Those were the words uttered furiously by my Stepmother in the car to me.
The date? Early February, 2009. Obama had been president for less than two weeks.
"Obama is just like Saddam Hussein!"
She snarled. Furious. Angry.
"C'mon," I responded. Couldn't you at least give him six months before you start insulting him and calling him a disaster? I mean we all know that's the conclusion you're going to reach, but less than two weeks in?" I responded.
"No." She snapped. "He's just like Saddam Hussein! He's going to destroy this country!"
An avid Fox News watcher, Wall Street journal editorial reading wingnut, my Stepmother and I have never agreed on politics. But never had I seen her quaking with such rage.
She was literally shaking with anger at this "Saddam Hussein" who had taken over our government through nefarious methods.
When Bush "won" in 2000, I asked her how she could accept a president who won less votes than his opponent and needed his brother to shut down a recount to win? She smugly said "that's the system!"
When the runup to the Iraq War was taking place in late 2002, I told her I thought the "evidence" Bush was presenting of WMDs was total bullshit.
"Oh come on! Of COURSE Saddam Hussein has WMDs. How could you be so ignorant?"
I asked her how she was so sure? Granted, I wasn't 100% sure either that he didn't have WMDs, but I sure hadn't seen any evidence otherwise, and neither had Hans Blix.
She called me an "idiot" again, snapped "I don't want to talk about it anymore! If you can't see the danger of Saddam Hussein attacking us with another 9/11, then I can't talk to you!" She would poke me in the head and should "STUPID!" and always turning Fox News back on.
The insults had been coming at me more and more since the late 1990s. I was a "LIBERAL" or a "MORON" or "BRAINWASHED" or "STUPID." This was the political debate.
The fact I didn't buy into Fox News, the fact I hated Bill O'Reilly and thought Sean Hannity was full of shit, meant I was "BRAINWASHED" by the "liberal media." There, offered to me, was the cure for my delusion in the form of the heroic Fox News. She had found enlightenment, but I was too foolish to see it.
My Stepmother was born in China. She moved to the United States at 18 and put herself through college. She'd found work in computers and then went to law school.
Her mantra was "If I can do it, anyone can do it!"
She didn't believe in government handouts, nor did she tolerate minorities who complained about racism. She claimed to have suffered discrimination for being Chinese, and felt that the solution was hard work and overcoming the biases, rather than turning to the government for assistance.
There was a lot of merit in this position.
But in the late 1990s, her politics changed. No longer was it policy debate. Now "civilization" was at stake from the proverbial "OTHER." Yup, it was Fox News. Her drug of choice. Her intoxicant.
Our political discussions had been going on since I was a child in the 1980s. My father was a cross between a classical liberal and a paleocon. He read National Review, but he had problems with both Reagan and Bush, and always voted for the Libertarian candidate. My father loved Ron Paul in 1988 and voted for him.
But my stepmother veered hard right. She adored Charles Krauthammer and believed the personification of proper journalism was seen in two figures: Chris Wallace and Brit Hume.
I tried not to gag when she'd cut out the latest Bill Kristol B.S. from the Wall Street Journal and handed it to me when I was visiting. I had given up trying to convince her of anything.
When the WMDs turned out to be fantasies and the war was a disaster, I asked her if she'd spent any time reevaluating the ways she got her media and/or considering if she was lied to. "They kept us safe!" was always the response. "Good intentions" justified all.
By 2005, I gave up.
She was so far gone with her "Fox & Friends" framing, there was little I could say to sway her.
I'm still convinced the Iraq War was the issue that separated those who live in the real world from the true believer wingnut cultists. If, after three years of utter lies that got hundreds of thousands killed and ran up a trillion dollars in debt can't make someone see the bankruptcy of the republican party, then they'll never see it.
But when Barack Obama won, everything changed.
"Barack Obama is just like Saddam Hussein"
Her anger, always there, gave way to a bleak nihilism. It was as if the entire country had betrayed her for not "staying the course." But it was in that car in January that I had an epiphany about where her anger really came from.
This was not about politics at all. This was about her "Friends."
Fox News had cultivated the notion of belonging to a "club." The bullyish "clique" of power players and bold leaders. The Sober, Serious club of "real Americans" who didn't fall prey to namby pamby emotions like "empathy" and did what "Had to be done" in a dangerous world.
Fox News and talk radio had given my stepmother an extended media constructed "family." As real as those who feel like they hang out with "Seinfeld" every night in reruns, or that Jay Leno is their uncle, or that the Huxtables live next door.
I realized that she didn't care about the issues. She just needed to belong.
The republican party is a TV family.
Sure, some might be crazy uncles shouting at the dinner table. But the family was always there on Fox, always ready to welcome her in to a world where "normal" would be explained as her, and the "other" would be defined as everyone else (gays, immigrants, Arabs, Muslims, Mexicans, etc.)
