Wednesday, June 17, 2009

It’s Just About Hating Obama

Apparently “dozens” showed up for the fire David Letterman rally in New York: about 100 people, estimates the Village Voice, if one includes the media, “rubberneckers” and counterprotestors like these guys:



Among the protestors was PUMA Harriet Christian, one of the disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters who endorsed John McCain in the last election rather than support an "inadequate black male" (her words, not mine). Air America interviewed her at the rally:



She was substantially more subdued than the last time we saw her, ejected from the DNC rules and bylaws meeting shouting “God damn the Democrats!” and telling Neil Cavuto that Obama’s nomination was invalid because “99% of the blacks don’t even know why they’re voting for him.”

Okie dokie.

Air America also interviewed a conspiracy theory nutter who rolled David Letterman, Air America and George Soros into one big soup-pot of liberal fascism. However, he knew the correct pronunciation of “Soros” with proper Hungarian inflection.

I repeat: okie dokie.

Jim My Conservative Commenter® has been trying, with great difficulty, to conflate the lame Letterman joke with the racist Goforth e-mail, as if the two are flip sides of the same coin. Even though plenty of feminists (including NOW) have decried the joke as in poor taste, he's trying to use this as an example of liberal hypocrisy. It's not working very well, though, and even Jim doesn't seem to have his heart in the argument.

Still, the two events are alike in one respect: the racist e-mail and the fauxtrage about David Letterman both reflect partisan hatred of President Obama. After all, we haven’t seen any racist e-mails about Michael Steele circulating around Tennessee state legislative offices; of course not, he’s a Republican. A year and a half ago when we were all blogging and e-mailing about misogyny at "liberal” MSNBC these folks outside The Ed Sullivan Theater were absent. Where was Harriet Christian? She said she was protesting Letterman to make a stand for women's equality. Where was she in Feb. 2008? Where were any of the PUMAs?

Really, the one thing that unifies this group is their hatred Obama. Any fake controversy, fauxtrage, boycott, offensive e-mails, you name it can boil down to that one fact. We saw it at the tea parties, where organizers tried to say their movement was "bipartisan" while telling cameras not to film the "Obama Is A Socialist" signs.

It’s partisan BS targeting the Democratic president. There is so little substance behind these right-wing activists it’s shocking.