Apparently the civic incompetence and pathological personal obsession lampooned in my earlier diary, Obama Derangement Civics, was even more pronounced than I'd thought. Not so much in the diaries I've seen, but in comments it makes a real showing. So I'd like to highlight a couple of particularly juicy specimens and put the toxic bigotry and compulsive lying that define ODS on display.
The following comment is an almost impenetrable thicket of careless lies, history revisionism, false premises, deranged analogies, and naked hate:
Certainly indicated the depth of [Obama's] depravity. (11+ / 0-)
In defiance of treaty obligations, the only person Obama prosecuted about torture was the person who revealed the torture regime.
And the only person prosecuted about war crimes was the person who revealed them, Bradley Manning, whom Obama had thrown into solitary confinement, itself a form of torture.
Let the ardent supporters explain how much more ethical Obama is than Dick Cheney or Richard Nixon.
Obama is the Chickenshit-in-Chief for failing to stand up to Republicans on all their phony scandals, from the "beer summit," to Van Jones, "death panels," Shirley Sherrod, contraception, Benghazi, and the IRS.
Maybe you don't see it immediately if you've become accustomed to seeing this kind of alternate-universe vitriol around here, so I'll explain in detail. Basically, the overall perspective is that the comment is only rational if you start from the
premise - not conclusion, but rather the unquestioned foundation, that Barack Obama is evil and personally directs every action of the federal government. Not merely that he isn't doing enough - which is itself debatable - but that he is an actively and perpetually malevolent agent operating at all levels of government at all times and places.
In defiance of treaty obligations, the only person Obama prosecuted about torture was the person who revealed the torture regime.
Presidents do not prosecute people. They do not order prosecutions, they do not sign off on prosecutions, they do not terminate prosecutions. They appoint Attorneys General and US Attorneys with the consent of the Senate, commute sentences, and issue pardons - that's it for their role in the matter. Only criminally abusive Presidents order prosecutions or order that prosecutions be terminated. This commenter has no information that President Obama has done so, nor does he/she care. The facts do not appear to matter to this commenter. All that matters is that there is an undesirable situation - Snowden being prosecuted - and so the logic of Derangement dictates finding the most efficient pathway to blaming that directly on Barack Obama without caveat or intervening intelligent thought. So we end up with a person who literally plays no role in prosecutorial decisions being accused of the most heinous violations of prosecutorial discretion: I.e., complete batshit nonsense.
Now, someone not suffering from a rabid case of Obama Derangement could be justified in criticizing the President for failing to cool the political temper by at least rhetorically defending whistleblowers in a non-specific way, although it would be grotesquely improper for him to specifically defend Edward Snowden as the Justice Department was investigating possible criminal charges let alone after it had handed in an indictment. And it is a legitimate opinion that the President should fire Holder for his prosecutorial priorities, despite the risk of abuse of power impeachment (a risk I agree he should take). But having dispensed with the fact that the President doesn't make prosecutorial decisions, the rest is largely discredited. So basically the comment has made this claim: Barack Obama is the Attorney General of the United States. Still, the commenter isn't satisfied with having erected that foundation of falsehood - instead, ever-higher mounds of shit are built on top of it:
...Bradley Manning, whom Obama had thrown into solitary confinement, itself a form of torture.
A President is indeed the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, so there is no disputing the power of a President on this subject where military justice is concerned. But the commenter isn't saying the President had the power to personally intervene in the management of military prisoners and failed to do so - he says that the President literally issued a personal order that Bradley Manning was to be put in solitary confinement. The commenter pulled this claim out of thin air. There are no reports of such an order being given, no rumors even from anonymous sources - the commenter is simply saying it out of hate and rage. In other words,
lying. Got that? It's a lie. The comment is HR'able, but lying to attack Barack Obama is now so commonplace that those who would HR it hesitate to do so, creating a wide and growing Freeper insanity bubble around Daily Kos.
