I Have a Scream

Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid. -- Heinrich Heine

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. -- H. L. Mencken

So the Beckalos had their little putsch at the Lincoln Memorial, and amazingly, none of the attendees keeled over on their Rascals from the die-uh-beat-us that may take their feet before it kills them outright. (And how much you want to bet that every one of those little vehicles has some sort of gubmint subsidy? May these scumbags get their wish for a minarchist gubmint, and have to subsist on ketchup and cat food before they finally die from their self-abuse.)


Your tax dollars at work. Really getting our money's worth.

Naturally, reports of attendance vary wildly, from the kabillionty-jillion estimated by the Becktards themselves, to the more realistic 87,000 from CBS News. Either way, hell must be full. Whatever the amount, it's too many, and whatever they say to excuse their conduct, they are vile and insufferably dumb right down to the last person. Check the second photo in the Wonkette post -- they made a Lincoln Memorial backdrop to put right in front of the actual Lincoln Memorial. As I've said before, this is so far beyond stupid, I'm not sure a word exists in the English language to properly describe it.

(Yes, I get that it presents a more scaled image of the memorial behind the speaker for headshots, but still....extremely lame. As always, these people could find a way to fuck up a baked potato.)

Then there's this fucking guy, surely proof that Darwin was full of shit. Not sure where "Mauitania" is, perhaps one of the lesser-known Huhwayan Islands, but thanks for playing, asshole.


Chicks dig a poorly-spelled racist t-shirt.

Even as empty slogans go, this "Restoring Honor" thing was pretty weird. Implicit in the phrase is that the honor in question has been absconded with, or worn from attrition. This requires some actor or set of actors, catalyzing event(s), some sort of narrative describing said honor. Deconstructing further, one might as well wonder, when exactly did this honor change or disappear, to where it needed to be "restored"?

Of course it's a waste of time to pursue it further, these were just two randomly-picked buzzwords from a Newt Gingrich list. But the logical upshot from this is that either the honor was impacted on eeeevil Obammy's watch, or it left before, and they've just been waiting around all this time to, I dunno, gather and mutter about it per Lonesome Rhodes' instructions. (A third possibility: it took them this long to get to Warshinton on their state-subsidized fat-fuck scooters.)

Really, Dennis G. at Balloon Juice has the most likely explanation for how these simpletons perceive "honor", and thus how it must be "restored":

The Confederacy and the Confederate movement has always been very concerned with ‘Honor’ and its restoration and when seen as a neo-Confederate rally the gathering today make sense as a fitting endpoint to a month celebrating stupidity in America. It makes sense that these neo-Confederates would hold this rally on the Anniversary and at the site of MLK’s famous speech 47 years ago. And it is predictable that these shifty fuckers would claim ownership of King and his movement. After all, Confederates have been trying to reclaim their right to own people, their labor and their ideas for more than two hundred years.

“Honor” is a wingnut code word that defines the term in the same way that the old Confederacy defined the term. And when paired with the word “restoration” it is a call for a return to an American rooted in the White Supremacy of the Confederacy. This Neo-Confederate movement has—ironically—captured the political party that was formed over a 150 years ago to destroy Confederate thinking and slavery. History is filled with funny twists of fate.

He's right, and indeed, if their slack-jawed audience could pronounce it or know what the word meant, Beck might as well have used the word "instauration" rather than this "restoring honor" crap, because that's really what he means, and what his crowd means and desires.

I thought about writing a serious post about how to genuinely engage the Beckalos, instead of belittling them, to ask them concise, pointed questions that would force them to confront the logical gaps and contradictions in what they're saying and doing. Surely beneath all the clown paint and edema lies a vestige of reason, a dormant core of sense needing only to be awakened by the right means, to reclaim itself from limbic lizard-brain mumbo-jumbo.

And those questions should be fundamental indeed (define "socialist"; explain how Obama fulfills that definition; name a politician whom you feel would do a better job than Obama; precisely which of their stated positions or policies do you agree with), but more and more it seems a waste of time. Sometimes it's tempting and easy to ride the fine line between schtick and honest sentiment, but it's not schtick when I say that I don't think someone that deeply invested in people such as Beck or Palin can be reasoned with. I don't think there's an honest dialogue to be had, because they have no use for intellectual honesty or factual debate.

It sounds like a pejorative, but it appears to be true -- these followers are magical thinkers, people who seriously think that the things they say are true and correct simply by virtue of being vocalized. Magical thinking is what underpinned eight years of policy under the last regime -- we have never done anything to inflame resentment among Middle East Arabs; Saddam has WMD; the Iraqis will greet us with champagne and blowjobs; deficit spending is not a problem.

This is a very fundamental but extraordinarily dangerous precept, that so many people apparently think things are true just because they say they're true. That someone can piss and moan about the gubmint while they're on the fucking dole; that they can complain about even small measures toward reforming our barbaric health-care system while they themselves suck on Medicare's tit. These really are despicable human beings, no two ways about it. Merely calling them hypocrites understates the case.

It is to Obama's, and the Democrats', shame and disadvantage that they repeatedly try to meet these assholes halfway, or any way at all. At some point you have to realize that some people cannot be reasoned with, because they are not interested in learning anything. They already know what they need to know, and are aggressive and hostile to anything else. It is wasted effort to engage them, pure and simple. Every second Obama has spent trying to reason with the hard right is a second better spent playing with the dog or spanking the monkey. If he doesn't get wise to that, his ass is done in '12, the rest of his life spent monitoring Third World elections.

Not that, given the track record so far, it would be a huge loss, except for the increasingly scary incoherence burbling from the other side. They have no clue what they want, but they fucking well want it yesterday. Bad enough behavior from a four-year-old stomping his wittle feet in the cereal aisle, but in adults? People like that are always a danger to themselves and everyone around it. It sucks having to vote for someone who doesn't have the balls to tell a bunch of braying assholes to sit down and STFU, just as a bulwark against said assholes. It's pathetic.

The teabaggers gain traction from constant coverage, more and more idiots flocking to the be-in, see what Palin has scrawled on her hillbilly Palm Pilot this time. If the (bowel) movement does turn into an electoral force of any sort, you can thank the media for a lot of it, and John McCain for the rest, for unleashing Palin and her clan of grifters (seriously, does anyone in that family actually have a fucking job, besides auditioning for reality shows?) on an unsuspecting public, for once again ventriloquizing the worst, basest sentiments this country has to offer. Empowering them will only make a bad situation catastrophically worse.

And the idea that these people agree with, much less endorse, any of MLK's points about social and economic justice, is obviously bullshit. It is not rendered any more legitimate by the presence of King's niece, a craven pro-life activist who has never missed an opportunity to cash in on her name.