Right-Wing Voices: Obama is Going to Kill Us

by: tremayne

Fri Jan 23, 2009 at 19:30


No, literally, he is going to lead directly to our deaths. George W. Bush's speechwriter, now writing at "The Corner":

He has removed the tool that is singularly responsible for stopping al-Qaeda from flying planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, Heathrow Airport, and London’s Canary Warf, and blowing up apartment buildings in Chicago, among other plots.  It’s not even the end of inauguration week, and Obama is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

And this is just one example of the Republican freakout. There's a post today by a Redstate editor titled: Barack Obama's Dangerous Game Starts the Process Toward Our Deaths.

While I know it's not very post-partisan, there are still moments when I think "fear" is the main unifying theme of Republicanism.  It's not just that they want citizens to be afraid, it's that they themselves are perpetually frightened. A few examples (in somewhat chronological order):

Fear of communism

Fear of black people voting

Fear of women in the workplace

Fear of hippies

Fear of people having sex

Fear of gay people

Fear of immigrants

Fear of people not speaking English

Fear of baggy pants

Fear of gays in the military

Fear of big government

Fear of their handguns being taken

Fear of terrorism

Fear of the thought of gay people having sex

Fear of gay people getting married

And now, fear of the "most dangerous man ever to occupy the Whitehouse."

No wonder so many conservatives love huge fenced-in ranches. All the better to keep out the gay, brown, terrorist-loving, sex-having, baggy-pants wearing, communist, socialist hippies.

tremayne :: Right-Wing Voices: Obama is Going to Kill Us

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Right-Wing Voices: Obama is Going to Kill Us | 41 comments
You forgot fear of (4.00 / 5)
those flat stomach rule ads on this web site.

Frankly I'm afraid of those too!

Conservatives really are scaredy cats. Afraid of shadows and in need of papa to come chase the boogeyman out from under their beds so that they can sleep at night.

Home of the free, Land of the Brave... Liberals!

Peace,

Andrew

Yeah, so many "fearful" right-wingers in the officer corps! (0.00 / 0)
While you're writing off everybody who votes Republican as just a bunch of "scaredy cats," don't forget the officer corps of every branch of the US military, which has voted Republican by significant majorities in virtually every election since Eisenhower/Stevenson, and maybe you could also explain how much braver you can be at your keyboard than some officer in a god-forsaken firebase 200 miles from nowhere in Afghanistan.

That silly list of fears conveniently forgets which party did what for about a hundred years...

"Fear of black people voting"... But the Dixiecrats who supported Jim Crow were all Democrats.

"Fear of communism"... But which party got us into wars with "international communism" in Korea and Vietnam? Were Truman and LBJ and JFK really red-state Republicans on some other planet?

"Fear of hippies..." But which party just took ending the ridiculous "war on drugs" off the table, even though the Presidential website that was supposed to allow to the little people to have a little influence was flooded by more demands about ending the war on drugs than any other issue?


[ Parent ]
Dixiecrats? (3.43 / 7)
You mean those racist and homophobic redneck jackasses who left the Democratic party decades ago, like Thurmond, Lott, Helms, Wallace, etc., swearing to defend segregation to the last and running around scared to death of some dead gay artist (whom I'm guessing secretly turned them on)? And their useful idiot Reagan, another former "Democrat"?

And I've always been impressed by how many fear porn-obsessed armchair warrior Repubs actually served. The few who did are almost all over 70 and mostly retired. The diarist is referring to smirking Beavis and Butthead wannabe chickenshit chickehawks like Eric Cantor and Mike Pence. You're proud of these third-rate neoturds?

Dude, it's 2009. Get your ass out of 1948 already. Teh GOP sucks toe cheese.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton

[ Parent ]
Troll rated for ugly and insulting language. (0.00 / 1)

[ Parent ]
Oh, You Mean Telling The Truth? (4.00 / 2)
Well, you may as well just troll rate all of us every time we post a comment, Jacob.

