Facebook Politics

By @TomBales1
From Ted's A-1 post this morning:

I've just added Chuck Thompson's new book to my Holiday Season shopping list. The book is called Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession.

It's central thesis is that we Northerners would have been much better off letting the South walk 150 years ago -- and it's not too late to correct our mistake.

I'm thinking of giving the book as a present to a Christian fundamentalist in-law of mine who recently de-friended me on Facebook after I told her the Chick-fil-A anti-gay marriage show of solidarity she'd participated in was not about free speech or imagined "censorship" but rather the demand by far right religious conservatives like her to make other people conform to their "biblical worldview" without complaint or contradiction.

So she de-friended me! For not capitulating to her biblical worldview! I'm thinking of attaching a "Happy Holidays" label to the box just to piss her off.

Heh. Politics by Facebook, eh? As always Ted, a fine and, for me educational, piece and I'm firmly of the "let "em eat grits" school but I couldn't help but notice a parallel with my own recent experiences that helps to convince me that most right wingers have lost all sense of rationality and logic when it comes to the President of the United States.  I'm also firmly convinced that irrationality... be it based in religiosity or politics...  cannot be countered by rational argument and any attempt to do so will get you soundly thrashed by those that feel they have a better understanding of how the world works than you do..

Only one of my daughters, the youngest, is still speaking to me after I questioned the barrage of crass racist cartoons, Fox News style race baiting soundbites, demagoguery and outright openly expressed hatred... not for Democrats or even "Liberals" but for Barack Obama personally... being expressed by the rest of them, mainly by the second youngest but always "liked" shared and echoed by a couple of the others whom she facetiously refers to as her "minions", on their Facebook accounts.  

Since taxes were the lowest ever, corporate profits were among the highest ever, unemployment was actually increasing in the private sector even as the "growth" of government in terms of public sector employment was actually down from the Bush years... I was simply asking them why they so blindly hated Barack Obama, who not that many years ago would have been considered a conservative, when they were getting everything they claimed they wanted.  

I just asked them to look deeply into their motivations and see just what it was they hated so much about this man since the things they were claiming it was all about were patently false and included talking points that had been thoroughly debunked months or even years ago because I was pretty sure that, given the nature of most of the attacks on PBO by those from the extreme right... most of whom live in the old Confederacy and have racism as ingrained into their psyches as an autonomous function of the nervous system that they can no more dispel than they can dispel the need for oxygen... it played a role

I was immediately unfriended by the second youngest, with whom I thought I had been fairly close for the past several years, for "accusing her of racism" (and by her son... my 11 year old grandson which gives you some idea about how right wing THAT family is) but who couldn't resist making sure that every one else on her friend's list knew what a total asshole she thought her father was... and two of the others haven't spoken to or addressed me in any manner since except for one last little jab by one of them about that "horrible and  hateful" stuff I write on my blog.

When political considerations trump family you begin to realize that this is how far hatred for Obama, ignited by millions of corporate dollars and fanned by a bevy of Rush Limbaugh wannabes, has taken over a lot of people out there and why we can NOT take anything for granted no matter how sorry the candidates the other side have paraded in front of us.  

There are enough people who won't even really know who Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are and won't be voting for them, but who will be simply voting against Obama, to bring this race into the realm where the crooked voting machines and a stacked SCOTUS can once again be the deciding factor.  We can't afford complacency based on any kind of poll numbers or anything else because as we have seen, being the "majority" doesn't mean much anymore in a country where politicians are openly bought and sold in an open market and even if your side loses, you can still keep the other guys from accomplishing anything.  


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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheyGaveUsARepublic-FrontPage/~3/oXvTYKg8qDM/faceb
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