Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Looking For Hate In All the Wrong Places

The Teabaggers howling about how a payoff to the insurance industry is somehow socialism and the tent-revivalists praying to muscular white warmonger baby Jesus to keep healthcare from killing Grandma (unless, presumably, she's a lesbian) are clearly not driven by any kind of sober assessment of facts or arguments to their palpably nonsensical positions. I have long concluded that these folks are more driven by the expressions of pain and distress on the faces of the college-educated and peace-loving do-gooders among their family members and neighbors and on the teevee than anything else, calculating that they should always do more of whatever it is that causes such people to exhibit the most acute apparent misery possible from moment to moment. How odd and discomfiting it must be now to find that the "socialists" they revile seem to revile the bill they have reviled as "socialism"! If it makes sense to speak of "heart" in a movement so heartless, it is notable that much of the wind seems to have left the sails of the Teabagger protests and one is finding instead quite a lot of sectarian squabbling among their ranks. At the moment, the distressed left seems not to be paying the crazytown Right much attention at all, and one wonders if that feels like a victory to them or as yet another in a long string of recent humiliations?

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