It's that time of year again. Some have vowed to hit the gym more often. Others are swearing off cigarettes. For some, coffee has been replaced with copious amounts of socialist green tea. Still others are signing up for community service projects to help improve the world around them.
Yes, many Americans have made their New Year's resolutions. Perhaps the conservative media establishment should do the same.
I don't want there to be any misunderstanding. Black people hate what Alan Keyes stands for.
I'm sure that some people like the guy, there are some useless fools who call themselves Republican. who do, but to most black people in America, he is simply a traitor. He betrays the community, the culture, everything good about being black.
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Now, I know being black isn't easy, and some people, unfortunately, are driven crazy. I mean did Keyes try to lighten his skin? Bathe in milk? Why did he have to try so hard to adapt the way of his masters.
It isn't even that he's a conservative. There are lot of people who are black and conservative, at least socially. But Keyes crossed over and decided to take stands which would hurt black people, to prove he wasn't like us. He wanted to be a special negro, one white people would like, would let run something.
But of course, they would no more do that than let him marry their daughters.
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People need to understand that black conservatives are our shame, our embarassment. People driven mad to assimiliate at ANY cost, their soul, their dignity, common sense.
Look at the respect people like Tom Joyner, Tavis Smiley and even Oprah gets. They don't debase themselves for the approval of white people. They have character and dignity. Look at the gollum which is Alan Keyes and you see something entirely different, sadder, but different.
Unsurprisingly, what Steve said here (of which the above is only the briefest excerpt) gets to the very heart of the matter.
Sprinting into the lead of the GOP Crazy Olympics, it's Alan Keys:
"Obama is a radical communist and I think it is becoming clear. That is what I told people in Illinois and now everybody realizes it is coming true.... He is going to destroy this country and we are either going to stop him or the United States of America is going to cease to exist....
"The man is an abomination.... That is a man with such a seared conscience, I can't even understand why anyone in their right mind would consider him worthy of political support....
"[He is a ]usurper occupying the office without constitutional warrant."
"He has refused to provide proof that he is in fact a natural-born citizen....
"Refused to provide proof" as in posted it on the Internet. Obama's "Fight the Smears" website, as of last June:
Keyes:
I'm not even sure he is president of the United States."
Heck, he's not even sure what year it is. Or where he lives. He's been under 72-hour observation longer than anyone else in history.
But hey, no one could have predicted that Fox would use these appearances for PR purposes, right?
So there you have it. For everyone who was so sure this was brilliant, because the candidates were "reaching out," apparently we forgot that the traditional media would still have an opportunity to define for America to whom they were reaching out. Fans of the candidates assured us that it was (pick one): 1) swing voters; 2) open-minded conservatives (ha!), or; 3) people who had lost their TV remotes. But gosh darn it if the Fox PR machine hasn't schooled us all. It was populists! Which means both Clinton and Obama -- and all Democrats, by extension -- are elitists.
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
This is a very old game, and it's way past time we got a better handle on it. Before getting into any sort of messy details, it's important to note--ala my diary two weeks ago, "The Ontology of Snark: A Prelude"--that there's a common ego defense mechanism in play here:
Displacement: Defence mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion to a safer outlet; separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening. For example, a mother may yell at her child because she is angry with her husband.
Real, actual conservative elites have been using displacement as a stock in trade for millenia, creating ghost elites for unwitting populists to misdirect their anger at. It was virtually inevitable that Obama's "new politics" of "change" would be targetted with this ancient charge. It was not inevitable that it would have such a weak response. But, then, the consultant class that crafted it really is part and parcel of the Versailles elite. So what could we expect?
