Monroe Anderson

ObamaCare The Game could battle the evil Echo Chamber

While attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week in New Orleans, I came up with an idea as to how the Obama Administration could help us understand the historic health care law. I wrote a column about it for The Root website.

'Obamacare,' the Video Game?

This writer says that the repacking of the president's accomplishments would keep his message in play.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: June 29, 2012 at 12:48 AM

 

(The Root) -- The Saturday before the 2010 November midterm elections, President Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod was a call-in guest on a radio show I was co-hosting. Team Obama was already bracing for a shellacking, since for months one Republican after the next had lip-synched right-wing talking points, accusing the POTUS of having accomplished zip.

I knew the Republicans were playing fast and loose with the truth. I knew that, like it or not, in his first two years in office, Barack Obama had scratched more off his to-do list than any other U.S. president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.

So I asked Axelrod why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the first two years of his first term. I dare not try to reconstruct the entire answer from the president's then senior adviser, but I will repeat two words that jumped out at me: "Information gridlock."

That's right. Axelrod's defense for a failure to communicate was that Obama's accomplishments came at such a breakneck pace that the White House press office didn't have the time to make sure that everyone following could keep up with the score. Maybe. Maybe not. But it would seem that the one achievement that is the most momentous since LBJ pushed Medicare and Medicaid through Congress in 1965 might have gotten a little special treatment: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

It hasn't helped that from its conception through passage until now, the right-wing echo chamber has been in superdrive, dogging and demonizing the president's health care law. But I've got an app for that: Obamacare the Game.

Rather than trying to run down all the complicated bennies and perks hidden in the 2,600-page law, a computer game would have players racing through level after level, virtually discovering the rewards or penalties for either being or not being enrolled in the health plan.

It wouldn't matter whether it was a strategy, simulation or role-playing game, as long as it was available for a free download on the Obama-campaign website for every system from iPad to Xbox to desktop -- Facebook, too. The gamification of the president's historic accomplishment could quickly and easily be a mind changer, slaying the stream of poison that the right keeps spewing. With the flick of a click, Americans would be able to go from unenlightened and turned off to informed and engaged.

How to beat the right-wing smear-and-fear machine came to me while I was in "The Gamification of News" session at the National Association of Black Journalists' convention last week. Although the panel was focused on a cutting-edge tactic for engaging readers and viewers in complex news stories, my mind quickly leaped from there to politics.

Since then I have interviewed two of the gamification panelists, Manuel "Mani" Saint-Victor and Scott Anderson, to see what they thought. They both agreed that it could be done and suggested how to do it.

"Have people walk through the process of being a different person with a different illness -- [the] Sim [City] approach," said Saint-Victor, who is a former psychiatry resident physician at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital and a founder of Marveloper Media. "Let them walk through and let them see it with the Obamacare version and without the Obamacare version, not telling them which is and which isn't."

Scott Anderson, who is my firstborn as well as the co-founder and lead programmer at Enemy Airship and one of Game Developer Magazine's top 50 game developers for 2009, had a similar idea. He thinks the game should be "how to survive without health insurance." In his version of Obamacare the Game, "You have all these setbacks, and you have all these crazy things people will have to do to survive," Scott said. "It might not be fun, but it'll be effective. People will say, 'Oh, wow'; if these things happened to me, I'd be screwed."

Although gamification hasn't come to politics in a big way yet, it is already being played out in advertising through reward cards and loyalty systems, Saint-Victor said. Of course, almost everybody is familiar with the SimCity games, and there's even a game called Cut Throat Capitalism, which explores the economics of Somali pirates and why they do what they do. "You basically pick what ships they go after and how you'll treat the hostages," Anderson said.

The Supreme Court may have upheld the individual mandate on Thursday, but hold up on the high fives. Just how badly the Obama administration and campaign need to get beyond the information gridlock is patently obvious.

A majority of Americans -- 54 percent -- still believe that Obamacare should be repealed. Republicans have spent three times more money bad-mouthing the president's health law than Democrats have spent explaining it. Right now there are 3 million small-business people who qualify for a health care tax credit.

