The Republicans and their news outlet, Fox News, are lockstep in calling up all the demons of the Apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. In the New Testament of the Bible, in the Book of Revelations, they are actually the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, most accounts deeming them a divine apocalypse upon the world as harbingers of the Last Judgment – which is the tenor of the Republican response to Obama’s executive action plan.
Use whatever it takes to control and conquer our country: war on the Democrats and the vulnerable, suppress income for the 90%, and suppress benefits for the people rendering them homeless and hungry. Right-wing demagogues can obfuscate and confuse with catchy or fearsome words like Death Tax, death panels, class warfare, death by Ebola or ISIL. They can stage rants and tantrums to influence or intimidate.
The frenzied response of the right-wing media mill and its Republican patrons effectively amplifies the recent mock outrage of lesser offenses like chewing gum (Nicorette gum) at the G20 conference in Beijing. Even the Chinese used terms like “idler,” or careless “rapper” to characterize his action, perhaps rote terms learned from watching America’s Fox News.
But all turned up the volume in response to President Obama’s announcement of upcoming executive action on immigration reform, even as he rightly indicated the more than year-long Republican House’s inaction on the Senate’s immigration reform bill.
Only in the mind and voice of the beasts of media, Fox News, and the demagogues of politics, most of the Republican Party, is this apocalyptic. The frenzy, if not the litany, is repeated harshly and shrilly: impeach, intimidate, sue, shut down, defund, obstruct, and – in the process — debase the President (Outrage frenzy).
Cheerleaders like John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Charles Krauthammer, the latter singing impeachment. They coordinate and unify the message: one day it’s the explosion caused by Obama’s executive order, next day, it’s “shredding the Constitution.
Unreasonable, irrational, hateful – all oaths between clenched teeth, like snarling dogs of war and all seemingly hating Barack Obama with a vengeance. The reason can only be guessed from the more subtle words and, perhaps, obvious with the more blatant. It’s racist. All seem to have hate in their eyes. How else can you interpret an unreasonable anger for all actions of the President.
Some of the more vile right-wing figures have been more obtrusive in revealing their racism: the Tea Party, Ted Nugent, even Karl Rove — The Tea Party, often with signs depicting Obama as Hitler, dark and ugly like the devil, and Ted Nugent, whose support the new Texas governor, Greg Abbot, welcomed, and whom Ted Cruz often praises, has often called President Obama a “Subhuman Mongrel.”
Karl Rove, a seasoned career propagandist (Bush’s Brain), has more subtle code words with his Fox News buddies – Obama has “a lazy attitude toward the job that he’s got” (lazy, a stereotype for blacks). A Wall Street Journal Oped by Rove is sprinkled with code words: Obama’s “trash talking,” and “his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard,” and “he’s often lazy.”
Trivial, even manufactured (no flag lapel pin or a slight bow to the Chinese leader) offenses are magnified in the radical voice of Fox News and the scripted Republican talking points, a currency of intent to discredit at all costs, even costs to the efficacy of our democracy.
Rendering right-wing outrage specious, if not damning, are the truths of past Republican presidents, including Ronald Reagan, their deemed patron saint. Both George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan used executive orders to effectively keep immigration families together, affecting some 40% of immigrant families, Reagan in 1987 and Bush in 1990. That’s about the same number affected by an Obama executive order.
Why Republicans conveniently forget the actions of past Republican presidents or are not conscious of hypocrisy is anybody’s guess. We know that this memory loss is not a one-time occurrence.
The curiosity is that the mainstream media doesn’t have the resources or the will to identify the hypocrisy of Republicans and conservatives in general, not only for the same imagined offenses committed by Republicans in the past, but also the misinformation that is daily dispensed by Fox News, right-wing radio and Republican politicians.
For example, the recent Republican rants about Obama’s deficit spending are proven time and time again to be false. The media is silent about George W. Bush’s irresponsible budgeting: tax breaks, wars and the Medicare prescription drug program being charged to credit. Republican legislators don’t care to remember they voted for them without condemnations they currently proclaim, all false.
In effect, perhaps all this doesn’t matter, considering that voters have given Republicans and the media the go ahead on obstruction, demagoguery, misinformation, voting with money, and restrictions on voting.
How else can you characterize low-information voting, not voting (2/3 in the last election), and the resulting rewards for Republican partisan performance, namely more seats in Congress and winning statehouses?
So Republican drama continues, while the media reports them like news, and it’s not really drama but tragedy for truth and freedom, that with a portion of racism thrown in.
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