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Sunday, August 22, 2010

Still?

So we're all still going on about the Not Ground Zero Not Mosque? Really? Can it really not have occurred to the Democratic left that at this point the ongoing enabling of Republican right anti-Muslim demagoguery via this non-issue has kicked off our tee vees the actually ultimately devastating anti-Latin demagoguery of Arizona immigration through which the Teabag-Base id was expressing itself hitherto? Both of these varieties of white racist dumb-fuck crazytown Republican bigotry are of course ugly and evil and horrifying:

However, even if in the longer-term anti-Black anti-Latin anti-Muslim bigotry all portend a future for the GOP as little more than a neo-confederate rump of old whiny white assholes clinging to their ignorance and moneybags in an ever more secular multicultural America -- in the shorter term defined by the approach of the mid-term elections we should all be aware that it is incomparably better for the GOP (the Base of which apparently simply can't help being deranged disgusting bigots, that's just who they are) to be targeting Muslims with their deranged disgusting bigotry at the moment than to continue to target Latinos with it as they had been doing, just as a matter of numbers, which alienates more independent voters, and given the optics of particular State races (this matters in Nevada and Kentucky, for example).

The Not Ground Zero Not Mosque is a distraction, don't fall into its attentional gravity well. Once the furor dies down the local government and neighborhood community, which are the ones who matter most here, have already indicated their support for this worthy endeavor, and it's not like this conflagration of ugly stupidity is actually going to culminate in First Amendment Repeal or in the Establishment of the Christianist Order of Gilead or whatever it is that is in the mindless mind-mess behind the dot-eyes of the fulminating freaks giving vent to all this crap. We need to get back to exposing their anti-Black anti-Latino racism as this will expose the not-ready-for-prime-time marginality in the crazytown Base candidates in premier Senate and Governor races, and help with Democratic GOTV. The Netroots could be helping with this if it got its act together for once.

3 comments:

jimf said...

> So we're all still going on about the Not Ground Zero Not Mosque? Really?

Well, of course, Bill O'Reilly is going on about it at length.
It seems the mosque (or "mosque complex" as I heard it called
on Fox News -- mall o' mosques?) is most significant as a
not-so-covert ploy by the jihadists to give the U.S. the finger.
Why can't the liberal "defenders" of the GZM see this?
Mr. No-Spin wonders.

Speaking of Fox News, I was at a family wedding this weekend,
at a beautiful retreat in the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania.
At the reception, I was sitting at a table with the bride's
mom's mother and her two brothers. One brother's wife was
lamenting the lack of a TV in the room she was staying in,
and said that she and her husband were suffering from TV news
withdrawal. "It goes on as soon as we get up in the morning, and
stays on until we go to bed at night. Yes, Fox News is on at
our house 24/7." I managed to maintain a neutral expression,
and to avoid inhaling my Asti Spumanti. In any case,
surprised I should not have been.

Dale Carrico said...

Let them go on about it. Let them go on and on and on.

And when the Community Center gets built anyway, like abortion staying legal, and the President staying Black and still a real citizen, and gay marriage going through State by State without plagues of frogs or divorce happening, and flag burning remaining legal without anybody giving two shits, and all the other things that never ever get done, and never will, and are never even expected to, despite the right cynically getting these morons into a lather about getting them done or else it's apocalypse time in the Mall of America all to distract attention from the fact that all these sick fuckers really care about is keeping billionaires rich while everybody's lives pointlessly suck more than they have to, well by then they can be freaking out about whatever non-issue they have gone on to think they care about then anyway, why the fuck should the rest of us care, honestly?

It's a joyless, pointless, fruitless, sense-sucking merry-go-round and there's nobody making us stay on the thing. Eventually, presumably, these scared dumb hicks will realize that they're getting fucked over and maybe join in with the rest of the grownups who are actually trying to solve problems.

I am not discounting the force of institutional racism in this country or the real psychic and social distress generated by hateful speech, by the way, I am insisting we stop falling for these idiotic non-issues that push the buttons our structural racism makes available to these cynical con-artists. Fighting racism on these terms fights nothing, not even the racism -- it's a non-issue. We've got to get better at this.

jimf said...

Interesting article in the NY Times on the history of the affair:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22rich.html