A mere 170,000 have applied.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

The POTUS sings the blues, Blue marries his bass player

 

 

  Barack Obama sang the blues last night.

I saw it coming. When Chicago’s blues icon Buddy Guy started egging the president to join in on Sweet Home Chicago, I figured I was about to witness an encore singing excursion, a follow-up to the “I’m so in love with you” debut performance last month. This time, instead of the Apollo,  the president was playing  the East Room at the White House, singing a duet with “The King of the Blues,”  B.B. King, and a gaggle of other blues stars as back up.

“This is music with humble beginnings -- roots in slavery and segregation, a society that rarely treated black Americans with the dignity and respect that they deserved.  The blues bore witness to these hard times.  And like so many of the men and women who sang them, the blues refused to be limited by the circumstances of their birth,” President Obama said in his opening remarks for the Black History Month celebration concert as it was live streamed over the Internet.
 
“The music migrated north -- from Mississippi Delta to Memphis to my hometown in Chicago.  It helped lay the foundation for rock and roll, and R&B and hip-hop.  It inspired artists and audiences around the world.”

One of those artists who was inspired by the blues was there and featured: Mick Jagger.

His presence struck a sour note for me. Watching the lead singer of “the world’s greatest rock and roll band” headlining at a blues concert in the White House made me instantly think of Dr. John’s lyrics “I been in the right place, but it must have been the wrong time.”

Here we had an English rocker pretending to be a blues performer in America’s House.

It was a bad juxtaposition for me: my friend, Sugar Blue, would have been a better choice.

Blue was the harmonica player on Miss You, the second song Jagger sang last night at the White House and my favorite Rolling Stones hit. When you listen to the 1978 recording, the song’s driving, defining beat is Blue’s harmonica rift. When Mick sang the song last night, I missed Blue.

Across the threshold photo by Maggie Reid

As fate would have it, five days earlier I had attended Blue’s wedding right here in Sweet Home Chicago at the Chess Studios, home of the Chicago Blues Foundation and Willie Dixon’s Blues Heaven.

 

The Wedding Reception. From left to right, Billy Branch, Wayne Baker Brooks, Sugar Blue, Billy Boy Arnold, Iltaria Lanteri, Eddie Clearwater, Deitra Farr, and Paul Benjamin (Photo by Monroe Anderson)

Ilaria Lantieri and Sugar Blue cutting the wedding cake (photo by Maggie Reid)

 Sugar Blue’s was no ordinary wedding.

First of all, his lovely bride was Ilaria Lantieri, his band’s bass guitarist who is also an MD in her native Italy. Their wedding was a three-layered affair. It was a conventional wedding imbued with a Native American Smudge Ceremony followed by the jumping of the broom. The guests were their extended blues family--Blues greats Billy Branch, Detra Farr, Corky Siegel, Jimmy Johnson, Eddie Clearwater and Billy Boy Arnold were present as were the children of Jimmy Reed, Howlin Wolf and the grandchildren of Willie Dixon.

Following the ceremonies on Chicago’s South Side, we all went to Rosa’s Lounge, the blues club on the city’s near northwest side. That’s where the bride, and her Grammy award-winning groom, took to the stage to play some blues. They were soon joined by many of their other talented blues guests.

And while the White House celebration was a sweet way to spend a couple of hours, Rosa’s rocked the night away.

Mr. and Mrs. Blue jamming at Rosa's (Photo by Monroe Anderson)

 

 

 

Ten years after 9/11, America needs 911

 

 

    On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, the Chicago Sun-Times assigned all its Sunday op-ed columnists to write on the subject. Below is what I wrote. I've cut and pasted it from a wingnut website, Free Republic. If you'll notice, I got honored with a very grown-up "Barf Alert."

    Well, five years have passed. We're Bush-free but still stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    We're also still afraid.

    We can't catch a flight without going shoeless first and we're more than likely to have to show our private parts to a TSA agent before we're allowed to board. Osama bin Laden is dead but his terror lives on. So does his toll on American freedom and finances. We've spent ourselves into a hole by occupying two countries in our pursuit of invisible men. While we've been blowing things up for the past decade, China has been building and building and building.

