Tenthers, Birthers, and Other Nobamas

The immediate, massive grassroots populist uprisings against any and all Obama policies has been kind of startling to the outside observer, particularly in the level of ferocity with which he’s been attacked.  A lot of the attacks come from legitimate places – after all, there is plenty of disagreement over the proper way to deal with healthcare reform – but some of them are just downright stupid, and this is what should probably concern Obama the most for 2012.

How can he expect to win re-election if he’s getting in trouble for things he’s not doing?  You take, for example, the death panels.  Anyone who takes 8 seconds (I just did it and counted) to look up Death Panels on Google can see that the Wall Street Journal named it the “Lie of the Year” and the following sites are for the most part dedicated to the discrediting the idiots who actually think these are going to happen.

The grain of truth in the issue lies in the rationing of health care, but there’s a strange double standard here, in that it’s exactly what insurance companies do now.  And that’s not to say it’s evil, it’s just what they need to do to cover other people’s health expenses.  Reason dictates, to me at least, that health care rationing is better entrusted to a government which is accountable to me than to an insurance company, which is accountable to the bottom line.  I was at a gas station today, and went in to pay to find the customer in front of me red in the face, spitting out an anti-Obama diatribe, about how he was trying to dictate when people could die.  The gas station attendants were nodding in feverish assent, and I, not wanting a face punch, decided not to point out that the industrial size breakfast burrito he was buying had more of a say in when he’d die than “Barack Hussein Obama,” as he so affectionately called him, ever would.

Then you take the birthers.  I don’t feel the need to dignify their claims with a response, suffice it to say they’re absolutely moronic.  But they’ve gathered a LOT of support.  There seems to be a bigger movement claiming that Obama’s not a legitimate President than there was a movement claiming Bush wasn’t a legitimate President after that spotty 2000 chad-counting fiasco.

Now there’s a new movement known as “Tenthers,” which is a group that focuses on giving the states more rights and cutting back on all federal programs.  Okay, I can give this movement a little more credit, the federalist/anti-federalist debate dates back to our earliest historic political rivalry, between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, respectively.  Yeah, it tastes a bit like the Confederate south to me, but hey, the South will rise again.  Where this movement starts to feel a bit… well, stupid, is when you look at the truly massive expansion of the powers of the federal government while Bush was in power.  I’d imagine that the overlap between the two groups protesting these two administrations over expansion of powers is relatively slim.

And I don’t want to belittle everyone in these groups, because there are legitimate complaints to the Obama administration so far, and if you check my other posts, you’ll see I’m not part of the Obama Army, but I think a lot of this is borne out of a massive, misguided populist rage.  There are just so many people who still believe in death panels (Sorry, Virginia, they don’t exist), there are so many people wearing the Obama-as-The-Joker T-shirt with SOCIALISM printed on the bottom (the Joker was an ANARCHIST.  They are TOTALLY DIFFERENT AND CONFLICTING IDEOLOGIES), and there are so many people who believe Obama’s a communist (I have never met a communist who would consider Obama one of their own, and I’ve met a few communists in my day.  Also, he’s not even pushing for a single-payer system, which is the only heath care system you could possibly label as “socialist”), that I honestly think the entire country has drank stupid juice.

This is what Obama has to worry about.  It’s not just the fearmongering anti-intellectual reactionaries giving a call-to-arms, it’s the fact that so many people are answering the call.  How does the great campaigner of our times combat that?

(And, just to reinforce, I’m really not endorsing Obama here, I’m just pointing out supreme idiocy as I see it)