Jack Cashill, Ph.D. (that’s Doctor of Philistinism) became the towering intellectual presence he is in the Tea Party movement the old fashion way. First, he slyly joined a movement populated almost entirely by subliterate retirees given to denying Darwinism and birth certificates. Second he wrote lush, defamatory articles about President Obama for WorldNetDaily, slathered with conspiracy theories, and pointedly abusing the word “postmodern” a lot. If you don’t know what WorldNetDaily is (and why should any sentient being?), think Bat Boy meets Karl Rove, and you’ll have your answer. You can also check out this revealing Salon article.
This pungent combination provided the hot air that lifted Cashill’s Hindenburg above all the other conservative bloviators, even (mirabile dictu!) that of Newt Gingrich (though Gingrich reportedly denied that in a five-thousand-word statement). A constant attack toad, Cashill has written a number of books that cater to lowbrow rightwing tastes, mostly printed by lowerbrow right-wing publishing houses that know a conservative sucker is born every minute. His latest tome is seductively titled Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Love, and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President. Note the unnecessary Harvard comma. If you read the thing (and I don’t recommend you do – I got a bootleg from a Chinese website that hacked Kindle) you will also detect a total misuse of the term “postmodern,” which in Cashill-speak means something like “French” and “fake.”
Getting back to Bat Boy plus Rove, Cashill understands the Right-Wing Noise Machine as well as anybody who has a decree in American Studies can (presumably with a focus on the yellow journalism period). He understands it enough to deny its existence. This apparently is his “role” in the machine. More to the point, he gets the first law of Rove perfectly: conservative’s memes attack the strengths of the opposition, not the weaknesses.
Accordingly, Cashill’s patented meme (and every right-winger has a patented meme just as professional wrestlers all have a patented move) is ― now stay with me here ― Obama is stupid. And that’s because Obama is obviously intelligent and articulate, whereas his Tea Party opponents are obviously oafs in dunce hats. So like the draft-dodging bar-hopping Bush attacking the service of the Vietnam Vet Kerry, memographer Cashill claims the president is virtually illiterate. Obama didn’t write his books, argues semiologist manqué Cashill after a deep textual analysis involving subject-verb agreement. Rather the true author is (wait for it, wait for it), the notorious “terrorist/svengali” Bill Ayers. We have liftoff: Literary Swiftboating.
Cashill’s most recent foray into “deconstruction” came out yesterday in the deceptively named rightwing webzine(ophobe) American Thinker, and involves his semiological interpretation of a letter written by Obama while at Harvard Law School (newly discovered according to the breathlessly conspiratorial Cashill). The effort is unintentionally comical as the hapless Tea Party intellectual parses Obama’s sentences to discern dark political forebodings. Just as Obama uses the wrong verb form for a subject with a preposition phrase, warbles Cashill, so too he is dishonest about affirmative action, the subject of the letter.
Turgid, isn’t it? By the way, as with all grammar Nazis, his article has graphotactic errors, but that goes without saying for the subliterate Tea Party.
But wait, there’s more. Like Homer Simpson eating an hallucinogenic jalapeño, Cashill furiously segues into disparaging Michelle Obama’s writing abilities. “Almost assuredly,” concludes our Derrida of Smarm after comparing Mrs. Obama to Bart Simpson (see how easy it is to work in a Simpson reference, Jack?), “the gap between her writing and that of her highly talented colleagues marked her as an affirmative action admission, and the profs finessed her through.”
“Almost assuredly”? Translated, that means: based on nothing but his meme that African Americans are stupid. Conservative journalism at its best. (By the way, Jack, “affirmative action” is used here as an adjectival phrase and should be hyphenated).
And now the Eagle has landed in the trailer park. Cashill’s real agenda all along has been to show that only (scary) affirmative action could account for the black couple in the White House. Because as Cashill’s hobbitlike readers know, black folk can’t be smart. Few crop circles are less circular than Cashill’s mind.
The “Obama is dumb” meme has turbocharged the Right-Wing Noise Machine, occupying space in the WSJ, The Weekly Standard, and the rest of the usual suspects, all purporting to judiciously evaluate the president’s IQ, often in the context of indignation about his use of teleprompters or rampant Harvard grade inflation (unlike Rick Perry’s Texas A&M, mind you). Like clockwork, the “issue” seeped into the lazy mainstream media, hungry for copy, with US News & World Report producing a poll called “Is Obama Stupid or Smart?” Classic conservative memology at work.
Remember, the LNM maxim: the way to defeat a conservative meme is not to respond with facts. Tea Party obsessions aren’t about reality. They aren’t arguments. Instead they are more like snakes on a plane that have to be strangled to death. People like Cashill should be treated like your alcoholic Uncle Joe, who cracks an ethnic joke and empties a room.
By the way, I’ve read Cashill’s books and deconstructed them, and concluded he didn’t write them because he uses the Harvard comma in the title of “Deconstructing Obama,” but pointedly not in his articles attacking Obama. They appear in fact to have been written by Sean Hannity’s ghostwriter, Newt Gingrich.
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