We're still stuck in the quagmire with President Obama afraid to pull the plug, rightly fearing that the Republicans will successfully label him our soft on terror, anti-American, pro-Arab, freedom-hating commander-in-chief.

Ten years after 9/11, we're still nation-building in the Middle East while the Midwest in our nation is falling apart. So, for this next presidential election, I think Obama should be making a 911 call for America--we need the emergency services.

   

Just in time for elections, Bush campaigns on fear (BARF ALERT)
Chicago Sun-Times ^ | September 10, 2006 | MONROE ANDERSON

Posted on Sun Sep 10 09:47:18 2006 by Chi-townChief

 

Just in time for elections, Bush campaigns on fear

by Monroe Anderson

Five years after the 9/11 tragedy, the kingpin of Abraham Lincoln's party is still dead set on fooling most of the people most of the time.

President Bush and his chorus of Republican pols, Cabinet members and neo-con sycophants would have us believe we're safer or, depending on political expediencies, not that safe. According to the president's pre-9/11 anniversary speeches on the progress of the war on terror, we're safer than we were before the attacks but not yet safe enough to steer clear of his failed stay-the-course strategy. As Bush explains it, al-Qaida's leadership is decimated but remains dangerous enough to destroy the entire civilized world.

There he goes again.

With midterm congressional elections less than two months away, the Bush subterfuge machine is in full spiel and spin. Too incompetent to manage problems that are all too real to mainstream America, such as high gas prices, 45 million citizens without health insurance and a sliding income for middle-class workers -- or capturing Osama bin Laden for that matter -- the president and his forces are back to wheeling and dealing terror. They're playing the same fear-mongering three-card monte game that worked so well in the 2002 and 2004 elections: See if you can find the terrorist threat under here or here or there. Find Saddam Hussein's ethereal weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Watch the politically timed color alert rise and fall on cue.

There's a book just out with a title that sums it all up: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. Authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn report that Bush hated Saddam so much that he privately let loose expletive-laden tirades against the dictator. In March 2002, months before Bush asked Congress for authority to attack Saddam, he bluntly exposed his true intentions in an unguarded moment with two aides. When told that White House correspondent Helen Thomas was questioning the need to oust Saddam, Bush snapped: ''Did you tell her I intend to kick his sorry m - - - - - - - - - - - - ass all over the Mideast?''

The president's anger was understandable. ''After all,'' Bush said six months later while speaking at a fund-raiser in Houston, ''this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.''

I think that's admirable that Bush 43 loves his dad, Bush 41, enough to try to revenge Saddam's botched assassination attempt in 1993. I loved my late dad as much as Bush loves his, and while I too would have been livid if the Iraqi dictator tried to whack my father, I wouldn't have set into motion a wave of international shock and awe that would result in the deaths of more than 2,600 U.S. military men and women and more than 41,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.

I also love my two sons as much as I'm sure he loves his twin daughters. If we're really in danger of Apocalypse Soon, as Bush keeps insisting, then we ought to act like it. The president should re-institute a mandatory military draft. I'll tearfully send my sons off to war, right after Bush tearfully sends his daughters to sign up in our co-educational military. If the war against Islamic terrorists compares to the fight against Nazis, as Bush insists, and if a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to its conquest by our nation's worst enemies, then we ought to have a military reflecting that clear and present danger. There were 16 million Americans fighting to keep the world safe for democracy in World War II. There are 130,000 in Iraq.

I'm afraid Bush's plan to save the world from Islamic fascism is way too modest. He wants Congress to pass his terrorist surveillance act and authorization to try the al-Qaida detainees held in his secret CIA torture prisons. For reasons too simple for many Americans to understand, he's not interested in following the 9/11 Commission's recommendations to shore up security at U.S. harbors or keep a close watch on checked airplane luggage. Those measures, which would obviously make America safer from the inevitable al-Qaida strikes in the future, would cost big business big money.

