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babylonsister Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Aug-13-09 06:18 PM
Original message
The Nutters Are Coming to Get You
http://www.newser.com/off-the-grid/post/239/the-nutters-are-coming-to-get-you.html

The Nutters Are Coming to Get You
by Michael Wolff


They’ve always been here. But the nutters are surfacing in a way and to a degree that is finally catching the agape attention of non-nutters. It is not only the ferocity of their anger that is surprising, but the focus of it: this birth certificate stuff, the death panel business, the tea bags, and the apparently heartfelt belief that the end of America is upon us.

It’s super nuts.

Still, we are in a realm which, I believe, is more puzzling to most people than frightening. What is this about? Is it possible the nutters are really this outraged about this stuff? That guy at the town hall meeting in Pennsylvania, in his face-off with Arlen Specter about the sanctity of the American constitution, rather seemed, in his paroxysm of raw emotion, to be defending the life of his child.

My friend Larry Kirshbaum, the literary agent, calls this “symbolic rage.” The inchoate attaches to the most assertive claim of deviance from, or seeming offense against, virtue and righteousness. The notion of bureaucratic panels with the power of life and death is obviously meant to provoke feelings of helplessness and panic more than to describe the decision-making process of a new health care system. The birther stuff is all about conspiracy and aliens.

This might also be called demographic rage. It isn’t shared across the social and economic spectrum. It’s limited to…well, the stupids. But these are stupids grasping for some words—hence, the new lexicon of wacky grievances—to describe their unhappiness.

This is why it seems more bizarre than frightening. The nutters—even as they have coalesced into something more like a movement than isolated mental health cases—seem desperate and alone and lost, on the verge not so much of violence, but of tears.

What’s more, they are cherry-picked for their desperation. It’s an Internet thing in which the people most likely to subscribe to symbols of rage and to engage in dramatic public outbursts are easy to reach through the websites they obsessively frequent.

No doubt, too, it’s an Obama thing that is producing this atavistic rage, a defense of some lost ideal and identity.

Still, in the end, the nutters will undoubtedly be good for the Obama programs, even their inexplicable bête noire, health care—after all, who’d want to be on their side?

These people are not so much a mob as they are gargoyles. Or train wrecks.
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Skittles Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Aug-13-09 06:23 PM
Response to Original message
1. it's like Obama's election turned the lights on
Edited on Thu Aug-13-09 06:23 PM by Skittles
sending the cockroaches running around for all to see
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babylonsister Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Aug-13-09 06:25 PM
Response to Reply #1
2. Yes, and these are hissing, biting, mean-spirited cockroaches. nt
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Skittles Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Aug-13-09 06:27 PM
Response to Reply #2
3. and they should be treated as such
yes INDEED :D
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babylonsister Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Aug-13-09 06:28 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. Where's my flip flop? That's how I handle them around here. THWACK!
:D
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safeinOhio Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Aug-13-09 06:30 PM
Response to Original message
5. IN the 60s I didn't like em much
Now I am in the silent majority.
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lib2DaBone Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Aug-13-09 06:51 PM
Response to Reply #5
6. Ya, I hear ya Safe... Remember "Tin Soldiers and Nixon Comin?"
.."We're finally on our own"... same thing going on today..only 10 times as bad.

Joe Walsh did a great song called "Rocky Mountain Way". The lyrics are "..Bases are loaded and Casey's at bat". But when I saw Joe live outdoors at the World Series of Rock he sang.. "Bases are loaded and Nixon's at bat.. gonna kick some ass....time to change the batter."

The crown went nuts... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt75y38J00s
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windoe Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Aug-14-09 06:41 PM
Response to Original message
7. Yes, and who created these nutters?
Do you think they are a fluke or an accident? I do not mean to be fear based tinfoil hatter, but I can see a pattern of domestic destabilization that is being allowed to happen. This should have been nipped in the bud long ago, but is being programmed into these fear based uneducated people. Where have we seen destabilization techniques being used before? Fundamentalists overseas, chaos and misinformation being used overseas, and now I think this is being used domestically. Whoever is behind the extreme RW, do not want the progressive movement to be successful, and they have the endless (stolen) funds to pay off the media. They want to wear us down with this lunacy. Tell me if I am way off base here, because I feel very strongly about this.
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CLANG Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Aug-14-09 08:58 PM
Response to Reply #7
8. Right-wing propaganda turned them into ideologically pure automatons.
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