wing fanatic who believes that he has Jesus in his heart and Thomas Jefferson by his side and Rush Limbaugh as his commanding general.