Something funny happened today. I’m occasionally forwarded Right-Wing propaganda by some of my relatives. Usually it’s from someone who doesn’t believe all that crap, but knows that I like to know what’s being said. Well, today I got an e-mail which was trying to spin Joe Biden’s recent encounter with a Rightie reporter named Barbara West from WFTV in Orlando, Florida, who was apparently trying to make her Neo-Con bonafides by quoting Karl Marx and asking Biden if Barack Obama was going to turn the U.S. into a socialist state like Sweden. The Right has been trying to spin this by saying that Biden avoided the questions and ridiculed the reporter. Which is absurd.
Anyway, the e-mail included a link and an opinion. This is what was said;
This Gal asks all the tough questions that the Liberal Mainstream Media wouldn’t ask. Watch Joe lie through his teeth. Even Obama admits he gave $800,000 to ACORN. Joe is so upset at the questions and tries to ridicule the reporter. She works for an ABC affilate. Probably won’t be employed much longer. Biden’s wife was to be interviewed by her but Biden cancelled it. Obama has blacklisted that TV channel from any more interviews.
Obama cuts them off
Well, I didn’t need anyone to try to tell me what was what. I’d already heard the interview. It didn’t seem to me at all like Joe Biden had “ridiculed a reporter for asking the hard questions”. It sounded to me like a reporter was doing a Sean Hannity impersonation and was repeating Right-Wing talking points. I figured the people who sent out this link didn’t actually expect that anyone would go watch it, because the Right-Wing take on it was completely at odds with the actual interview. If a reasonable person watches that interview, they’ll see a reporter being a complete asshole, and Joe Biden, though obviously annoyed, answering the ridiculous questions he was being asked.
I responded to this by saying essentially what I just said here, and I included a transcript of the interview so that people could see how the encounter when without any kind of bias. I didn’t, and don’t, expect anyone to take my word for how it went. Just read it. Or, better yet, watch it.
Well, this illicited a response from one of my nutjob Right-Wing relatives, who sent me 22 messages, each addressing a different Right-Wing talking point/lie. Most of them were from One News Now, which is a bogus news site from the American Family Association and its nutjob leader, Donald Wildmon. Holy crap, it’s no wonder this relative is living in a Right-Wing, Neo-Con, Evangelical fantasy land. If he’s getting his news from the American Family Association, he’s a long, long way from the real world. I mean, right now one of the headlines on One News Now reads “Elementary Schools Promoting Homosexual Agenda“. These folks are way out there.
There’s no way you can argue with this kind of indoctrination. I wrote my relative and kindly thanked him for sending me so much information. I told him that I’d been thinking about creating a section on The Watch that chronicled all the bizarre Right-Wing propaganda that’s been making the e-mail rounds, and I’d been kicking myself for deleting them as soon as they came in. So he’d done me a favor by sending a virtual archive of Right-Wing propaganda. What else could I do, really? It’s like being in a room with someone and realizing they’re completely insane. You know, they bring you a dead squirrel and tell you you’re pretty, so you thank them for the squirrel and get the hell out of there.
Of course, I realize that this relative’s response was little more than harassment. I’ve continually annoyed him by writing and challenging his bizarre Right-Wing propaganda. So the 22 message he sent me was probably something he did out of frustration, rather than any genuine expectation that he could change my mind on anything. That’s fine by me. I feel in my heart that the influence of the Far Right is waning. How else would you explain that Barack Obama is so far ahead in most polls, except to conclude that the average American is simply tired of being beaten over the head by the Religious Right.
I think they’re scared. If your religion is your political ideology (and vice-versa), it has to seem somewhat like God has abandoned them, whether or not they would actually voice that concern. The Religious Right was on a roll and thought that when they got George W. Bush into the White House and a lot of Right-leaning politicians in Congress, they actually had a chance of staging that theocratic takeover of government that’s central to their agenda of “Culture War”. If you’re the party of God and you’re losing, how do you reconcile that with your belief that God is on your side and against your enemy?
Why, you do what the Far Right and the Religious Right have done so prolifically during this election cycle. You lie. And lie some more. And lie even more. You say whatever you have to say to elevate your chances of winning. If nothing else, you lie to yourself and say whatever you have to say to convince yourself that you’re not losing, no matter how the evidence might contradict you. You say whatever you have to say to delude yourself and hide from the fact that in the end it turns out that the majority of Americans do not share your extremist views or your hyprocritical values.
I’m not surprised that the Far Right is currently lying about Joe Biden. They’ve lied about everything else, in spite of their claims of being Christians. I believe the reason that the Republicans are losing so badly this year is that those good, decent, moral people who really represent the middle ground in America are overwhelmingly Christians who are tired of having their faith hijacked by extremist ideology and an extremist agenda.
At least for this election cycle, the Far Right isn’t getting much traction. Most Americans have finally decided that we’re in too much trouble to allow these people’s Neo-Conservative, Evangelical ideology to destroy the democracy that our forefathers worked so hard to establish. Quite simply, those good people in the middle aren’t listening anymore. And we’ll soon be a better country for it.
