When the election was called for Obama Tuesday evening, diehard Republicans were whining and moaning as if the end of the world had come and that the next four years would be terrible times. What's with these morons? Do we have to indulge any more of this onerous claptrap or should we now begin to conduct interventions to administer reality therapy?
I thought they were kidding at first. They were almost in tears, still plaintively extolling the virtues of their rebuked standard bearers, and still dismissively deriding the two highly-respected members of the United States Senate who will be the President and Vice President of the United States for the next four years. They were incredulous that the nation as a whole "could make such a horrible mistake". Where do these folks get off with that? How can they remain so smugly assured that their decreasingly significant, shrinking minority of deluded simpletons is right and everyone else in the country is wrong?
They do have the historical precedent that their own propaganda machine deluded much of the lumpen proletariat for the better part of the last 40 years. If nothing else, that proves what a gullible bunch of lemmings the "swing voters" are. Obviously, these people are too stupid to form their own opinion based on any rational thought process. Instead, they form a vague, ethereal notion of trust for one party or another based on nothing more than a "gut feeling". That idea really comes from a critical mass of exposure to advertising on television. It can be full of lies or a reasoned discourse, but it's the amount of air time and the production values of the ads that count most. Of course, slanderous untruths, especially with if they entail some sort of erotically tinged titillation, deliver more bang for the buck in the short term, but air time is pretty much the deciding factor.
Well, this time we collected more money, and thus we carried the day by bringing the message home to the great unwashed plethora of uninformed voters. Make no mistake; it was smart people who made this happen. Despite the average contribution to the Obama campaign being on the order of $85 or so, it's clear that it was the intellectual elite who assessed the situation and made a clear choice to bring in the Democrats to try and clean up the mess made by the Republicans. Smart people don't always have more money, and rich people aren't always smart. Hence the low average contribution. Smart people don't always have more education. Hence the huge number of contributors. What distinguishes the quick-witted from their mush-brained brethren is that they shrewdly ascertain their own self-interest. They figure out what side their bread is buttered on and not only vote, but send in the cash!
This notion leads to some interesting demographics based on the varying proportions supporting Obama and McCain. Are African-Americans, native Americans, Asians and those who speak Spanish as their first language, on average, smarter than those of European descent? The answer to that doesn't matter much to anyone who isn't a racist. Still, one might be compelled to consider why so many white people can be so ignorant as to not understand that Obama does not advocate raising the taxes of anyone who makes less than $250,000 a year, and does advocate lowering the taxes of those who make less. Don't they know how much they make? Apparently not. A greater portion of people of color, who have a lower average income and less education, though, were able to see this. Is that street smarts or common sense? Who knows? It does show that nut-ball tub-thumpers for the Republican cause are delusional and blind to reason. They are very sick people and it is incumbent upon us as bleeding-heart liberals to help them. It's the right thing to do.
The idea that Republicans are just stupid was driven home to me on Thursday night by the first post-election episode of South Park. The premise was that everyone in the town went nuts after the election. The Obama supporters got drunk, raised a little hell, puked and passed out. Some went wild and wrecked a police car. Another told off his boss and assaulted him, even though the boss was also an Obama supporter. When they sobered up, though, they were fine. One night of drunken revelry after an eight-year descent into a paranoid police state, then a miraculous, resounding re-emergence of electoral sanity, is about right. I did something of similar ilk, singing Happy Days Are Here Again at the karaoke bar and taunting jackass working class Republican with my Obama button as I swilled my bottle of non-alcoholic German beer (borderline diabetic, you know).
The South Park Republicans, however, completely lost their minds. They were sure that the Republican loss portended doom. They tearfully said goodbye to their children, certain that they would not live to see them grow up. Many of them holed up in an "ark" to await the metaphysical deluge. While the exaggerated behavior of both sets of partisans was ludicrous, I was struck by how similar the irrational Republicans' fears were to real people I know. Two of my lodge brothers ran out to one's SUV after our meeting Tuesday night to hear the returns on the radio. They were sitting in the vehicle when I came out, dumbstruck in horror. One, my adversary in the $100-dollar sucker bet, said to me, "I can't believe it. It's over. Obama's actually won." He so wanted Obama to lose that he ignored all rational assessment that the Democrat would win. He couldn't fathom the notion that the nation as a whole did not share his views. He was truly surprised.
