And there were real events and concerns that formed the basis for protests and lack of support for Obama. It wasn’t all birth certificate stuff.
Or are you arguing that there are real, verifiable reasons that people said he spoke with the voice of the Messiah? What is the real, actual event that leads us to conclude that Obama is “our product out of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence”?
Regards,
Shodan
Really? Where am I doing that?
I did? Where?
Where did I make these allegations? Are they in this thread? I really don’t remember writing much if anything about extreme rhetoric coming from the right about Bush. What significance do you think a single blog page has in relation to this discussion? Was there somewhere that I wrote that righties were touting GWB as the Messiah? Why do you think that link is relevant?
So if I do a search on this board, I wont find any posts by you advocating for Bush or his policies?
What were those real events and concerns? And why don’t we hear about them now? Have they been resolved? Were they really not problems to begin with?
I don’t even know that people said that. I know that one person said it on his blog. I know a lot of people said that a lot of people said that, as you’ve just done (see the bolded parts). I certainly didn’t say it.
You’ve seemingly lumped everyone who hasn’t denounced Obama into the category of “supporter” by trying to conflate the contents of one website as being the result of millions of people’s efforts.
OK.
Well, I don’t think the deification meme about Obama is a creature of the right, or at least didn’t begin there. Clinton’s campaign castigated the media for it; Saturday Night Live – hardly a hotbed of right-wing sympathies – caricatured the media’s fawning response to the Obama candidacy in at least two skits during the primary run-up.
To the extent it’s going on now, it’s simply because it’s become a commonly accepted storyline. Obama is supported by starry-eyed followers. Bush 43 is an idiot. Clinton is a horndog. Bush 41 is a wimp. Reagan is senile. Carter saw a UFO and is therefore clueless or alarmist. Ford is clumsy. Nixon’s a paranoid crook. LBJ is crude. Kenendy is a horndog. Etc. etc.
True, but look at what you wrote about there. Who said that Obama was the messiah? The media. Not staggeringly large numbers of Obama supporters. The media. This was largely a media-driven phenom until it became a meme.
The thing is, all the other memes you listed were about the Presidents themselves, but this meme is about everyone who does not actively denounce Obama.
Can you see that distinction?
I would have missed the edit window, so I had to make this a seperate post.
Let’s look at all those memes and see where they came from.
Reports and records of womanizing behaviour in his past.
LBJ did have a habit of cussing and could be quite vulgar.
Nixon maintained a list of his personal enemies that went back years. He also authorized at least one criminal activity that we know of and then actively sought to cover that invovevment up.
Carter did in fact claim to have seen a UFO.
Critics used speech patterns, train of thought pauses and other anomalies to reach the conclusion that Reagan may have Alzheimer’s while he was still President, which did turn out to be the case, IIRC.
Honestly, I don’t remember what started this one. Wasn’t it someone on Reagan’s campaign that said it first? No idea what the underlying context was. Anyone remember?
Clinton had a history of womanizing and affairs.
We just had 8 years of him, do I need to show that he was an idiot, or can we just agree on that point for now?
Your meme for Obama isn’t completely accurate, and judging by how much of the time you parse meanings, I’m going to assume you knew that and were going for easy points. Sorry. A more accurate rendition of it would be:
And that conclusion is unsupportable by facts. There isn’t even, AFAICT, a rational basis for thinking that. There’s no evidence to show it to be even likely to be true.
Notice that in all the previous Prezmemes™, there was a pattern and/or history of the behaviour at play. There’s no history of people worshipping Obama to point to. There weren’t even large numbers of people “worshipping” him to begin with; it was largely the media focussing on those very few that gave that meme momentum, as I think your post above illustrated, however inadvertantly.
Yet many righties, to the point where it seems as if it’s most of them, will continue to crow loudly this disconnect, even to the point of being proud about it.
What gives?
He’s got a point there, Bricker. All of those other descriptors are of individual men; the one about President Obama is meaningless without positing the existence of a bloc of “starry-eyed followers.”
Well, it’s simple.
They’re wrong. 
Is it? I think you’re over-reacting to that thread about “Obama supporters”.
But as far as generalizations go, don’t you see more demonizing of republicans than democrats here? I mean, you had it in this very thread:
Do I need to do a search for “Demoncrat” (and variations) and “Repuglicans” (and variations) and give you a post count?
So, if you understand the monickers on the left (which I assume you do since you aren’t complaining about them) is it so hard to understand the same thing from the left?