Did you notice how I stopped paying attention to you after your first 3 or 4 days here?

No?

Well, notice now.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
"Get your ass out of 1948 already. Teh GOP sucks toe cheese." (0.00 / 0)
De gustibus non est disputandum, and if kovie's style meets your standard of acceptable writing, so be it.

But it's easier to write like a pre-teen than refute a very simple statement of fact about which party hosted the Dixiecrats from the beginning of Jim Crow until those exclusionary laws were overturned by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

They were all Democrats, and if you think I troll-rated kovie for truth-telling, maybe you can provide a counter-example to any assertion I made in my comment.

If "fear of communism" belongs properly to Republicans, how did it happen that it was Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson who sent our brave soldiers into combat against a communist regime in North Korea and a communist insurgency in Vietnam?

And if "fear of hippies" expresses itself mainly in draconian anti-drug laws, how is it that one Democratic administration after another continues to enforce those laws instead of repealing them?

So, Paul, does your dedication to "telling the truth" extend to answering a few simple but inconvenient questions?


[ Parent ]
I write plenty good (0.00 / 0)
It's you who have reading difficulties.

It's been 45 years since the events that you cite as proof of...something. So whatever your point is, one fails to discern it.

The GOP also used to be the progressive party, btw. My how the mighty have fallen...

Toe cheese now, toe cheese always! Teh GOP sucks toe cheese forever!

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton

[ Parent ]
Paying attention to whom? (0.00 / 0)
I'm confused now...

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton
[ Parent ]
Meta Jesus weeps for you, Ms. DuBois (0.00 / 0)
But Stanley just says HAH!

Never depend on the kindness of bloggers.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton

[ Parent ]
Uprated (4.00 / 1)
for "neoturds".
[ Parent ]
I don't know about us, but... (0.00 / 0)
Obama is continuing Bush's policy of sending drones into Pakistan to drop bombs on "suspected" terrorists.

Today, in our name, this soulless military exercise killed three children.

And yet, I have not heard any outcry from the left, right or center.
Nobody.

But I'll wager that people in the region are taking notice.

Obama may be responsible for killing us after all.

Pakistan/Afghanistan (0.00 / 0)
This is iffy to me. If you scoured the Earth and tried to find one violent movement that is actually 'evil', the Wahhabist Islamists of Pakistan and Afghanistan are probably near the top of that list. I'm not saying we should be blowing them up at our leisure (thereby perpetuating the cycle, etc), but we should be working towards reducing their influence and, most importantly, making sure they do not seize control of advanced armaments in Pakistan.

From a purely realist, amoral perspective, I think Obama's motives are crystal clear and should not be misread. There was some speculation that the Obama administration would cease these types of attacks within Pakistan. This perception could easily 'embolden the terrorists' so to speak, making them more of a threat than they are currently. Obama was sending a signal that his administration is not above illegal, cross-borders attacks against these groups. Hence, the status quo is maintained for the time being.

I'm not saying this is right, but I think it is clear this was a policy signal (and yes, one that did cost lives) meant to buy time and ensure an uneasy stability in US/Pakistani relations. But it would be presumptuous to think this marks a ongoing Obama policy.  

"Don't hate the media, become the media" -Jello Biafra

[ Parent ]
Getting it right (4.00 / 1)
I was strongly in favor of Obama's Afghanistan policy during the primaries -- remember, it was Obama who first recommended  strikes into Pakistan, before Bush authorized it -- but as time has gone on I'm more tepid.  I do think these strikes are reasonable as part of an overall strategy, but I need to see the full strategy.  Right now, we don't have one.

Killing children, of course, is reprehensible on all accounts.  The morality is obvious, but even "practicality" shows such actions only work against us.  These strikes need to be virtually perfect in order to actually accomplish the desired long-term goal of destroying Al Qaeda.

