You know, when FOX reports that a majority of Americans oppose Obama's health care reform, liberals complain that the numbers are being manipulated. FOX is lying.
When FOX reports on the Tea Party protests, liberals complain that they are manufacturing a movement. FOX is lying.
But when FOX shows footage of these protesters as stupid, inarticulate, crude, violent, white trash rednecks, suddenly FOX news is totally credible.
Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle. Maybe FOX is appealing to what they consider their demographic (kind of like pop country does). Maybe liberals, who for so long have warned us against kneejerk xenophobic rejection of "the other" in society, have their own snobbish exclusivity to own up to. Maybe stereotyping those with whom you disagree isn't the easiest way to find common ground in solving a problem everybody recognizes regardless of ideology.
If it was a myth that all those who opposed Bush's policies had a nose ring, an abortion, a hankerin' for jihad, or a gay lover, perhaps - just perhaps - not everybody who opposes Obama's policies is a white, racist, inbred, dumb-shit country bumpkin. Indeed, just as there were conservatives who rejected Bush's agenda, there are people on the Left who reject Obama's. Maybe if people who supported Obama's healthcare plan would talk to people without placing them in superficial categories, they'd have gotten a better and/or more widely supported bill. At the very least, such magnanimity would have reinforced the dirty tricks and negativity they've decried on the neocon side over the last decade.
So far, many vocal liberals have merely shown they can be just as petty and shallow as the conservatives during the Bush years. If neocons could justify their behavior by appealing to nationalism and jingoism, liberals have one-upped them on smarminess. In their goo-goo ga-ga fairy tale they play a snarky Robin Hood who robs the middle class to give to the rich - but, oh yes, let me not forget! Poor people can now gather crumbs dropped from the table of the corporatist drug, insurance, and medical care lobbies who get millions of new serfs to pay tribute under penalty of imprisonment, so yay.
After eight years of largely common cause with liberal statists on U.S. foreign policy, it's abundantly clear that they are the other side of the same fuckin' arrogant-ass, murder-supporting, authoritarian-loving coin.