Moreover, the commenter doesn't even have evidence that the President knew of Manning's treatment before it was reported to the world by the media, nor is there a credible case that he should have - that a President of the United States is supposed to personally monitor and keep tabs on how jailers at US military prisons are treating their wards. Or was he only supposed to do that for Bradley Manning, showing special treatment to someone for political reasons while the other prisoners are ignored to suffer whatever treatment they happen to get? I hope the commenter wasn't implying that should have happened, because that's not a very humane or fair policy. But the fact is the President of the United States is not a prison warden, and does not keep tabs on the lifestyles of the inmates or the decency of the guards. He might receive an aggregate report on these things from the jailers themselves - which is itself actually pretty unlikely - but you'll probably agree it's unreasonable to expect POTUS to make a habit of personally visiting every federal prison in America and personally interviewing the prisoners.
But the commenter doesn't give a shit. Bradley Manning was placed in solitary confinement, ergo by Derangement logic, Obama was the one who made it happen, because aside from being the Attorney General, Barack Obama is also the warden at Manning's prison. He will be wearing quite a lot of hats by the end of this dissection of the comment, so I will introduce a term for this inability to understand or even tolerate the mention of what a President is: Jobnesia. Moreover, even though solitary confinement exists in most first-world prison systems, and has always been a part of the US prison system, the commenter chooses this venue in which to declare that it's torture. So now Barack Obama is not only the warden of Manning's prison, but Torquemada, despite very likely never having read a single piece of paper or heard a single verbal report about Manning's incarceration conditions.
Again, facts don't matter to Derangement. The unquestionable premise is that it's Obama's fault, and all logic must proceed from that premise. But real logic can't stop there: If Obama tortured Manning, then he also must have personally committed every single criminal act committed on his watch by the hundreds of thousands of government personnel across the country, all the prisons nationwide, by US law enforcement officials, and by others on the premises of all US military bases and federal buildings. The buck stops with him, right? From that witticism made popular by Harry Truman, they cast aside all empirical reality and hold that every event which transpires within a government setting is the direct and personal result of Barack Obama ordering or deliberately failing to order it.
That guy who hypothetically got robbed on a military base in Texas? Obama robbed him. That lady we heard about who got felt up in a courthouse by the bailiff? That bailiff was Obama. Every questionable shooting of a criminal suspect, Obama was pulling the trigger. Every troubled veteran who goes on a rampage, it was Obama who failed to see the warning signs. Obama is the Derangement universe's Satan. Literally. Look again up at that comment: Obama is basically everywhere, doing everything evil in the world, and failing to do anything good - an omnipotent villain and an impotent, fake President. That's what the ODS mind sees through the miasma of its frenzied bigotry. And it never stops - it just keeps building on itself:
Let the ardent supporters explain how much more ethical Obama is than Dick Cheney or Richard Nixon.
Got that? From his heinous crime of
not doing any of the things the commenter accused him of doing, and basically playing no role whatsoever in any of them, Obama is equivalent to mass-murdering psychopath traitors directly responsible for orchestrating millions of innocent deaths between them. I must say I don't think this commenter has much respect for the victims of Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney or their surviving relatives when he makes such a comparison, because it's not that far from a Godwin attack, and is basically issued in the same spirit of reckless hysteria and hate. Which, I should note, is ironically a lot more in the spirit of consummate liars like Nixon and Cheney - they would have appreciated the analogy for the sheer malice and mendacity of it.
Obama is the Chickenshit-in-Chief for failing to stand up to Republicans on all their phony scandals, from the "beer summit," to Van Jones, "death panels," Shirley Sherrod, contraception, Benghazi, and the IRS.
I've personally watched the President stand up to Republicans over their phony scandals many, many times. He doesn't make a secret of it: He does it publicly in his regular addresses, and also at press conferences, through spokespeople, and as asides when he gives speeches in front of crowds. Pretty much everyone who pays any attention to this President at all has seem him do it. But if you hated someone as deeply and unquestioningly as this commenter obviously hates Barack Obama, how much time would you spend listening to their speeches and WH press conferences? I'll go out on a limb and say none. But in the logic of hate, having no clue what you're talking about is no reason not to talk loudly and often. In fact, it's actually an encouragement. The deliberately cultivated absence of contrary information is treated as a vindication, hence the Orwellian truism that Ignorance Is Strength.
