i don't see racism has what motivates any of them. they would have been like this no matter what. they would have been freaking out were hillary in office. does anyone not remember the reaction with clinton?
I interviewed some folks at work, about obama and his effect on the left, it was for that article i just wrote. i interviewed two black guys who have to work with tea partiers, and they are definitely making racist comments and really digging for any reason at all to find something wrong with the guy, but they were like that before.
my impression of the guys i work with are that they are pissed b/c they aren't in power -- their party. they will do anything at all to find something wrong with the current administration. they will find something wrong with everything obama does or doesn't do. reality doesn't factor into it. the government is out to grab their guns, obama sank the economy, evertyhing that is wrong is because the government did it, and if capitalism fucks them over, it's because of the government.
when i told one of them about the guy who predicted the bubble burst and then predicted, accurately, the trough and told him about the history of recent recoveries being jobless such that there was a ~2 year lag in job creation, he blinked blinked blinked. he's been told repeatedly that it's all obama's fault that it was a shocker to listen to any other explanation. that's when he started going nutso about the unpredictability of it all. fear seems to be a big thing for them.
i posted to the list about all this but am too lazy to look it up.
but yeah, it's an old phenom. they're just the same 30% or so who supported shrub and the war no matter what happened. there's no "movement" and, at least for the folks i know from work and from r's family, there is zero about this that involves resentment. the three guys at work are successful by any measure. their jobs weren't in jeopardy and haven't been. two were layed off, but because they didn't move to the new corporate location - their choice.
these guys at work, and def. r's family, would have been flipping a lid had clinton won or gore or kerry or edwards.
> On Tue, 18 May 2010 20:57:29 -0400
> Dwayne Monroe <dwayne.monroe at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I wrote about my Tea Party/Birther friend here:
>> <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20100208/001907.html>
>
> Thanks for reminding me. I remember reading that post and enjoying it
> quite a lot.
>
> Has your friend always been like this? Would he have thought that
> Hillary "hated America" less than Michelle, if she were in the White
> House again? How much do you think Obie and Michelle's "mocha-ness"
> has to do with it? Not rhetorical questions -- I'm really wondering.
>
> The reason I ask, I guess, is that this all seems terribly familiar --
> far as I can tell, there have been people running around raving like
> this
> for at least half a century. I always sorta thought it was a pathology
> engendered in certain susceptible minds by the sensory isolation of
> living
> in suburbia and spending too much time alone in your car, listening to
> the radio. But maybe there's something new that I'm missing?
>
> --
>
> Michael Smith
> mjs at smithbowen.net
> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
> http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com
>
> "I am in favor of leaving people alone,
> no matter how imperfect their polity may
> seem." -- Stephen Maturin, MD
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)