But what fool would want to take those measures when it's so much more politically practical to scare most of the people one more time?

White House blackout peeves some black columnists

    I was a columnist at a major American newspaper nine years before three black East Coast columnists brought "the idea that a group of black columnists would come together to share our common experience and probe the soft underbelly of our craft" to fruition in 1992.

By the time these three men had formed The Trotter Group, I was no longer writing a signed, op-ed column for the Chicago Tribune but had moved on to a post as a department head at WBBM-TV and the executive director and host of Common Ground, a public affairs TV talk show. 

Five years ago, I was back in print, writing a signed, op-ed page column for the Chicago Sun-Times. It was during that time that I became a member of The Trotter Group.

I've gone into my ancient history because of current events that are still unfolding. 

Ten members of The Trotter Group met in the White House with President Barack Obama and other key staff a few days ago. I only learned of the meeting after fellow Trotter, Robin Washington, the editor and a columnist at the Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune--with whom Obama spent a better part of a day for an interview 20 years ago, even cutting class at Harvard Law--sent me an angry Facebook message questioning how certain Trotters were selected to attend the meeting and others were not. While I didn't receive an invitation at all, other Trotters were invited then dis-invited. As a result, travel plans had to be changed and there was considerable explaining to do to the editors who had signed off on the trips to the White House.

So far, the aftermath has fallen just short of that old axiom: Hell has no fury like a columnist scorned. But just barely.

There has been a flurry of emails between Trotters criticizing the selection process. Trotter member Faye Anderson (no relation), didn't write about it on her blog, Anderson@Large but did discuss it on her Facebook page. Under the headline, Did White House Decide Who Represents Trotter Group?, Trotter member Richard Prince brought the controversy to light in his Journal-isms column.

And, of course, I've just written about it, here, on my political blog. This may be the end of the story. Then again, it may not be.

We'll see.

Thank the lord for the Teabaggers

 

 

I think I owe the Teabaggers an apology for all the nasty things I've written about them since they started stupidly protesting against the healthcare reform bill that will benefit them as much as most other Americans.

Sure, some of them may be racist. Others may be the dull knives in the drawer. A few may even be well-meaning but misguided in their cause without a cause. But no matter who they are or what they say, I've got two words that says they're okay with me: Rand Paul.

As a result of their successful effort to put one their own on top in the Kentucky Republican senate primary, the Teabaggers have accomplished what Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have only dreamed of doing: Leaving the echo chambering Republican establishment leadership speechless.

Within a 24-hour news cycle, Ron Paul's boy, Rand, had Michael Steele, Eric Cantor and Jim DeMint morph from their "just say no" political policy to a "no comment" stance on the the Kentucky Republican senate candidate's stance on the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act and The Americans with Disabilities Act.

Libertarian Paul has a nit to pick with all three established, USA seal-of-approval laws. When it a choice between the citizens or business, big or small, he's not with the citizens. Of course, less than a day after Paul confessed on NPR and the Rachel Maddow Show that he was in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act--except for the part that would allow businesses to prevent Americans who look like me from sitting at their lunch counters--he made a mad scrabble to a saner position.

But it's too late. He's now the poster boy of what the whole conservative movement really is about. And for that, we've got to thank the Teabaggers for giving us the gift that's bound to keep on giving.

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not anywhere where Glenn Beck just happens to be

 
 

    During yesterday's fleeting hour, while he was interviewing the very troubled former New York congressman, Eric Massa, Glenn Beck was out of his mind. 

This was the first time the whining, weeping conservative talk show host sounded, sounded, sounded, well.....thoughtful as he tried to get freshly-resigned Massa to dump all over his fellow Democrats and the Obama Administration.

When I say Beck sounded thoughtful, let me be clear: I'm speaking relatively here.

Any other time Beck favors staying stuck on stupid, saying stuff like President Barack Obama is a racist who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people."

As Media Matters points out, Beck "has flirted with the idea that FEMA is building detention camps, suggested that President Obama is purposefully "tanking" the economy to force young people to work for ACORN and AmeriCorps, and said that Obama and former President George W. Bush are 'moving us away from our republic and into a system of fascism.'"

