Not Just a River in Egypt: The Lengths the Right-Wing Will Go to Maintain Their Deluded Beliefs

by: AndySchmooklerforCongress

Mon Nov 12, 2012 at 12:06:42 PM EST

The beliefs in question concern President Obama. But more fundamentally they concern a completely false picture of the nature of the moral choices to be decided through the American political system. This distorted picture serves very well the interests of Big Money in America: they're entitled to all they can get, and anything that calls that into question must be denigrated as the grasping of losers for what they don't deserve.

Here are some passages from Eric Boehler, on put it in the blog post on Media Matters, about the attack on the electorate elicited from the right from the failure of the voters to ratify what the right wing has been spewing about President Obama for the past four years:

During Obama's entire first term they depicted him as a business-hating, class warfare socialist who despises the American way of life.

But if that's true, why did Obama just score his second electoral landslide in four years?

Either 60 million voters just rejected the Noise Machine's endless, and often hysterical, claims about Obama, or all of those voters are part of the socialist problem in our "maker vs. taker" society. Faced with that choice, and refusing to admit their messaging futility, the right-wing media have opted for the latter: Americans are the real problem!...

Never hesitating to question whether they were the ones out of step with the mainstream, and if their Doomsday warnings about the center-left president were too extreme to be taken seriously by most voters, far-right talkers and writers set their sights on the populace and berated the nation for picking the wrong candidate, and for being selfish, thoughtless people on the prowl Tuesday for 'free stuff' from their 'Santa Claus' government, as Rush Limbaugh put it.

'People feel that they are entitled to things,; Bill O'Reilly lamented on Election Day, as he launched a pre-emptive attack on voters. Led by Hispanics, blacks and women, O'Reilly claimed there's a whole country filled with moochers who vote Democratic.

'Put bluntly, the takers outnumber the makers,' blogged John Hinderaker.

Have we ever heard such a contemptuous, post-election attack on American democracy?

Voters weren't simply misguided in choosing Obama and the Democratic agenda, we're told they revealed themselves as deeply flawed people.

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Andy Schmookler, until recently the Democratic nominee for Congress in Virginia's 6th District, is an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, Andy moved with his family to Shenandoah County in 1992.  He is a graduate of Harvard University and holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.