Well, that was refreshingly succinct.
But the thrust of the thread isn’t “are they right?”, but rather “why do they continue to do do these things and make these statements, when they themselves are unable to offer any justification or evidence to support them?”
Initially, I was just looking to see if my perception was correct. John Mace and elfkin pretty much settled that for me. then G-SE sealed it with his first post. My perception isn’t inaccurate: there is a large segment of the right that demonizes without knowledge.
So now I’m looking for why. Why would you do that? Why would you act without information? When presented with the lack of evidence supporting their claim, why don’t they back down and reassess, instead of shouting louder?
I mean, just look at posters in this thread who went and said stuff that they had no basis for. Why would you do that, and especially why would you do that and deliberately demonize total strangers, who you will need the votes and support of in the near future to realize your goals? How do you think it will sway me, or anyone else that is branded as “not righty therefore lefty” to vote for your cause?
And do any of them ever reconnect if the disconnects are pointed out?
Ok, what is it that I wrote that caused you to reach the conclusion that I was over-reacting to another thread?
So you see equivalence in one posting by DCMS that contained the word “rethuglicans”? You think that mocking the name of a group to convey distaste is equivalent to falsely placing un-related people into a group and then demonizing them?
Missed the edit window:
John this isn’t about generalizations. It’s about willfully, falsely applying a generalization in an attempt to demonize people.
xtisme, did you really need a cite for right-wing idolatry of Bush?
Fer fuck’s sake, I used “rethuglicans” to be ironic. I’m sure if you did your thread search you would find more “repuglicans” than “demoncrats.” Nature of the board. However, I don’t think you would find much of either, really. I don’t recall a huge amount of either term (and I guarantee you wouldn’t find me using either term before this thread.) Care to repeat your search on a right-leaning board and see if the frequency of “demoncrats” and the like are overrepresented there compared to here?
To answer your last question, I think people who use “repugs” and “demoncrats” are stupid and childish no matter what side they are on. Way to quote one word from my post and ignore the rest, though. It’s much easier to ignore things that don’t support your point, especially in a fast-moving thread.
And when Obama loses a truth-telling contest with a corrupt dictator and lies us into two spectacularly expensive wars and wrecks the economy for the benefit of a few of his buddies and bungles pretty much everything he touches, I will totally understand if you want to call people that are still defending everything he does “Obamafellators” or whatever Rush tells you to call them.
Me?? Did I ask for such a cite? It is pretty funny, granted, though I’m not sure what it’s supposed to demonstrate. If I dig up a YouTube video of children singing about change, or changing about Obama in unison, will that prove anything? Other than the old saw that right wingers are nuts but left wingers are crazy? Or is it the other way around? I can never keep them straight. 
Seriously, I’ve lost interest in this thread because it seems there are some double standards at work here. It’s incredible to me that people think that Obama is being unfairly attacked or that his supporters are being labeled with unfair ‘monikers’ from evil righties (of COURSE they are), and that this is somehow new or different than what happened under Bush or most other presidents…or politicians throughout history for that matter.
From MY (biased, to be sure) perspective here’s what I see (this is the XT-Cliff’s Notes version): Clinton get’s elected when the right wing and moderates split between the incumbent Bush the Elder and Perot, and the right wing reacts to his time in office by ratcheting up the rhetoric against the Dems in general and Clinton specifically (it doesn’t help that he’s a popular president presiding over a time of unrivaled economic expansion in the US). This progresses to higher and higher levels, especially after his re-election (landslide) and after the whole blowjob witch hunt thingy (bad blood all around, but the left wing especially takes this hard and is ready to lash back when and if the opportunity presents itself).
Gore then runs for office but the left wing is split in a similar fashion between Gore and Nader, so Bush is elected (it doesn’t help that the election, despite Nader’s effect, is VERY close, and many Dems feel they were robbed). The left takes exception to this and begins the negative rhetoric even before Bush takes office, stating with the long and painful ‘Bush stole the election!’ meme, as well as the Bush Tax Cuts and later the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They take the rhetoric to new heights (or lows), throwing out ever dirty term and phrase in the book, and are able to rally sufficient angst and fury against Bush and the Republicans that they manage to shift the balance of power in the House and Senate. The right wing, after years of abuse and also the demonstrated usefulness of this tactic begin to use the exact same strategy, and focus it on Obama and the Dems.
