One of the curious things about Facebook is that if a "friend" leaves a comment on the page of someone unknown, I get notified. Recently that phenomenon sucked me into a "conversation" with the original poster, who'd claimed Barack Obama is the worst president ever.
I made the mistake of responding to some comments by people who were making fully Foxolimbeckifed claims about the horrors of Obamacare. What I did was post links to impartial articles, among which was one discussing the fact that several red states have recently decided to sign on. And one linking to a just-released study by Kaiser-Permanente, about premium rates, which were, shall we say, at odds with claims made on that thread.
Here's how the original poster responded:
People like you Sid make me sick to my stomach. Socialized
medicine is run by your Government and we the people don't
want the government to run any part of our lives. You Liberals
are so insecure that you have to have others making your
decisions mainly because your not smart enough to and your
too lazy to go out and make a life on your own. Go find some
more lie's that your boyfriend Muslim brother digs up, this is
what you morons feed on is lies. So go back to your Liberal
News and get your daily food serving. You creep.!!!And there, in a nutshell, is the reason I'm so depressed about the future of our country, and the democracy on which, at one time, it was based. (Side note: as seen somewhere else on Facebook: "You can teach people to hate, and you can teach people to spell. Evidently, you can't do both.")
There, in a nutshell, is the result of non-stop Foxolimbeckification. The end of discourse. The ingestion, without the benefit of digestion, of deliberate lies and disinformation, based entirely on the well-established certainty that the consumers of right-wing propaganda will take it in with unmitigated credulity.
Nor is it mysterious: clearly Foxolimbeckifed teabaggers like it that way. They prefer their hatred to information. They reject the hard work of addressing real issues with real commitment to finding solutions. Because that would require letting go of prejudice; because that would require mental effort; because that would require what the US is really about, and it's not zero-sum politics. Until recently, anyway.
So, what do you think represents a greater threat to the foundations on which this country is built, on the persistence of which it depends: someone willing to try to engage in conversation by providing facts on which to base it, or someone who responds like the above-quoted proud "conservative?"
And when will what's left of conservatism in the country demand better of their bedfellows?
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