Another lodge brother has been trying to convince me for months that Obama was "totally unqualified to be President" and that McCain was obviously the better choice. His post-election e-mail shows how nothing either candidate did or said during the campaign had the slightest impact on his preconceived notion of divinely ordained Republican hegemony.
Mcain[sic] lost by a few million votes. ... You are about to find out that very few if any of Obama's promises will ever see the light of day. they are mostly empty. Our financial deficit is so huge and our economy so bad, and the world situation with two ongoing wars, so chaotic, that very little of his promises will be kept.
Well, whose fault is all that? And just why doesn't he think that changing the party in charge won't change the policies? This is where I realized that he doesn't care about anything other than the idea that Republicans are good and that Democrats, especially non-white ones, are bad. He can't see how anything good could possibly result from the administration of a candidate he doesn't like. I should mention that this good old boy is a racist as well as an idiot because he is a Jew who doesn't understand that oppressed peoples only aid their oppressors by hating each other. When he tried to disparage Obama by citing his race to me, and I laughed at him, he changed tack and focused on Johnny Hotshot's "heroic" war record. I've never been impressed much by commissioned officers as a group, and less by a crappy pilot who crashed three planes but didn't get his wings pulled because his daddy was an admiral, then got shot out of the sky by some crackerjack Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners and was imprisoned for several years. I feel sorry for his ordeal, but don't think that qualifies him to be a senator, much less President.
There's the crux of my assessment: McCain is an intellectual lightweight compared to President-elect Obama. (God, how I love saying that!) McCain ranked near the bottom of his class at the second-rate engineering school he attended, the United States Naval Academy. (It's no Cal Tech or MIT!) Obama was a stellar performer at Harvard Law School and president of the law review. What's to compare? Barack can speak well and interact intelligently with the press while John stumbles and falters without a script and can barely contain his violent temper.
So, there we have it. McCain, is a dysfunctional, cantankerous, disingenuous misogynist and his sidekick is a pandering airhead, a brain-dead Christian fundamentalist and a secessionist crank who didn't know that Africa is composed of many nations, not just one, and who could not name the NAFTA signatories. (Duh. North America has three nations, dear, the Dominion of Canada, the United States of America and the United Mexican States. Cheesh.) Despite these defects and deficiencies, Republicans brazenly asserted that these two buffoons were better qualified for office than Senators Obama and Biden. Worse yet, they had the audacity to steafastly maintain that Obama was not qualified. Puh-leez!
These people just don't get it. I'll say it again. Republicans are stupid! They are so detached from reality that facts and reason have no meaning. You can't educate them; you have to treat them.
What has always peeved me about the mean-spirited, Chauvinist attitude of Republicans was the bullheaded arrogance in blithely backing any loudmouthed chowder head who was opposed to communism (now socialism) or genuflected to fetal rights over women's rights to control their own bodies. I can usually dismiss this by attributing such stands to blind partisanship, but I can't see how they really seem to believe such crap.
What is unconscionable to me is the callous disregard of self-styled "conservatives" for any notion of social responsibility and their cavalier indifference to human suffering. I know a couple of minimally functioning, high-grade morons. I'm not exaggerating; they've both been diagnosed. Both are staunch Republicans because someone got to them during the Reagan era. They both hate Democrats because, "They raise your taxes!" Of course, both are penniless, and one is nearly homeless. When they work, they have menial jobs at near minimum wage. One is married to a unionized factory worker who has health care benefits that may keep keep him alive as long as his alcoholic's abscessed liver doesn't get much worse. He likes to rail against the evils of socialized medicine. He doesn't appreciate that he would die like a dog in the street if his wife wasn't a union girl.
You must agree that he's pretty stupid. By that token, how stupid is any low-income or mid-income worker who doesn't want full-scale, comprehensive, single-payer, socialized medicine? How dumb do you have to be to realize that not having it is killing you? Most of us would get better medical care if we lived in Cuba than we do here, even if we can afford to pay thousand of dollars a year for health insurance. How can you even discuss this issue intelligently if you can't cop to that?
OK. They are stupid. But, what can we do about it? Humor them. Cajole them. Gently mock them. At every opportunity, point out how the benevolent policies of an honest government make their lives better. Never be shrill. Even if they become hysterical and run around waving their arms and screaming that the Apocalypse has come, don't be harsh with them. Love them and slowly, inevitably bring them into the fold of rational, sane humanity. It's your duty as a secular humanist, you know.
Now that we have our marching orders, how do we go about it?