I was a guest on Newsradio 1080 KRLD in Dallas yesterday to discuss how President Obama has handled the economy so far. I debated a GOP consultant in Dallas named Chris Turner who was pretty slick. He immediately started in with the new talking point that President Obama was being too negative and it was affecting the stock market which in turn means he's doing a bad job. It's a straw man argument of course. The stock market is in terrible shape because of the Wall Street frat boys.
President Obama had to tell the people the truth on a topic that's very difficult to understand or explain. Remember when President Bush couldn't think of anything he ever did wrong and then had the fraking nerve to blame bad intelligence on his decision to invade Iraq. But if Obama tries to level with Americans, well then, he's not painting a rosy enough picture. Just start a war with a smile, be optimistic about Hurricane Katrina and that's A-OK.
Now that the legislation has passed, his approval rating is sky high while Republicans are exiled to the basement. I expect him to be very optimistic about our chances of recovery tonight on TV. I'm glad, Bobby "The Exorcist" Jindal is speaking for the opposition. Maybe he'll get motivated to give us a demonstration.
It's amazing how many different ways the right wing is attacking President Obama in such a short time. But I didn't expect anything less from them and I believe the media will adopt more of their talking points as his tenure continues, and it will be either equal or much worse than the treatment Bill Clinton received. Eric Boehlert wrote a great article about this:
Unhinged in 30 days: The right-wing media's Obama era implosion
The Republican Noise Machine doesn't need the customary 100 days to size up the new president. Right-wing commentators barely needed 30 days to come to their conclusion that they hate everything Barack Obama stands for.
In terms of speed and efficiency, the right-wing collection of bloggers, AM talkers, pundits, and yes, newspaper cartoonists, may have set a new land speed record for becoming collectively unhinged, as they wail and moan about how the new Democratic president's turning America into a fascist state, or communist, or socialist, or whatever other bugaboo claim Glenn Beck and Laura Ingraham are tossing out to viewers and listeners on a daily basis.
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If we just pause and take one or two steps back from the daily/hourly barrage of hate, it's obvious that faced with the new Obama presidency, the Republican Noise Machine has already lost all perspective -- has gone totally loco -- and it's only February, a mere month into Obama's first four years in office. Who dares to even imagine where the right-wing "conversation" goes from here?
Secondly, Malkin tried to claim that everyone on the left used the Hitler/Nazi language, and to prove her point she did lots of Googling and posted links to sites that contained that kind of language or imagery. But one was a photo of anti-Bush graffiti from Argentina, circa 2006. What that had to do with Malkin's claim about American liberals, I'm still not sure. And many of the links Malkin posted led to sites I've never heard of.
She did link to the landmark site Daily Kos, and a search there found lots of dumb, regrettable Bush/Hitler references. But most of those were from 2006 and 2007, 60 months after Bush had been in office, and most were by Daily Kos readers, or diarists, not front-page writers. You'll note that in her liberals-did-it-too defense Malkin didn't link to images of Markos at Daily Kos with his arms around a Bush-era swastika protester, or Matt Stoller or John Amato or Jeralyn Merritt -- or fill in the blank with any other A-list blogger you'd like to mention. Even after eight years of despair (i.e. botched war, trampled civil liberties, mass incompetence), most prominent liberal bloggers never went there with the Bush-Hitler nonsense.
But Malkin, among the most widely read bloggers in the conservative movement, and just four weeks into the new Democratic presidency's run? Hell yeah, she'll pose with an Obama hater waving around a swastika sign, and then refuse to apologize, claiming the Nazi/Obama analogy was not "completely out of the bounds of public civil discourse." Because honestly, who knows more about the guidelines of "public civil discourse" than Michelle Malkin?
