• AI: Thanks for your informative response to my post.

Not to burden the dying thread with a series of trade-offs, but we're on the same wavelength. I wrote this elsewhere recently:

As I've repeated ad nauseam, after Obama captured the nomination he castled behind his right rook; his main objective became to woo and capture the approval of the Republicans and reactionary wingnut yahoo masses Nixon called "The Silent Majority".

I'm not considering whatever Obama was saying at the time, incidentally. What difference does it make?

(Obama enthusiasts, imbued with the sanctifying grace and ecstasy of pragmatism, predicted that this track was a parabola, that Obama would swing around the sun with increased mass and acceleration, and on the return trip scoop up the progressives and their causes.

So far, it's been a straight line, and Obama a shrinking dot streaking-- or stumbling-- ever-rightward.)

I'd already stopped dutifully trying to kindle some positive feeling for Obama by that time, but nevertheless I was appalled when Obama filled his administration with Clintonista neoliberal hawks.

An Obama-infatuated progressive friend scoffed at my displeasure that Obama hadn't "reached out" beyond Clinton Family soldiers. Obviously, my pragmatic interlocutor explained impatiently, Obama must first and foremost Consolidate the Party.

Later, of course, Obama similarly outsourced the US Treasury to Goldman-Sachs by appointing a preponderance of "ex" Goldman-Sachs executives to key government positions. I gather this was in order to Consolidate Wall Street. [...]
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• CarolynC, FWIW I think you make an excellent point regarding the fulminating issue of "illegal immigration".

I've had one or two acquaintances-- former co-workers-- forward ugly, creepy anti-immigration material, typically either righteously indignant or attempting humor, along with more innocuous e-mail "items of interest".

From my casual association when we worked together, I took them for "progressive" liberal types-- former DFH-types, in fact. At first I thought they were sending them ironically, i.e., "check this out".

Clearly they've bought into the meme of "illegal immigrant" parasitic invaders looking for a way to get over at decent folks' expense, and think it's OK to say so.

The Obama race issue and the immigrant issue arise from a common denominator of xenophobia, and it is indeed the case that an unholy synergy is ratcheting up the rancor as you suggest.

OK, next-to-last post!

You slipped one in while I wasn't looking! ;)

This individual associates himself strongly with your last post.

I use "Received Wisdom" synonymously with "manufactured consent". But apart from new memes and themes created by government and its corporate media propaganda arm, there is a body of "legacy" memes floating about in the Amerikan ether.

There's a gallery of legacy stereotypes that hang invisibly over Amerikans like Norman Rockwell* paintings; the portrait of "Moral and Trustworthy Leader" is arguably universal-- paradoxically, only the subject's features change.

It's remarkable how this portrait is refreshed and renewed when a Leader-- especially an iconic wingnut Leader-- dies. The corporate media's smarmy posthumous hagiography following Richard Nixon's death is even more demonstrative of this phenomenon than Reagan's Cinemascopic orgiastic obsequies.

In my experience, even reasonably intelligent and skeptical persons are astonishingly prone to subscribe to such secular pieties. Somehow, very elementary, and purely sentimental, concepts of common decency, courtesy, and civility are programmed into citizens and undermine their capacity for critical observation and thought.

And it further astonishes me that citizens are so willing to stoutly and unequivocally affirm this presumption of virtue in public officials based on minimal evidence.

Some of my relatives and friends who support(ed) Obama actually read his book(s); most know him through teevee appearances and material disseminated by his campaign. Not so much anymore, but during the campaign his supporters perceived him as personally Warm 'n Wonderful, a genuine altruist who was also a skilled politician.

Meanwhile, although I definitely inhaled, I couldn't get a rush from this pixie dust. Instead, I actually fought down a feeling that Obama was a shallow, manipulative, self-serving cold-blooded corporate lawyer.

No offense to the once and future corporate lawyers here, but I use the term in a pejorative sense; I have my own stereotypes and "secular pieties" too, obviously.

FWIW, I also sense an overarching piety that may be a toxic residue of the Sixties countercultural tolerance and rejection of being "judgemental". Not unlike the "Everybody's a Winner!" mentality of the Special Olympics, there persists a fatuous ideal that Everyone must be presumed to be Good and Honorable, absent clear and convincing evidence to the contrary.

If I were to say to my university-educated, university-employed sibling that Obama is another example of the banality of evil, said sibling would either assume I was kidding-- or blow me off as "hyperbolic", among other things.

And I marvel that a career high-school English teacher turned administrator, who routinely "taught" Camus' "The Stranger", remains apparently insensitive to the problem of subjective and idiosyncratic reality as it applies to judging character.

(Actually, to their credit, my siblings mostly avoid the subject of Obama; I think their dormant Crap Detectors are beeping.)

*I actually admire Rockwell's work, which has redeeming qualities. But, not surprisingly for someone making a living as a magazine illustrator, it was accessible to the yahoo masses. They licked off the sugary, superficial, sentimental icing and threw away the rest.

IMO, the difference of opinion here over the history and pedigree of reactionary right-wing hostility may be ameliorated by expressing it in old-school Madison Avenue advertisement sloganeering:

New and Improved Wingnut Rancor®-- now Fortified with Racist™ boosters!