Friday, May 06, 2011

With No Substantive Criticisms, Wingnuts Fabricate the Myth of Obama's Conceit

Well, those people are crazy, as is abundantly clear. They are also filled with a groundless, visceral hatred of Obama (similar to their groundless, visceral hatred of Clinton). They'll say anything, so long as it has as its upshot that Obama is bad.

Problem is, he's a good president doing a pretty good job of fixing the mess they left us with--an exceptionally good job when you consider the fact that they are working hard to prevent him from fixing it. (My favorite: destroy the economy, then demand, at the worse possible time, "fiscal responsibility"; fiscal responsibily of a sort that we heard nothing about when the GOP itself was in power, and which does nothing but slow the recovery...) Oh, and: Obama is considerably more accomplished, intelligent, knowledgeable and competent than anyone the GOP has right now. So plausible criticisms are rather hard to come by.

So what to do? Well, when faced with someone who's obviously a lot smarter than you are, one way to go is to accuse them of being self-important. Sure, it's a grade-school tactic...surely that no longer surprises you?

Here is one of the biggest dumb-asses from the right fringe of the chattering class, Victor Davis Hanson (not just "Vic Hanson," you'll note...hmmm...that sounds a bit...what's the word I'm looking for...?) It's a very short piece of unmitigated bullshit titled "The First-Person Presidency," in which VD clearly suggests--but refrains from actually saying--that first-person pronouns were the most commonly-occurring words in Obama's statement about OBL. This is a myth that's been batted around on the right since Sunday night. Of course the big news is not that we got OBL...the big news is that...Obama is a poopy-head. It took awhile to come up with something, but several on the right finally settled on his little collective tantrum.
[Edits: looked to me at first as if the post was just a one-paragraph drive-by; turns out VD's point is really a more extended one about Obama being a hypocrite and all that sort of thing.]

The story seems to have been started by Limbaugh...and, like almost everything that comes out of that guy's fetid pie-hole--it was false. Turns out that 'I'--a word that ends up figuring prominently in virtually any ordinary bit of English prose--was the most common first-person pronoun, but showed up far down the list of most frequently-occurring words in the speech...and far behind "our" and "we." Of course facts only matter to those of us in the reality-based community...

Sorry for the vitriolic nature of this post...but stupidity of this degree is downright nauseating to me. If only stupidity were painful, Limbaugh would really need all that Oxycontin...and VD would be asking him to share...

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