Beck, who was named Media Matters' Misinformer of the Year, also thought the Tea Baggers march on Washington was 1.7 million strong--about seven times as much as the number of anti-reform protesters that actually showed up. He apparently thinks the ideas enumerated in his banal 912 Project, with its nine principles and 12 values, are something new, necessary or profound.

But right after I saw Beck's broadcast yesterday, which left me hoping against hope that he wasn't the dullest knife in the drawer, I read that on Monday he was urging the listeners of his syndicated radio show to leave churches that preach social justice.

As it turns out, Beck thinks that the term many Christian churches use to describe efforts to tackle poverty and promote human rights is a "code word" for communism and Nazism. 

Who would dare think the teachings of Jesus Christ were the ambitions of commies and Nazis? Glenn Beck.

This commentary was cross-posted on the AgoraVox website.

Mainstreaming Malcolm X

    I heard about Malcolm X's assassination while listening to the radio in my father's car. For the life of me, I can't remember much else. I can't remember whether I was driving or a passenger. I can't remember where I was going. What I do remember is the news report that he had been fatally shot by gunmen while giving a speech in Harlem.

    At the time, I knew little about Malcolm. I'd watched him on late-night talk shows that were forerunners to Common Ground, the one I'd find myself hosting three decades later.

    Before the year of his assassination had ended, I'd come to know much more. By Fall, I was a freshman at Indiana University. Jazz musician Charles Ellison, who was one of three black students on my dorm floor back then and to this day remains one of my closest friends, dropped by my room with a big book in hand.

    "Read this, It's the Bible," he said, showing me the newly published "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."

    It was. The book stirred my soul and fired up my political consciousness unlike anything the fading Civil Rights Movement had ever managed to do. By the time I'd finished reading Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King's nonviolence approach to combating racial discrimination seemed about as relevant as a "We like Ike" campaign button. A little more than a year after Malcolm's death, when Stokely Carmichael shouted "Black Power," I took to quoting the Black Muslim leader and embracing Black Nationalism.

   At that time, black Americans virtually had no power. The Civil Rights Act had become law just two years earlier, the Voting Rights Act a year after that. It would be another year before Carl Stokes and Richard G. Hatcher would be elected the first black mayors of Cleveland and Gary and Thurgood Marshall would become America's first black Supreme Court Justice.

    Today, of course, 45 years after Malcolm's death, blacks have power in America. We have black mayors in the nation's largest cities, black heads of Fortune 500 corporations, black governors and senators and Barack Obama. 

    That's not to say we still don't have a long way to go--just look at the unemployment and incarceration rates. There's still much work to do. But there are no longer any major obstacles that we can't overcome.

    In fact, from Hip-hop to fashion, African American influence at home is American influence throughout the world. We have power. 

    So, why was I so surprised to realize that even the very militant Malcolm has himself become mainstream in America? I don't know. But, after seeing this  MSN popular searches, I suspect he has now.

 

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Today marks the 45th anniversary of the assassination of a leader in the American civil rights movement: Malcolm X.

Lost too soon: Malcolm X (Birth name?) (Muslim name?) was only 39 when he was cut down while speaking here. Find speech transcripts and hear him talk.

Powerful presence: He was a charismatic speaker, and the media covered him extensively. See videos.

Lasting legacy: He was a member of this group before he founded an organization with this philosophy.

Intimidation: What troubling events occurred shortly before his death? What did his wife, Betty Shabazz, say days before his assassination?

Premonition? Malcolm X made this comment eight months before his killing.

The crime: Who were the shooters? They were convicted but didn't receive the death penalty. Where are they now?

Cover-up? Some don't believe that version of events. Conspiracy theories abound.

His family: Malcolm X left behind his wife and six daughters. Shabazz died tragically. How are the daughters doing?

The impact: He was mourned by many, and after his death he received this honor, among others.

Two giants: Malcolm X and this civil rights leader met only once and for just a brief moment (see photos).