[ Parent ]
This is lunacy (0.00 / 0)
N/T
[ Parent ]
bedwetting Jack Bauer cultists (4.00 / 1)
never learn
Good, let them cry this loudly. (0.00 / 0)
When they turn out to be wrong (again), some of this 'dangerous' BS will be laid to rest.
Thiessen (4.00 / 3)
It is remarkable that in Thiessen's career Bush is the most moderate and respectable person he's served as speechwriter.  Before that it was Jesse Helms and Donald Rumsfeld over at the Department of Defense according to his bio.

Nobody notes from these ranks of alarmists that Bush ignored the warnings of Bill Clinton and his staff.  Nobody notices that he even ignored the warnings of his own staff when it really mattered.

good luck (4.00 / 1)
to all the Repubs who are going to keep on fighting last year's election. Obama said he was going to do all of this oh about 10000 times on the campaign trail. He made the case to the American people, told us what he wanted to do as President. Told us in the debates, told us in speeches, told us in interviews, told us in town halls. We know what the verdict was, the biggest vote total in U.S. history. Let's repeat that for dim witted, hard of hearing Republicans-

BIGGEST VOTE TOTAL IN US HISTORY.

The Villagers aren't really afraid, not really. Just that talking about big scary threats that will kill us all very very soon make them sound like very serious people. Just more shock doctrine tactics. Yo Repubs, we are bored with your reruns.

also (0.00 / 0)
Obama beat McCain with a popular vote percentage that is the biggest in 20 years. Let's repeat that for the reality challenged Repubs-

BIGGEST POPULAR VOTE PERCENTAGE IN 20 YEARS.

Bigger than Reagan 1980. Bigger than Nixon 1968. Bigger than Kennedy.

[ Parent ]
It's not fear per se, it's fear of people (4.00 / 3)
Or fear and loathing of people. Conservatives are misanthropes.  

Damn George Bush! Damn everyone that won't damn George Bush! Damn every one that won't put lights in his window and sit up all night damning George Bush!
And it's projection. (4.00 / 6)
Being selfish, greedy, sorry SOBs themselves, Conservatives assume everyone else is, too. Their biggest fear is of getting what they deserve.

Montani semper liberi
[ Parent ]
It's projected self-loathing and and inferiority complexes (4.00 / 1)
writ large, sublimated (in an obviously bad way) into political action theater. They hate and fear themselves, and transform it into hatred and fear of anything strange and unfamiliar--like themselves. The top Nazis had the same issues. Pathological fear and hatred invariably come from within. You can just see the terror and rage in their eyes.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton
[ Parent ]
And when we survive the next four years? (0.00 / 0)
Then what?  

Right wingers blow their wad way to early in these types of things... I guess they are setting things up hoping for a terrorist attack (yes, they are hoping for it... country first, ya know!)...

So, Obama will have to be extra vigilant, since I'm sure Al Quida knows that they destabilize us politically with an attack.  Obama will probably also have to be more hawkish than we like... hopefully, he'll manage to take out Osama or find his buried body....

That would end the right wing BS once and for all...

REID: Voting against us was never part of our arrangement!
SPECTER: I am altering the deal! Pray I don't alter it any further!
REID: This deal keeps getting worse all the time!

oh please (4.00 / 1)
The republicans can't remember what they said five minutes ago, let alone four years ago. They'll be fine four years from now, when, terrorist attacks or no, they'll be insisting that if we don't all vote for the white guy, mushroom clouds will dot the continent. They are immune to cognitive dissonance.
[ Parent ]
Fear = RWA (4.00 / 4)
Altemeyer makes this point quite clearly that rightwing authoritarians are ruled by fear.

For example, they routinely say that just about any problem you draw their attention to is "our most serious problem."  It's the Lake Woebegone effect in policy nightmareland.

On a more gut-level paranoid plane, they're so primed to go out and round up dangerous sorts of people that they'll even volunteer to go out and round up themselves!  

