The Ugliness

The teabaggers held a rally in DC on Saturday. Organized in large part by former House Republican Leader Dick Armey's Freedomworks, it was attended at a 5-7% level of what the organizers promised, claimed and even lied about, misquoting ABC News. What it did bring was the ugly lynch mob side of America, or so the imagery brought by the protesters would suggest.

This "classic" image they created and seemed to fetishize symbolizes the morbid contempt in which they hold those who oppose them, as well as the confusion of their message:



The sign is evil enough, printed and distributed, but the staged photo (see lynch link above) is confusing in that it can be read as a defication on their very own message, i.e. a negation, yet is clearly meant to equate Obama with feces, i.e. shitting on Obama.

Seriously, I don't recall any similar image from the anti-Bush/Cheney demonstrations this decade. But then again, they weren't African Americans, and as Maureen Dowd points out in her Sunday column, guys like Rep. Joe "You Lie" Wilson are implicitly reacting to that:

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.

And, back to the dissonance of the protest message, it is at once a confusion of political labelling, Obama is a Communist yet a Hitler (who, to inform the educationally-challenged teabaggers, imprisoned and killed Communist). At the heart of this enraged minority is what one TPM reader who went there calls out:

There were small groups huddled around the Glen Beck inspired flags and the usual disaffected white males wandering in groups with the American flag desecrated by being incorporated into clothing. Having been to the exact same location for the Obama Inauguration and other large political events, this was small fry in comparison. However, it was an angry group with a real sense of absolute entitlement. Something not focused on by many. This sense of entitlement that they deserve to be the dominant deciders and that it's being taken away.

As I've written before, I see this as trying to delegitimize a President elected with a larger electoral and popular margin than in two decades, I believe with the ultimate goal of inciting or legitimizing violence against him. My instincts say that if the President is harmed these forces will make sure it comes from a black man to help legitimize the act -- in front of our local Whole Foods today there was the same white youth manning the LaRouche "Obama as Hitler" table but this time with a young African American fellow traveler.

If you have any doubt that these protesters are on the psycho side of American history:



God bless freedom of speech in our United States of America.