You know that feeling you get whenever you see a semi jackknife on an icy road ahead of you and you make that quick turn to avoid being smeared by the trailer? That sense of incredible relief and the intensity of being alive as you look in the rearview mirror to see the wreckage that could have been you? Yeah, that's how it feels looking at these images. (And, yeah, that was more or less the Rude Pundit's post-nor'easter commute this morning.)
Let's kick these fuckers while they're down. Let's degrade them and mock them for not understanding that voters actually give a damn about the nation, unlike the Republican Party. Let's make them feel every ache, every lump, because if we don't, they are going to attempt, again and again, to get up and gut us, like every cliched serial killer in every cheap straight-to-video bullshit flick. You don't walk away when the murderer just looks dead. You cut off his head so that you know he is.
Here's what the right is saying while sucking on its sour grapes in the wake of Barack Obama's reelection:
Bill O'Reilly: "It's a changing country, the demographics are changing. It's not a traditional America anymore. And there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things and who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it and he ran on it.
"And whereby 20 years ago President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff.
"You're going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming for President Obama and women will probably break President Obama's way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?"
Cal Thomas: "Politicians bid for votes, making promises they can't keep to voters who will believe anything, as long as it appeals to greed, envy and their sense of entitlement. This undermines our culture. This fuels our massive debt, weakening our economic power and America's standing in the world."
Rush Limbaugh, after declaring "We're outnumbered": "There is no rising to responsibility. There is no accepting responsibility. There's just a demand that the gravy train continue, and we have an administration that's promising an endless gravy train. All you have to do to stay on that gravy train is vote. But it doesn't matter.
Scared, scared white men all, blaming those demographically-different (or, you know, black and Hispanic) people who want stuff, the half of America that pours gravy from the train, gravy like Medicare and the GI Bill and Pell Grants, acting as if the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren't the indulgent luxuries of a fading empire that chose frivolity and fantasy over the mundane work of actually taking care of the country and its citizens. But that would require self-reflection, and it's always easier just to blame the spics for stealing your hubcaps rather than realizing they're gone because you hit the curb a while ago because you're a shitty driver.
(Side note: It always struck the Rude Pundit as odd that people attacked Barack Obama for not having a "plan" for his second term. No, he always had a plan. What he didn't have was a worthless scheme, a grand and mighty doctrine that he could attempt to shove the country into. If there is such a thing, the Obama doctrine might best be called "If shit is broken, fix it.")
