People Like You

This is a wonderful, sad and affecting piece of film, but I really wonder what good it will do.

The Right has been so conditioned to spring instantly into a "Ready! Fire! Aim!"  Limbaugh-wilding when presented with any fact that contradicts with any part of their loathsome ideology...

...and  Beltway gas bags and "independents" have been so conditioned to go completely  "bothsidesdoit!bothsidesdoit!bothsidesdoit!" Centrist-catatonic whenever the Right gets caught dead-to-rights doing something abhorrent...

...that I genuinely wonder who is left out there to be convinced.

Earlier today, while having a flat tire fixed, I watched two random minutes of Fox News at the garage.

The story was about how Evil Unions had "gamed the system" and all-but destroyed the city of San Diego.

Later, on my way to pick up middle child from school, I listened to two random minutes of Sean Hannity on the radio.

The first thing I heard was "Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright".

The second thing I heard was "...in the White  House.  I mean, why are we even still arguing about this?"

The third thing I heard was "...the great work being done by the Breitbart people on this."

The fourth thing I heard was "...the great work being done by The America Spectator."

The fifth thing I heard was how Michele Malkin is "killing it on this stuff every day".

This is the bilge Right pumps into their skulls, all day, every day.

Then, when one of them breaks containment and shows their naked, raving ass in public, every Centrist in America automatically sprints for the "False Equivalence" toy box to dig out an Imaginary Equally Awful Librul to curl up with as they cower under their "Meet the Press" commemorative blanket, suck their thumb and whiiiiiiiine about how awful it is that Both Sides are so mean and unreasonable.

When I say that the last time anyone persuaded the Right en masse to change some of its very bad habits it took the entire Union army and four years of bloody civil war to do it, I am not being flip or hyperbolic.  On the contrary, I pray every day that I am wrong and that there is someplace to take this Long Culture War of ours other than to the mattresses.

For this perfectly nice woman -- this former Democrat -- it took a series of Old Testament-grade catastrophes to crash in on her family to wake her up and change her mind.

What a monumental tragedy it would be if we had finally come to a place where words and reason were useless -- if it turned out, in the end, the only way our sleepwalking Centrists citizens were pulled out of their individual political comas was 20 million customized Jobian disasters dropped on their heads, one at a time.