Monday, August 3, 2009

Rants: A Redneck Renaissance?


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The surprising strength of the "Birthers" movement is the most frightening manifestation of the rising fascism in this country that we've seen thus far. Despite the irrefutable evidence that Barack Obama was, indeed, born in Hawaii, rabble-rousing sheepherders like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh continue to stir their listening mobs of credulous rubes into a snowy froth over this blatant fabrication, and--most disturbingly--GOP pols continue not to speak out to squelch it.
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The Birthers are not only nativist (in a land of immigrants), but given the fact that one can't plausibly actually believe Obama to be an illegal alien, the inescapable conclusion is that the actual motivation of the Birther movement is racist at its core.
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In response to the dwindling caucasian majority and concomitantly weaker hold on political and economic power, the GOP is becoming a southern, racist political party--as regional as the fiction of Eudora Welty. The Birthers and their ilk will readily trade their freedoms for the promised security of maintaining the White Power tradition, when it comes to that. They are seriously freaked out by the advent of a Black POTUS who nominates wise Latinas for the SCOTUS and promotes programs which, if successful, would finally level the playing field and make this truly a land of equal opportunity for all.
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The South shall rise again, folks, and again be wrapped in the Stars of Bars and all that it symbolizes for the pickup-with-gun-rack contingent. The racist liars will continue to use the conservative media outlets to infest the national consciousness with the charge that liberalism and progressive politics is about equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity, and the bleating merinos and pinheaded goobers in their growing numbers will continue to suck up the Kool-Aid.
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