Crooks & Liars With Young Turks: Obama's Election Drove The Right INSANE

Run time: 13:41 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrM3Nb-JsAc   Posted on YouTube: June 11, 2010 By YouTube Member: TYTInterviews Views on YouTube: 983   Posted on DU: June 12, 2010 By DU Member: CherylK Views on DU: 1995

 
The co-creators of CrooksandLiars.com make an appearance at America's Future Now! to discuss their book on how the right wing lost its marbles at the election of Obama.

http://crooksandliars.com/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-amato/over-the-cliff-how-obamas_b_594085.html

They were insane to begin with.

Probably too young to pay attention in '93 when the right-wing smear machine went into effect. They were looking for traction from day 1 of Clinton's presidency and they found it in his zipper.

Mid 40s? It's not as if you need to be a certain age to pay attention to politics: I've been doing it since I was in preschool.

Is that a statement intended to be serious, or are you just joshing us?

That was back in 1972, Dad was in Vietnam, and things were pretty interesting.

Politics touches us on its own schedule. I know a 45 year old who still believes none of it affects him. He's been fortunate enough to steer clear of the effects of the political sphere from the beginning and doesn't vote, doesn't talk about it, doesn't follow the news...

It is harder when the machine of power steamrolls through your living room... Vietnam, Civil Rights, The Iraq and Afghan Wars... Exile.

I was born in the US the child of Chilean exiles. Even answering a small question like "Why don't we speak spanish anymore" is ripe with power, nation states and death and you learn that fact very early on.

In 3rd grade I decided not to stand for the Pledge of allegiance anymore because of the Attack on Libya... I don't think anyone, even the teachers at that time understood what I was talking about ... the haze of the Reagan era ... but there was a complex of experiences leading up to that ... pure politics.

Walter Cronkite every night. Still, somehow, in a southern, military family, being raised by my feminist mom and my new deal era grandparents, I learned very early on the the war was wrong, the civil rights movement was right, and that the Republicans were the rich man's party and were responsible for pretty much every wrong choice the nation had made since Hoover. Though I couldn't mount any sort of real defense of what I believed, I was certain of it, and saw events through a filter that continued to confirm what I learned earliest.

It's funny you should mention the raid on Libya. I'm a little older than you, and remember the Libyan attack pretty well, because we were stationed in Germany--Berlin, as it happened--and I was vacationing on Elba with my girlfriend the week of the raid. The Mediterranean skies were alive with aircraft. Though history has now decided that it was Libya who was behind the LaBelle bombing, at the time most folks in military intelligence in Berlin whispered that it was the Syrians. The bombing itself was on a Friday on the weekend of my 18th birthday, and we had actually talked about going to the LaBelle, a place we had never heard of except for the fact that one of my friends was dating a Marine from the US Embassy in East Berlin, and that was where he had wanted to go. We wound up going to one of our own favorite places instead. Rather curiously, considering the big deal that was apparently made of it over here, it wasn't really that big a deal to the American military community in Berlin: the terrorism of the RAF was only a few years before, so such things were not so exceptional, and security of overseas personnel had been heightened for quite some time anyway, following the events in Lebanon in 1983. I also remember hearing that we had lost two aircraft in completely unrelated training accidents in Europe that week, including one that supposedly crashed into a mountain.

I would have hated to have been very young in that era. Back in the early 1970's, there was very much, or so it seemed to me, a national cultural liberal consensus that had disappeared--or, perhaps more accurately, was crushed--by the time you were coming up.

have been largely laughed at most of my life until very recently... I often felt like a Cassandra figure doomed to see the future, but not able to communicate it and now there are young people with some very good intentions politically, but a lot of naivete that might have been curbed had people been paying attention all along. A plague of irony is the legacy of my generation. Now that my generation has come of age I often lament how often they seem to have come to very liberal conclusions about things, but that cynicism prevents them from any constructive responses to the nation's problems.

Thanks for your insight. My wife and I have been watching Madmen and reflecting on how different a country this is now, for better and for worse. There is an episode in the show where everyone experiences the Kennedy assassination, and it seems like a very proud and naive country of privileged people are brought to their knees by it. We can only hope that the hubris we've seen in the past 30 years can be upended by some of the very terrible events of the past few. So far, I'm not hopeful.

It was just a quick trip down the street.

It was fun to watch three of the biggest and most prolific minds in progressive politics today. Thanks for that.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TYTInterviews

And here's an edited version of Cenk's comments on the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcgUR3jt4IM|Holding Congress Accountable Panel> at AFN

to the fanaticism and call it out for what it is.
Niewert is exactly right.
Don't pass a law mandating silence.
Instead cow them with better argument.

beat them the FIRST time. They were livid when he did it the second time. If the conservanazi wingnuts don't get a grip, when and if Obama beats them again, I believe they will want to start a revolution against the duly elected government of this country.

NO ONE holds any of the right-wing hate machine accountable for their lies and distortions of the truth. Especially the main stream media, if there really is a entity by that name. It seems they all want to grip the lies and see who can smear it the most.

I have to put up with the conservanazi teabaggin' KKKluckers at work. I work in Wisconsin and believe me, there are plenty of wingnut propagandists pushing the lies on hate radio all day and all night here. Lots of these cheesehead f*cks are very rabid. Then, they throw the lies about gun control in to the mix to try to get others involved.

It's a never ending battle. We have a wingnut by the name of Vicki McKenna on hate radio in the mornings. That stupid bitch spews her bu$hit and lies for at least half an hour straight before taking a commercial break. She makes Joseph Goebbels sound good with all her outrageous lies.

So, what's going to be done? MSM step up and say, hey, enough is enough. As far as I'm concerned, if they aren't part of the solution, then they are part of the problem also.

there to inform us.

Take it from a 58-year-old American whose memory goes back a lot further than 1993 and who studies history.

Before there was the Reagan/Gingrich revolution there was the John Birch Society and the knee-jerk support for the Vietnam War.

Before that there was Joe McCarthy, HUAC and anti-Communist witch hunts.

Before that there was opposition to the the New Deal on ideological grounds, which may have lost at the time but which rose from its ashes to gain power in the eighties and nineties (see the reference to the Reagan/Gingrich revolution).

Before that there was the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.

And so on and so forth back to the Whiskey Rebellion and those Founding Fathers who thought slavery was a positive good.