THERE IS NO REASONABLENESS FOR FANATICS

It's truly become pointless to even try and respond to the right's more and more wild accusations about Obama and the Democrats and government in general.

The kinds of accusations I'm hearing from other sources (here's one for instance), that Rush and Beck and Palin and other rightwing demagogues are making now, go beyond even their usual ruthless distortion of reality to a fantasy land that because of its influence can only lead to serious consequences for all of us.

Like I've said on previous posts, my experience with regaining many functions and abilities I lost after the brain surgery has taught me that when the brain lacks the wiring to make the obvious connections it needs to make in order to use logic and reasoning to determine a solution to a problem, it ends up substituting the easiest explanation it can find.

In other words the corporate shills, that Rush and Beck and others obviously are, probably know their lies and distortions serve their corporate sponsors and masters etc. and are either faking it (we see this often when rightwing Republican politicians are caught thinking their microphones are off making disparaging and dismissive comments about their followers) or have convinced themselves their propaganda and demagoguery is necessary to defeat the "Communist/Fascist/Antichrist" they portray Obama as.

Some of these tactics were used by the left in the late 1960s and early '70s and I fought against them as much as I did anything else. Coming from a family of cops I knew all policemen weren't "pigs" etc. But I also knew the analyses by most leftist intellectuals and leaders were based on facts, on a reality that the mass media of the time tried to cover up or simply ignore. Unlike many of Beck's and Rush's pronouncements that are based on lies necessary to foment animosity and rage against "the other" (i.e. minorities, Dems, "liberals" or "progressives" etc.).

It's obviously working as those whose brains cannot make the logical and reasonable connections—and thereby conclusions—demonstrate with their ongoing daily attacks on anything their leaders and spokespeople target for them (as The Daily Show and Rachel Maddow et. al. often highlight with reels showing the talking points of the day on the right being repeated verbatim all day throughout the rightwing media and the mainstream media they have such enormous sway over these days (which almost never uses the same kind of factual references to expose the usual rightwing lies (the Shirley Sherrod experience being one of the few where they were forced to but then made it all about the Obama administration apology rather than the rightwing's manipulation of the so easily manipulated mainstream media, but the distorted edited videos that led to ACORN's being misrepresented weren't corrected as most rightwing lies and distortions aren't in the MMS, etc.)

This occurred during the 1960s where many myths developed on the right based on rightwing propaganda and lies but which were nowhere near as insidious as those being perpetrated these days by Beck and Rush and their ilk. Like the myth that returning Viet vets were spit on and called "babykillers" as a matter of course. If it ever happened at all it was probably right after the Mai Lai massacre was exposed where US troops did kill babies and it was discovered that it wasn't the first or last time.

But in general the "hardhats" (rightwing demonstrators for the war who were initially characterized as construction workers mostly but often, as these days, were promoted and provoked and funded by rightwing organizations) were the ones who did the spitting and the hitting while most "flower children" and even the later SDS anti-war demonstrators of which I was one and often in a leadership position, made peaceful gestures toward these same "hardhats"—as well as National Guard troops and even the police sent to control or put down demonstrations—who we tried to educate about the lies used to justify the continuing war deaths and destruction.

But when attacked some attacked back as in picking up tear gas canisters and smoke bombs meant to disperse crowds of demonstrators and throwing them back at the police or National Guard troops who fired them. Often, when the main stream media references those days and those demonstrations you see mostly long haired young men throwing these smoking canisters at the police or National Guard troops but almost never does this same stock footage show the initial attack by the police or National Guard.

Anyway, even in those turbulent times very few on the left—and no on with the kind of media access and audience of a Beck or a Rush—used outright lies as the basis for their attacks on the government of that time. It was true then that the government was lying in order to keep support for a war based on lies. And that the FBI was spreading lies in the media in order to discredit leftist activists and peace organizers etc.

The idea that Obama is a "communist" let alone a "socialist" (I wish!) or "fascist" or "Nazi" or "illegal" or a "Muslim" or out to deliberately and consciously destroy his and our country is so preposterous that if you had told me or anyone else back in the 1960s that someday we'd have a part African-American president and these things would be said about him in major media outlets we'd have thought our greatest hopes and worst fears had come true at the same time. True indeed.

[And PS: "hope" is kind of spiritually useless in a way, as my old friend Hubert Selby used to say, because it's based on future projections rather than present reality where to maintain spiritual balance we need to live—i.e. in the "eternal now"—and then work for the changes we see as being beneficial to all so that the future reality may look more like what we envision as a better world, or as our president likes to say, quoting the Founding Fathers, "a more perfect union" (a little grammtically incorrect of course, how can anything be "more perfect" than perfection etc.)]

[And PPS: I know I went ahead and did what I said at the top was pointless, but as one of my favorite writers, Marth Gelhorn, said after she realized historical events were not necessarily going to go the way her youthful idealism had hoped, that at least she could bear witness to what actually is going on.]