And, in a sense, they've got good reason to be so spooked, given how poor their reasoning skills are.  If something goes wrong, they're almost certain to do the wrong thing, and make it 10x worse! So there's a certain perverted consistency to it all.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

Those who feared Obama was a slender reed (0.00 / 0)
before all of this, must think him even more vulnerable now. If I had anywhere else to go, I might consider going there, were it not for the fact that insanity can pursue you even there. We may as well do the rest of the world a favor, and stop it here.

It's nice to have an ally who gives us a head start, but neither he nor the rest of us have much of a chance if we don't stand up to these loonies en masse. (Do you suppose there's some secret manufacturing facility somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, or maybe in Colorado Springs, where the production lines are never idle, even for a day? (The right, for all its dedication, has never had a monopoly on paranoia.)

[ Parent ]
It's not just the south or middle America (0.00 / 0)
It's all over. I've met the type in NYC, where I grew up and lived most of my life, in California, in Washington, where I live, in Israel, where I'm originally from. The south might have more of them, but that's for historical and systemic reasons, I think. But the fear, hatred and stooopid gene is distributed equally, I think. And we can't really defeat them so much as contain them, especially when they seem to break out like like relapsing cancer every 30-40 years, and implement as many safeguards as we can against them (the constitution was a good start, but clearly it needs some help). They'll always be around, and we'll always be fighting them. They're a failure of nature and evolution, with no known cure, just treatment regimens.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton
[ Parent ]
Fear of Society (0.00 / 0)
Incapacity to identify with others on an emotional level which leads to a profound distrust of social structures - that are not based on power or authority (as Paul points out). I think this can be explained by HGT (horizontal genetic transfer) most likely from iguanas. Although this may be a bit unfair to iguanas since they are not sociopathic.

Seriously, I do wonder if Republicans lack a basic capacity for socialization and that the disorder may be hard-wired into them.

the only thing (0.00 / 0)
the cons aren't afraid of is the good ole days, why, because they can remember the past in their own version of reality and the good ole days are the place where non whites, gays, feminists, non cons, non elites, among others had to stay in their place and the white con gop could be a hero to all bigots, who as the gop are afraid today because the good ole days are a thing of the past, a good thing to most of america but not to the white con gop, which is a good thing for the rest of the previously mentioned america.  
You left out (0.00 / 0)
Fear of the Vagina.

That's actually the ur-fear for some of those you list.

Is that why there are so many closeted homophobic Repubs? (0.00 / 0)


"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton
[ Parent ]
I'm not saying I believe or know what's (0.00 / 0)
going to happen but Republican talking points often precede action later. Talking points today often seemed designed to set the stage for later realities.


And What the Such Rhetoric Produce? (0.00 / 0)
UPDATE: "Drunken Negro Face" Cookies On Sale at Greenwich Village Bakery


[A shocked customer tells My Fox NY that Ted Kefalinos, proprietor of Lafayette French Pastry, asked her, "Would you like some drunken negro heads to go with your coffee? They're in honor of our new president. He's following in the same path of Abraham Lincoln; he will get his."

Later, her friend stopped by the bakery and said Kefalinos corrected her about the name of the cookies-they're actually drunken "N-word" cookies. She says the backwards baker then repeated the dark suggestion that, like Lincoln, President Obama "will get what's coming to him." Go Secret Service, go!]


Let him stay in "The Corner" (0.00 / 0)
George bush, his speechwriter, The National Review, and most of the Republican party should be left in the corner where they belong.

I wouldn't highlight anything they say or write.  They are irrelevant right now.  We need to focus on our own party and trying to push them in the right (that means left) direction.  We need to watch what they're doing or saying, who they are hiring, and speak out about that.

Right now, they're putting together a stimulus package that has only (at best) about 17% of the money going to infrastructure.  33% at this point is for tax cuts, and these tax cuts have pushed aside projects that would move us toward a green economy, improve our infrastructure and put people to work.  That's a disgrace.  Let's use what little voice we have in trying to influence the people who actually have some power and some impact on our lives.