"Barack Obama is just like Saddam Hussein"
I realized in January that the words contained layers of meaning my Stepmother couldn't begin to comprehend.
Of course Barack Obama was just like Saddam Hussein. He was the bogeyman. The usurper of normalcy. The enemy of the "family" that welcomed her in on TV and the radio and the editorial pages of so many newspapers.
The "OTHER" is always the same.
The "OTHER" is the face of the media constructed "enemy of the state" -- Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell's 1984. The person doesn't even have to exist. It could be the "welfare queen" or the "immigrant" or the "Muslim."
"Barack Obama is just like Saddam Hussein"
Heroes and villains.
Cartoon superheroes from iconic Hollywood myth are brought out on Fox -- central casting archetypes like "plucky mom" Sarah Palin, patriarch war hero John McCain (but not effeminate John Kerry) or George W. Bush in a flight suit on the air craft carrier.
In a republican party built on media, the "Reagan Revolution" did not mean politics. It meant casting.
Starting in 1980, after the painful truths of Nixon, the "Republican Hero" goes through Reagan's iconic imagery to become Hollywoodized -- Republicans are coming to "Save 'Merica" like Jimmy Stuart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
The Republican PArty became a party of emotion and reactionary viscerality built on two totemic ideals:
#1 -- Iconic imagery
#2 -- Fictive Nostalgia
The Hollywood myth as longing for idealized American past. The "America" that existed in Frank Capra movies.
The "villain," of course, is anyone who challenges this framework. Facts can be a villain. Science can be a villain. Anything that stops the projector light or tears down the illusions of flickering right wing bullshit on the Plato's Cave screen that is Fox News.
To cast the villain? Piece of cake. It can be anyone, no matter how impeccable their real life story is. Just add ominous music and flashy graphics:
The hero? The hero can be an alcoholic drug user who inherited his wealth, got into Harvard and Yale undeservedly because of his father's connections, and hid out during Vietnam:
This is the power of the Classic Hollywood cartoon that republican media spun. This is what my Stepmother cannot break out of. Asking her to do so would be like stopping a movie in the middle and telling the audience to start hating the hero.
It simply cannot happen.
The republican party base, built for 30 years on Hollywood archetypes, is not capable of even considering emotionally shifting away from the "villains and heroes" that continue to be cast and sold to them by the Fox News, Drudge, Murdoch, Scaife media empires.
Arnold Schwarzenegger fit the mold, until he dared to think for himself.
Sarah Palin fits the mold beautifully, looking like she stepped out of a casting call for the plucky mom on "The King of Queens" (and she probably wishes she had).
"Barack Obama is just like Saddam Hussein"
Yes. Yes he is.
In the sense that anyone and everyone can be "Saddam Hussein" to the screenwriters of the Republican Party. Saddam Hussein wasn't even Saddam Hussein.
In 2003, my Stepmother went on and on to me about how bold and confident Donald Rumsfield was in the leadup to the war. She admitted to me that she found him "good looking."
He looked the part. He fit the Hollywood casting of the "war general." Barking orders. Silvery hair. Glasses. Smart but masculine.
No matter that this was Donald Rumsfield in the 1980s:
I would mention this, and she would dismiss it briskly. "That was a different time."
A different movie, is what it was. Like saying in the middle of Titanic, "Hey, didn't Leonardo DiCaprio play a drug user in the Basketball Diaries?"
And now here we are.
Wondering how much crazier the republican party can get.
My answer after watching my Stepmother's descent into the Fox News movie-theater of the mind is this: They can get much, much crazier.
When it's heroes and villains, good and evil, and everything is a battle that builds to the final set piece before the closing credits, nothing is off limits.
"Barack Obama is just like Saddam Hussein"
But let me return to the loss she felt when the election didn't go her way in 2008.
Because like any audience member of a fictional movie, she needs to believe there is an audience with her. An audience of like-minded people sitting in the seats around her, laughing, crying and getting angry at the same scenes she is.
This is what republicans need so desperately. As desperately as they need their icons and villains and heroes.
Republican followers need to believe they are part of a large, massive, singular audience.
Like going to see a movie that's #1 at the Box Office.
This is why Matt Drudge posts Fox News ratings whenever they're high (and ignores them when they're low). This is why Fox News pretended "Tea Bagging Parties" were "sweeping the nation" or that there are organic uprisings in Town Halls "across the country.
They desperately need to believe they are massive in numbers. For theirs is a collective hallucination, not an individually reached philosophy. Ironic, given all the lip service to the "individual" they so often espouse.
They are nothing without the security of safety in numbers (viewers). Alone, they stand afraid of facts, reality, and the real world complexities that await outside of any movie theater when the credits role.
They desperately need that movie to keep playing. That audience to surround them in the dark. The heroes to challenge the villains and save the world.
God forbid the lights come up.