President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

If you were getting vaccine via air gun, you'd better not. Lean into it or the thing will take out a chunk of meat.

 

In 2008, the right wing screech machine swore the stock market was condemned to oblivion if Obama took office.

 

Happy New Year to everyone on this thread.

 

I read that it is deducted from their check.

 

A developed a thought today while watching TV in a waiting room. Do you think some of the problems we are facing (not the crazies) is because so many Boomers grew up on a steady diet of 50s westerns and movies like Tora, Tora, Tora and think they are historically accurate?

 

I think its nostalgia for a time that never really existed. Maybe everything was "better" for certain white people (straight males) in the '50s - but it wasn't for non-whites, non-straights, and women. The world was painted AND presented in black and white, good and bad - Since then, the Civil Rights Era, Roe, Stonewall, Vietnam, Watergate, 9/11, COVID - it really isn't an Us vs. Them world anymore and people still struggle mightily to keep it that way.

 

Interesting theory because it requires people who never experienced the 1950s (who would be in their 80s now) to believe some idealized version of a world that they are trying to recreate without context. Real Boomers got vaxxed against DPT and polio because those were real dangers.

I like to think of this current group of malcontents as the SOBs (Sons of Boomers) or even GSOBs (grandsons). The overwhelming majority of people involved in the events of Jan. 6 -- or Charlottesville, or this inane anti-vaxx wave -- were too young to have lived in a white-colored world. I did -- Palm Beach County didn't segregate until 1970 -- but even then, I was in seventh grade. That eliminates everyone under 45 from having any first-hand inkling about what life was like then.

This is just a continuation of what Republicans do best, and have since the 1950s. It really doesn't matter who the "boogeyman" is because it's constantly changing -- McCarthyism, the Soviet missiles, the Chinese, Black Folks, Drug Dealers, Immigrants, Gun Rights -- somebody is always coming for your FREEDOM! And enough people fall for that lie that we're in this situation.

 

I've personally always felt that American society was permanently bifurcated after the Vietnam War. On one side, the 'hippies' and the people who put their personal pleasure ahead of the responsibilities of their parents and the women's, civil and gay rights activists who would rightly suffer this abuse no longer, and on the other side, a mostly rural group attempting to recapture an America that never existed, before people spat on troops coming home. So there was always an 'other,' and after 9/11, I think a lot of those people were convinced that that other was now a permanent threat, whether it was by force, by leftist politics, or just by loose morals.

I mean, right-wing talk radio, and its descendant, right-wing television have been in our media landscape now for nearly 30 years. And when someone tells you five days a week that government is a malevolent entity conspiring against its own citizens, in many cases on a spiritual level, it is not at all hard to believe that thousands of people believe that a former president and his wife and "Hollywood elites" preside over a pedophilic leadership cabal that harvests kids' blood. That's probably not even in the top 10 percent of ridiculous theories that could have come out of this.

 

Kyle Rittenhouse, the Proud Boys, the Let's Go Brandon stuff, it's all echoes of Hitler Youth. Nazism flourished because the Germans felt they were betrayed by their government after World War I. The young Nazis had no idea what really happened, only what lies their leaders told them. And Hitler was perfectly suited to fill that void. Sort of like ... Trump thinks he could be.

Now, it's a bunch of numbskulls not bright enough to recognize they're being played by social media and partisan politics, but they're just dangerous enough to incite full-blown insurrection. And the Republicans are more than willing to burn it all down, for all the wrong reasons.