In his inimitable style, James Walcott surveys the gloomy and apocalyptic ruminations of the losers of Tuesday’s election, who cannot believe that voters could be that dumb and are now seeking scapegoats.
After every defeat of magnitude, a scouting party is immediately sent out to find scapegoats, and, having exhausted all of their scapegoat candidates in previous fear-and-loathing campaigns (uppity women, shiftless minorities, “illegals,” Muslims, atheists, gays, gay atheists, carnival folk), they had only one big lug left to point a bony finger of judgement at: the Average American, that gullible lump.
Walcott quotes someone who says that this election proves that you cannot trust your eyes any more because “everyday life seems to be made up of fairly decent folks going about their business like you. But the fact is, they’re mostly morons, ignoramuses, fools, idiots, dolts, and a$$holes; and have never had a profound thought in their entire lives.”
Surrounded by imposters, “What to do? What to do?” goes up the conservative cry. How can they distinguish friend from foe? What is needed is to have some way of recognizing who are the few, the proud, the conservatives, and one of them has an idea:
“I’m serious about this: consider some sort of identification, a kind of marker, that lets others of your kind know who you are and where you stand implicitly. Get over your aversion to tattoos; a small “live free or die” or “don’t tread on me” somewhere on your person might just one day save your from the zombie hordes. Hell. Use henna if you have to. If you’re into irony, maybe a yellow Star of David sewn to your suit jacket.”
Yes, putting on your clothes the symbol intended to be a badge of shame and that enabled the Nazis to identify Jews for extermination would make for a nice touch of whimsical irony, don’t you think?
Oh, boy, we are in for a rough time as these crazy people try to come to terms with Romney’s loss. If these people are so obnoxious when they lose, imagine what they would have been like if they had won.
Walcott’s piece is hilarious. You should read the whole thing.
It is obviously time for the Republicans to elect a new American people if the American people will not elect the Republicans.
“…But the fact is, they’re mostly morons, ignoramuses, fools, idiots, dolts, and a$$holes; and have never had a profound thought in their entire lives.”
No, just 48% of them.
Are they… are they advocating *for* the Mark of the Beast now?
That is a great idea.
Maybe they could just tattoo a number on themselves somewhere, like say the number 666. That would work for sure.
But these days, according to their own reliable sources, everyone just uses implanted RFID tags.
So, the Republican base?
the number 666 … would work for sure.
Problem is: some mss. read 666, some 616 (all written according to the dizzying Greek system). So you’ll have internal warfare breaking out between the 666-ers and the 616-ers. Similarly with those who would live free or die vs. those who would not be tread upon.
Heh heh.
I don’t have to. I remember it from 2004, 2006 and 2010.
The trouble with democracy is that The People will elect the wrong candidates …
2004 and 2010 I get; how did Republicans win in 2006? Didn’t they lose control of both houses and their majority among governors?
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Yeah, I wanted to snark and then realized I’m momentarily speechless. He really said that, right?
Conservative ideologies has always been, since the Civil War, possibly earlier, a set of propositions that are both infallible and unfalsifiable. It is a religious faith, entirely unsupported by fact, that markets will self correct and that bad actors will be excluded. It is the same with every other precept of the Conservative catechism.
To true believers they simply cannot be wrong. They cannot ever fail. If they do fail it is a matter of inept application or lack of ideological purity. The conservative catechism cannot fail; it can only be failed.
Few things irritate me as much as hearing my state’s motto (Live Free or Die) used to support the GOP. Hey, asshats. You fight freedom at every chance. What item of the GOP ticket encourages freedom? Seriously? Name one. Whoa, whoa, whoa! Oh, FSM, I can’t breath with all that smoke. You republicans must have just tried to think of one. Smells like burnt hamster. Just stop, please. There are none.
In short, get your own friggin’ motto, and don’t drag NH down with you.
OK, so maybe I don’t remember all that well. I had it in my mind that the year in which Bush won his second term and the year in which a senior Republican publically spoke of having castrated the liberals and possibly being amenable to keeping one or two around as pets, were different years.
Try not to take it so personally. Commandeering other people’s symbols is a standard Repub practice: they tried to do this with the US flag for a long period in the last third of the 20th c., and the rattlesnake and motto had an honorable past. Of course a motto like “I’ll take good care of it” (Tuebor) is pretty much safe from the GOP.
This is very typical double-think. The electorate are clueless masses of sheep who cannot be trusted or allowed to think for themselves and need to be led by strong men. Except that, generally, the people thinking that are of the same social class and educational level (or often lower) than the other half of the “sheep” they deride. It’s the authoritarian version of successful “divide et impera”
I have a US Soccer hoodie from a couple of years ago that has the Gadsden snake wrapped around an old-timey soccer ball (the kind that volleyballs look like now). I like it because it seems designed to piss off teabaggers by associating the snake symbol with a sport they almost universally look down on.
Hmmm… Perhaps armbands of some kind?
A design comes to mind, except that (1) the device in the circle on the armband seems to go back to some sort of brown Sanskrit-speaking foreigners, and (2) these are God
winless blogs.I should correct this before Mano does: the name swastika has a Sanskrit base, but the Indus valley civilization in which the symbol seems to be first recorded probably spoke a language more closely related to (Dravidian) ones now spoken in south India and Sri Lanka.
The most amusing aspect of the election was the bad mouthing of Nate Silver for his mathematical model of the election, including state by state predictions.
Even non-conservatives like Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank were dismissive. Well, Mr. Silver went 51 for 51 in his state by state predictions. As they say, he who laughs last, laughs the longest.