We have to shift gears.  Republicans are no longer in power.  Take the spotlight off of them.

It's easy for us to mock (0.00 / 0)
this sort of attack from the Republicans. God knows it's a joke in any objective reality.

The problem is that it fortifies a stereotype of Democrats that all Democratic politicians seem to fear.

I don't know why, exactly, they fear it so much. Maybe there's some science behind that fear. Maybe in focus groups and polling across the decades they have found that, absurd or not, the "Mommy Party" thing is the blessing and curse of the Democrats -- good in some eras like that of today, when domestic times are poor, and bad in other eras, like after 9/11, when national security issues take front and center. Maybe it is not any kind of science, but simply conventional wisdom so ingrained that Democrats can't find their way out of it regardless of its actual groundlessness.

What I do know -- because I see how Democrats behave -- is that they seem never to fail to pay due deference to the belief that they must at every juncture avoid the appearance of being weak on national security, however contrived the issue, and however absurd the proposed solution.

And some Democrats are worse than others in their risk-averse behavior.

I will say this: given the current zeitgeist, and given the position for which he has run, Obama strikes me as, at least potentially, one of the more extreme offenders on this score. His flip-flop on FISA is Exhibit A of this sort of behavior. We may mock the notion that he is weak on national security. Yet on the day he voted in favor of the FISA legislation, it was clear he was in no mood to mock it. It is quite extreme behavior both to take the wrong position on such a basic matter as domestic spying, and to break a promise so as to do it.

This is why I think Obama must be watched like a hawk for deviations from basic principle when it comes to matters of national security.

And this would be one very good reason to be very concerned that, for recent example, he chose to empower an utterly unnecessary task force to investigate the incorporation of additional techniques of interrogation beyond those allowed in the Army Field Manual. Since the natural product of that effort is to incorporate further such techniques -- unless the task force has been formed in complete bad faith, which is something that would backfire in its own way -- it's hard to see how it can portend anything good.

And the attacks from Republicans on Obama, such as even this rather crude and over-the-top one issuing from Bush's former speech writer, are exactly the sort of thing that will incline Obama to make compromises as this task force proceeds. He, like many Democrats in Congress, seems to have an only too desperate need to have something to point to so that they can say, see, I'm willing to do the tough thing to fight terrorism.

Unfortunately for us all, doing the tough thing to fight terrorism in this context is to give up on basic rights and protections.  

Howzabout .... (0.00 / 0)
fear of intellect?

You can read more of JD Ryan at five before chaos, but why would you want to?
"Fear of their handguns being taken" (0.00 / 0)
The diarist identifies "fear of their handguns being taken" as a particularly Republican fear, but it's easy enough to demonstrate how easily that fear crosses the aisle and expresses itself vehemently with Democrats, too.

For example...

The most significant gun-control case in the last 10 years was D.C. v. Heller, and a great many Representatives and Senators joined in filing amicus curiae briefs on behalf of overturning the District of Columbia's stringent laws against possession of handguns. Not all of them were Republicans, and among those who expressed a "fear of their handguns being taken" were...