The Impeach Obama movement's impeachable motives

 
 

    Barack Obama has been POTUS for less than a year and a month and already the wingnuts have launched a slew of wacky Impeach Obama campaigns.

In Wisconsin, an Impeach Obama billboard mysteriously appeared last week on U.S. 41 near the Oshkosh Correctional Institution. And what are the grounds for this call to remove our nation's first African American president? This punch line on the billboard explains it all: "America's small businesses are failing. Help us spread the message." Oh, sorry, that was no punch line, these sorry folks aren't joking. There's also the Impeach Obama Campaign.com website that claims to have "Over 100000 signatures and growing."  Go there and you'll be able to read the revealing reasons why America's legally elected head of state should be removed from office:

Radio-personality Tammy Bruce may have said it best: 

---

"... ultimately, it comes down to... the fact that he seems to have, it seems to me, some malevolence toward this country, which is unabated."
Speaking of the best sayings of vitriolic, slime-spewing right-wing radio personalities, there's Michael Savage who demands that we "Impeach Obama now. Stop him before he kills this country."
Savage's padded-cell rants are kissing cousins to what's being sung by some jackleg rock group called Sleuth. If you're into poorly performed songs with poorly written propagandistic lyrics, then the group's Impeach Obama is the song for you.
And, of course, there's the Tea Baggers and the bumper stickers.
Why do a plurality of Republicans, according to a Daily Kos poll, want Obama impeached?  Why is there this wingnut zeal to topple America's freely elected leader? 
Has he been convicted of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors? Nope.
Has he lied to our citizens about WMDs so that we could invade and occupy an oil-rich, Muslim country in the Middle East? Au contraire.
Has he broken U.S. and International law by allowing POWs to be tortured in violation of the Geneva Conventions treaty? I don't think so.
Has he even been caught lying about getting some head in the Oval Office? No. No. No.
So why--just one-fourth through his presidential term--are these crusades to remove the Leader of the Free World out there? Keith Olbermann, my favorite cable TV host on the "whites only" MSNBC line-up, summed it all up in a special commentary, "Beware fear's racist temptation," on Countdown last  night. His commentary, I think, got to the heart of conservative America's thinking and to the soul of the Impeach Obama fantasy.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And now for some upside-down, inside-out racial thinking

 

    In this pretend post-racial era, there are those who argue that Black History Month should be a thing of the past. Since we're all getting along so well in our newfound colorblind society, why muddle things by celebrating Black History with its taint of slavery, lynching, segregation and all that over negative stuff  when we've finally leveled the playing field?

Just yesterday, Lionel Canterbury posted a comment on a post entitled "Is Obama really the magic one?" that ran on this blog a year ago. His comment is deeply rooted in the same twisted thinking that rationalizes racial bigotry and discrimination. Click on Lionel's name if you want to read his comment or reply to what he wrote. To make it easy for you, I've cut and pasted it below. You can also reply or comment about it at the end of this post.

Here's Lionel's comment:

racism cannot be confined to prejudice and injustices by whites towards blacks. in the larger scope of things, it is not necessarily unnatural for any human whatever their race, to harbor some feelings of racism simply by being. Indeed, it seems plain to me that blacks are in general much more inclined to make decisions, form opinions, or take actions towards others based on their race than most other races do. perhaps they feel more threatened by race, perhaps they feel they are superior.

there will be a racism problem as long as blacks keep talking about. imo many blacks would lose a deep sense of purpose if they could no longer claim they were being discriminated against based on their race.

In case you're having trouble figuring out the point of the comment above, allow me to shorthand it for you: He's blaming the victim.

His logic, if you want to call it that, goes something like this: It's natural for human beings to be racist and naturally black people are more racist than others. And, without pointing out racism when it happens, black people wouldn't have anything else better to do with their lives.

Well, at the risk of seeming both racist and purposeless in Lionel's mind, I'd like to rant about the photoshopped picture at the top of this post. IMO, a photo with the POTUS shining the shoes of a half-term Alaskan governor is racist--should he happen to be black and she happen to be white.

