On Jan 13, 2011, at 8:03 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> Come on, Doug. Loughner is indisputably crazy, but that hasn't stopped many from saying, "See? this is what happens when you let those tea-party ideas get about."
Actually, the liberals, bien-pensant or not, have been complaining about violent language and imagery used by name-brand Republican politicans and right-wing media stars. And the language is really violent. Yes, Loughner is crazy, but madness operates in a social context and frequently expresses itself through political symbols emanating from the discursive fever swamp.
> The bien-pensant Obamist liberals have a problem with the tea party. They were delighted to have it emerge so that they could run against it in order to gather the political class (the 20% of the population with a degree from a good college) with the threat of raving yahoos form the other 80%. But then they discovered that, small and even cynical as the tea-party organizations are, they've attracted the sympathy of the majority of the population.
No, they haven't really. They've attracted the sympathy of right-wing Republicans. It wouldn't surprise me if these shootings damage the TP brand and support ebbs.
> Now as the Great Recession makes things increasingly bad, the repressed economic desires - the "American dream" - return as a symptom and takes outre forms in the tea party. Nativism and monetary crankiness becomes the socialism of fools as antisemitism once was.*
Except that there's nothing socialist about it - it's all that old petty bourgeois right-wing self-reliant crap.
> And you know perfectly well that McCarthyism was only synecdochically related to a dipso Republican senator. It's the general name for the post-WWII ideological rectification campaign - beginning in a Democratic administration (with Truman's loyalty program) - to forestall the demand for social democratic reforms of the sort appearing in Europe.
Sure. Also state power. Keith Olbermann doesn't have that.
Doug