Senator Russell D. Feingold (WI, D)
Senator Max S. Baucus (MT, D)
Senator Robert P. Casey, Jr. (PA, D)
Senator Timothy P. Johnson (SD, D)
Senator Blanche L. Lincoln (AR, D)
Senator E. Benjamin Nelson (NE, D)
Senator Kenneth L. Salazar (CO, D)
Senator Jon Tester (MT, D)
Senator James H. Webb, Jr. (VA, D)
Representative Jason Altmire (PA-4, D)
Representative Michael A. Arcuri (NY-24, D)
Representative Joe Baca (CA-43, D)
Representative Brian Baird (WA-3, D)
Representative John J. Barrow (GA-12, D)
Representative Marion Berry (AR-1, D)
Representative Sanford D. Bishop (GA-2, D)
Representative D. Daniel Boren (OK-2, D)
Representative Leonard L. Boswell (IA-3, D)
Representative Frederick C. Boucher (VA-9, D)
Representative F. Allen Boyd, Jr. (FL-2, D)
Representative Nancy Boyda (KS-2, D)
Representative Dennis A. Cardoza (CA-18, D)
Representative Christopher P. Carney (PA-10, D)
Representative James H. S. Cooper (TN-5, D)
Representative Joseph D. Courtney (CT-2, D)
Representative Jerry F. Costello (IL-12, D)
Representative Mario Diaz-Balart (FL-25, R)
Representative John D. Dingell (MI-15, D)
Representative T. Chester Edwards (TX-17, D)
Representative Brad Ellsworth (IN-8, D)
Representative Steven L. Kagen (WI-8, D)
Representative Paul E. Kanjorski (PA-11, D)

It's obviously true that Republicans are more congenial to the NRA than Democrats, but neither party has anything to be proud of about supporting gun-control, and the United States continues to suffer more gun-related homicides per capita than any other developed nation.


And yet... (0.00 / 0)
...when Michael Moore made Bowling for Columbine he went to great lengths to find a correlation between gun ownership and violent crime.  He found none.  Canada had basically the same gun laws as our own, but none of the problems.

The problem isn't the guns, it is something else.

[ Parent ]
TERRORPHOBIA: OUR FALSE SENSE OF INSECURITY - by John Mueller (0.00 / 0)
A few days after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there might never be an "end date" in the "struggle" against terrorism, a point when it would be possible to say, "There, it's all over with." More than six and a half years later, his wisdom seems to have been vindicated, though perhaps not quite in the way he intended. At least in its domestic homeland security aspects, the so-called War on Terror shows clear signs of having developed into a popularly supported governmental perpetual-motion machine that could very well spin "till who laid the rails", as Mayor Shinn so eloquently, if opaquely, puts it in The Music Man. Since none of the leading Democrats or Republicans running for president this year has managed to express any misgivings about this development, it is fair to assume that the "war" will amble on during whatever administration happens to follow the present one.

In some respects, ironically enough, the closest semblance to a notable opponent the enterprise has so far generated has been George W. Bush himself. The President has, of course, garnered great political benefit from the terrorism scare. He has consistently achieved his best ratings for handling the issue, and Karl Rove has been known to boast publicly about the political utility of fanning terrorist fears for the good of the Republican Party.........

ENTIRE ARTICLE - http://www.the-american-intere...

"THE AUTHORITARIANS" - by Bob Altemeyer, Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba (0.00 / 0)
Table of Contents
Preface, Acknowledgments, Dedication, Introduction
Chapter 1 Who Are the Authoritarian Followers?
Chapter 2 The Roots of Authoritarian Aggression, and Authoritarianism Itself
Chapter 3 How Authoritarian Followers Think
Chapter 4 Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism
Chapter 5 Authoritarian Leaders
Chapter 6 Authoritarianism and Politics
Chapter 7 What's To Be Done?

BOOK (261 pages) AVAILABLE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD - http://members.shaw.ca/jeanalt...

Many Americans do love their police state - by J.D. Tuccille (0.00 / 0)
"Scattered through the comments to yesterday's column about a Customs and Border Patrol stop of a passenger train that never crossed the boundaries of the United States are little gems of the sort that I've come to dread and anticipate in equal parts: praise for the government for behaving in an arbitrary and heavy-handed manner. Unfortunately, all too many of our friends, neighbors and relations have come to relish acting like bit players in a bad Cold War film. They're more than happy to bow down to the nearest uniform so long as somebody assures them it will "keep us safe" -- from whom, it doesn't matter, though it's certainly not from overbearing authorities....."

ENTIRE ARTICLE - http://www.examiner.com/x-536-...

Right-Wing Voices: Obama is Going to Kill Us | 41 comments
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