10.10.12
Excerpted: How extremism was mainstreamed
Excerpted, from a Matt Taibbi piece at Rolling Stone (comments added):
“Well, it’s over. Or almost over, thank God. It looks like Obama will probably win, which I guess is good news, compared to the alternative – a Mitt Romney presidency would have felt like four straight years of waking up with a naked Lloyd Blankfein sitting on your face.”
Nobody except Matt Taibbi and a slim majority of his readers know who Lloyd Blankfein is. I made the same mistake.
“A decision that in reality takes one or two days of careful research to make is somehow stretched out into a process that involves two years of relentless, suffocating mind-warfare, an onslaught of toxic media messaging directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous and literally divides families.”
Pretty much, although it doesn’t get at the huge splits and chasms that exist between the tribes of America.
I lost a friend recently because he and his upper class pals could not stop harping about the evil of the income tax, the 47 percent of the country — lazy moochers without the talent or work ethic to survive without entitlements — got out of paying it and how food stamps were bad.
Inevitably, as with anything from the right, an patently offensive joke was delivered:
A woman from Los Angeles who was a tree hugger, a liberal Democrat, and an anti-hunter, purchased a piece of timberland near Colville, WA .
There was a large tree on one of the highest points in the tract. She wanted a good view of the natural splendor of her land, so she started to climb the big tree. As she neared the top she encountered a spotted owl that attacked her. In her haste to escape, the woman slid down the tree to the ground and got many splinters in her crotch.
In considerable pain, she hurried to a local ER to see a doctor. She told him she was an environmentalist, a democrat, and an anti-hunter and how she came to get all the splinters. The doctor listened to her story with great patience and then told her to go wait in the examining room and he would see if he could help her.
She sat and waited three hours before the doctor reappeared. The angry woman demanded,???What took you so long???? He smiled and then told her, “Well, I had to get permits from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management before I could remove old-growth timber from a recreational area so close to a waste treatment facility. I’m sorry, but due to Obama Care they turned me down.???
Great stuff, gratuitously nasty to more than half the population, too. And now we ain’t pals.
“Politicians are much to blame for this, but we in the media have to take responsibility for the damage we do to the American psyche in the name of election coverage. At this very moment, there are people all over the country who are stocking up on canned goods and ammo for the apocalypse they believe will come if Obama is re-elected.”
The media isn’t responsible for the Ted Nugent voter, it just often covers them poorly, as if being a bigot is simply a difference in respectable opinion. It’s the property of the GOP. Taibbi knows it.