More specifically, on this board, years of anti-Republican/anti-Bush sentiments have become so ingrained that it’s like breathing air…you don’t even notice it unless suddenly there is a lack. By the same token, since we have a pretty much microscopic Republican/RW member set, you don’t really see as much anti-Obama/anti-Dem rhetoric, and when you do it is usually from one of the nuttier 'dopers who can be more easily dismissed. So, anything that smacks of anti-Obama sentiment (like calling someone something as foul as an ‘Obama Supporter’ or ‘Obama Loyalist’…oh, the shame, the villainy of throwing around such loaded terms! :p) is blown completely out of proportion, and is seen as some new type of villainous attack, never seen before in the new depths which the horrible right wingers are willing to plunge too!
It’s all BS. People have been slapping ‘monikers’ (and monocles too) on each other since there have been politics. I’ve seen descriptions of Roman political propaganda where political opponents call each other all manner of names, and some of the stuff they did in post Revolution American politics would curl your hair. The attacks against Obama are nothing new…the attacks against the Dems are nothing new. Whether you think the attacks are or aren’t justified depends solely on your partisan, political biases and world view…same with the attacks against Bush et al. But anyone claiming with a straight face that Obama is somehow getting more heat than Bush did, or being called worst names, or that his followers are being disparaged more…well, someone claiming that, IMHO, has basically been living in a cave for the past decade and only recently emerged back into the light. A really dark and dank cave.
Either that, or they are letting their political bias and double standard blinders color their vision.
-XT
Some of those real concerns were that Obama had no managerial, military, or business experience. As indeed he does not. One of Obama’s mentors made racist and hateful speeches. One of Obama’s supporters, the man from whose living room Obama launched his political career, is a former terrorist. Obama said he was going to run his campaign only using public funds, and then reneged.
None of these have been resolved, but the campaign is over and Obama won. For better or worse, we now have a President who, if he finishes his term, will have held down a full-time job longer than at any other time in his life.
Well, they did - the Obama-as-Messiah happened, and a good deal more than with Bush in 2000. So your characterization of the situation is not well-informed. People like Oprah and Louis Farrakhan and MSM reporters got all slobbery and starry-eyed over Obama, to a degree that did not occur when Bush first ran for President.
So this notion that you seem to have that Obama supporters are reasoned and moderate and Bush supporters are wild-eyed fanatics is not accurate.
Glad to clear this up.
Regards,
Shodan
If this is what you think the thread is about, you’ve completely missed it. I’ll try again to state clearly:
The problem IS NOT that Obama’s supporters are being unfairly labeled. The problem IS that the descriptor “Obama supporter” is not accurate, but righties continue to use it as tho it were accurate, and then they use that label to demonize people.
After all, if Bob is the worst form of evil, and Henry supports Bob and his efforts, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that Henry is also evil.
But the “Henrys” don’t exist, at least not to the degree that the righties think (and/or want others to think). They want to world to think that anyone who voted for Obama is a supporter, but that’s not the case, as I’ve shown.
The equivalences that some have tried to make have fallen apart. Even the thought that this was a normal meme for a president during his term was shown to be incompatible with the facts.
And my reply is of COURSE it’s not accurate and of COURSE they use it to try and score points, pin labels and demonize (and simonize for all I know) people. That’s the entire point. It’s the same thing that lefties were doing against Bush…it’s why they used terms like Bushista and Bushivic, and why they attempted to paint Bush et al as Fascists and Hitler-like.
Exactly. What you are trying to do is to paint your opponent as evil, then draw a connection. That’s politics 101, and has been in use for thousands of years…hell, probably since folks lived in caves.
-XT
[Notice that in all the previous Prezmemes™, there was a pattern and/or history of the behaviour at play. There’s no history of people worshipping Obama to point to. There weren’t even large numbers of people “worshipping” him to begin with; it was largely the media focussing on those very few that gave that meme momentum, as I think your post above illustrated, however inadvertantly.
[/QUOTE]
The genesis of Obama as The Messiah, The One, stem, I think from speeches like [URL=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzoiPnrCwSc&feature=related”]this](
[QUOTE=Snowboarder Bo;12866412) and and [this.]
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=molWTfv8TYw&feature=related)
It’s fairly well summed up here,which includes the Messianic (not to mention, maniacal) line: “A light will shine down, from somewhere, it will light upon you. You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, “I have to vote for Barack.””]It’s fairly well summed up here, which includes the Messianic (not to mention, maniacal) line: "A light will shine down, from somewhere, it will light upon you. You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, “I have to vote for Barack.”