This racist little photo ran on Sarah Palin's Facebook page. It speaks volumes about those who are so enraptured with what she doesn't have to say and what she does represent.

I don't know if Lionel is a wingnut, a racist, an idiot or all three, but I do know that contrary to what he thinks, it's very much the duty of black folks to call out this stupid, ugly behavior--during Black History Month in particular and during the other 11 months in general.

Come to think of it, we're not so much in a post-racial era are we're in a neo-racial era.  The N-word is now considered too gauche in polite society so code words have replaced it. Instead of publicly calling him the nigger president, Barack Obama is monumentally magical in the wingnut definition of him, code-worded as the socialist-fascist-racist-tyrannical-punk-shoeshine boy-illegal immigrant POTUS.

All this tortured thinking from the far right immediately brings to mind what Malcolm X had to say nearly half a century ago. Check him out:

This column was also published on the African American Opinion.com website.

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not in the minds of the GOP

 
  

    Whether it's Sarah Palin, Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mike Pence, Michael Steele or Rush Limbaugh, you can almost always count on Republican leadership to say something stupid.

In some cases--take Palin for example--the simple-minded statements come from an uniformed mind. In other cases--take Limbaugh this time--it's a matter of fabrications, deceptions and out-right lies.

In the end it really doesn't matter rather it's an imbecile stuck on stupid or a madman on a misinformation mission: there are low-information Americans out there soaking it all up.  They all seem to be conservative and think they alone have ownership of all things American. Even so, I was shocked to find out how many Americans who call themselves Republicans know so little about so many things--or are just plain mad as a hatter.

And with that, I give you--

The 2010 Comprehensive Daily Kos/Research 2000 Poll of Self-Identified Republicans

OBAMA and AMERICA

Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?

Yes 39 
No 32 
Not Sure 29

For what? Who the heck knows. Who needs high crimes or misdemeanors when...

Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?

Yes 63 
No 21 
Not Sure 16

That's the power of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, after one year of relentlessly claiming Obama is the second coming of Lenin ... and Hitler!

Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?

Yes 42 
No 36 
Not Sure 22

We still have over a half of Republicans who don't think Obama was born in the US or think it's a matter open to debate.

Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?

Yes 24 
No 43 
Not Sure 33

Not just a quarter of Republicans believe this ludicrous premise, but another third think it's a matter open to debate. How do you negotiate with a party whose rank and file are that divorced from reality? And speaking of divorced from reality...

Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?

Yes 21 
No 24 
Not Sure 55

One in five Republicans think ACORN is so powerful as to magically make 10 million votes appear. Another55 are open to the theory. In other words, just 24 percent of Republicans have an even passing relationship with reality.

Do you believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama?

Yes 53 
No 14 
Not Sure 33

Sigh...

Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates White people?

Yes 31 
No 36 
Not Sure 33

I bet more people think Obama is racist, but were too afraid to tell a live operator the truth.

Do you believe your state should secede from the United States?

Yes 23 
No 58 
Not Sure 19

42 percent of Republicans aren't really patriotic. They pretend to love America only when they approve of the president. These traitors don't believe in democracy, in our nation's founding ideals, or in our flag. To them, those colors run. They are cowards.

Note, secession sentiment is MUCH stronger in the South than elsewhere -- 33 percent want out, compared to just 52 percent who want to stay. In the Northeast, "just" 10 percent want out, in the Midwest, its 18 percent, and in the West, it's 16 percent. Can we cram them all into the Texas Panhandle, create the state of Dumbfuckistan, and build a wall around them to keep them from coming into America illegally?

The comments following the polling numbers came with the Daily Kos report. To read more--and weep or laugh depending on your mood--click here.

I'm assuming the more extreme moronic thoughts belong to the Tea-baggers and wing-nuts. Other than that, what can I say? I could paraphrase Moma Gump with a "Stupid is as stupid thinks." Or I could point out that this proves the current axiom "Garbage in, garbage out?" 

But mainly it informs us that the GOP may not so much be the Party of No as it is the Party of Know Nothings.

 

 This column was cross-posted on the AgoraVox and UK Progressive websites.