Favorite Scapegoats
One of the talking points I’ve often heard from the right wing about the sub-prime crisis is the idea that it’s the fault of liberals and minorities: liberals for passing legislation that forced banks to take on bad loans, and minorities for eagerly buying into loans they should have known they could not pay for. The contention is that liberals, in their blind, unthinking ways, wanted more minorities to have homes, and minorities, being grabby and not too bright, overreached and precipitated the crisis. This ties up the scandal into a nice, neat, right-wing trifecta: you get to move conservatives and their still-favored deregulatory practices out of the picture, make the bankers into unwilling participants and even victims, and heap blame and scorn upon lefties and the lower-class dark-skinned people you look down upon so much. Bush, the Republicans, the deregulation they passed, and the banking industry are all innocent; stupid liberals and minorities are to blame. Of course, these charges are demonstrably false, but that doesn’t stop the meme from becoming firmly established on the right wing.
Nor is this hardly anything new. Remember how, when Hurricane Katrina hit, the fact that Bush dawdled for five days and completely blew relief efforts was handled the exact same way: it was, the right wing claimed, the fault of (1) local Democrats (specifically Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin) for not declaring a state of emergency (Blanco did) or using local buses to move people (Nagin did), and (2) the minority-rich population of New orleans for being too stupid to leave before the storm. Thus, the claims went, Bush, who reportedly begged Blanco and Nagin to declare the emergency (he didn’t, it was the other way around), was not to blame for the disaster that ensued. For weeks afterward, the right wing distributed false and misleading email messages which heaped despicable abuse and outright racist slander which was designed to vilify the people of New Orleans and thus make people less inclined to care about Bush’s ineptitude in helping them.
But this is the pattern: blame liberals and minorities. Immigration? The left loves minorities so they go soft on immigrants and immigration offenses while the dirty Mexicans walk all over us! (Pay no attention to the fact that corporate America is the actual villain here.) Elections won by Democrats? The liberals were guilty of election fraud, assisted by minorities within ACORN! (Pay no attention to the fact that ACORN was slandered, there is very little election fraud, and what there is is more right-wing than left.) Where only one or the other can be attached to a scandal by any stretch of the imagination, then only one is implicated–but whatever the problem, it’s always Democrats and minorities somewhere who are supposed to be behind it all.
never underestimate the forces of Bull—-.
Their entire modus operandi is based on lies.
Tax cuts will not result in greater deficits.
Invading Iraq will be a cakewalk.
Clinton committed an impeachable crime.
Exporting our jobs to the rest of the world will improve our economy.
This was and should ever be a Christian nation.
One symptom of this is the fact that US overwhelmingly rejects the naturalistic explanation of human origins. Only 1 in 6 people are willing to agree to the proposition that non-supernatural darwinian evolution produced humans on this planet.
Conservatives attack. “Swiftboat”. Character assassinate — the latest attacks against the ex-Sikh primary challenger is par for the course. They don’t believe in the efficacy of government so one wonders why they attempt to run it.
~40% of this country is simply f—ed in the head. Things are going to get worse.
もう、出来るだけ早いGTFOしなければならん。
The problem for republicans/conservatives is that almost every policy approach by Bush was a complete and total failure.
Bush inherited a country at the peak of its game. Historically, the only rival to the U.S. in November 2000 was perhaps the U.S. in 1945 or Britain in 1900.
Then Bush and the republicans promptly drove the nation into a ditch. They failed. Their policies are a failure.
Now their only hope is to make Obama a failure too. Then they can conflate failure as being a characteristic of both parties.
The stimulus bill needed to be three times larger than it was and it needed to be ALL stimulus. Instead Republicans managed to limit it to the approximate size of the TARP bailout – and half of that went to tax cuts (which was a major plank for what got us into this mess).
Here in Korea they produced a stimulus at 12% of the GNP plus a slight tax cut. They also benefited from a drop in their currency. Now they talk about the recession in the past tense. Canada in April produced over 100,000 jobs (an economy/society 1/10th that of the U.S.). The Republican strategy is working – but it is ruining America.
And here’s the important point: They really don’t care. They want power and control for the sake of power and control. Their policies are failures. They don’t care. They don’t care if they trash the country, the world and that millions, even billions of people suffer.
Republicans deserve the worst fate possible. Instead that is what they will give the United States and the world.