But more specifically, the commenter is accusing the President of not exercising total control over the media - i.e., that he is egregiously failing to stop people from criticizing him when the commenter deems it inappropriate, as no doubt any law-abiding, freedom-loving President should. And if that's not Orwellian enough for you, also note the "Chickenshit" accusation: So he's a murdering, torturing fascist, but too much of a ninny to stand up to the media. Doublethink is an absolute necessity of Derangement, and occurs constantly. To hold that a person is the embodiment of all things wrong, and responsible for all wrong acts, you must hold many mutually exclusive things to be true about that person.
You must hold them to be both omnipotent and impotent; arrogant and obsequious; reckless and cowardly; omniscient and oblivious; controlling and negligent; and many other dichotomies. The fact that the commenter's claims are an Orwellian doublespeak nightmare on the subject of Barack Obama is now painfully obvious - a conclusion they would no doubt find somehow awesomely ironic because of all the imaginary ways they believe Barack Obama is a dictator who spies on them and has people prosecuted and thrown into solitary. We can call this symptom of ODS Duopotence - the insistence that Barack Obama simultaneously exhibits mutually exclusive characteristics in order to maximize the potential subjects of condemnation.
They're accusing him of being a dictator when they're not accusing him of failing to be enough of a dictator, because there must always be that "But he's guilty of the opposite too" - just one lie doesn't provide enough hate to satisfy the ODS appetite. So basically, this part of the comment holds that Barack Obama is not only an Information Minister with total control over the media, but that he should be and is oh-so-outrageously failing in that capacity. So now he is Attorney General, the warden at Bradley Manning's prison, and a totalitarian ideological Commissar who gets to determine what the media choose to report but lamely fails to exercise this authority.
There is no President of the United States in history this person could fail to accuse of all of the above if they were remotely honest, but they're not - it's just Obama. All of history is divided into Before Obama and With Obama, and all things Before are to be ignored or interpreted as a halcyon paradise of highly ethical and patriotic leaders who respected people's rights implicitly (I wonder what Dr. King would have thought of that proposition?), and With Obama is literally their definition of bad. Is it sublimated racism? If it's legitimate to suppose so with teabaggers whose reasoning is virtually identical, there's no argument that it's not here. But I won't insist on it, because unlike they ever will, I acknowledge when there isn't enough information to form a conclusion.
Reading the utterly deranged comment in its entirety, does anyone believe for a single moment that if someone answered it with a calm, thoroughly fact-based rebuttal to each point, that there is any possibility whatsoever the commenter would rethink their position? Does this person advertise thoughtfulness, honesty, and benign intentions? Of course not - they advertise that the North Star of their morality is rationalizing their hatred for Barack Obama, and if you get in the way of that by offering facts, most likely you would simply share in that hatred. And because they're wrapped up in a closed epistemic bubble, facts mean no more to them than to a religious fundamentalist. What's important is how the facts you cite relate to the single overriding objective of slandering Barack Obama. And because we've allowed this mentality to fester and grow on Daily Kos, it's now a pervasive cult that lies with impunity and spreads CTs more quickly than anyone could remove if they even dared to try.
Our next specimen is much simpler and more tawdry, but no less instructive:
Looking forward, not back (0+ / 1-)
except for those who expose the administration for the fascist front for the plutocrats that it is.
So this commenter obviously harks to the same ignorant Derangement mythology that Barack Obama personally orders prosecutions, but takes it a step further: Not only is Barack Obama an overzealous prosecutor of the wrong people, but a corrupt
fascist. Fascist. Presiding over an administration whose Justice Department indicts a guy for publicizing classified information is
fascism - not merely a distorted set of priorities in the Justice Department, but literally tantamount to states like Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Assad's Syria. Moreover,
plutocratic fascism, so there's an implication that the reason that
Obama is engaging in these prosecutions that he has nothing to do with is that he's been paid off by someone. There's no basis for this speculation, of course, but hell if that matters - it's just what happens when a mind is filled with hate to the point where logic consists of making shit up to justify how you feel.
If I personally think someone should not prosecuted even though they broke the law - in other words, I think their actions were justified - well then, Attorney General Obama should care more about my opinion than the law. And even though that person was in a position of public trust when he got those records and took an oath, he should not have to justify his actions before a jury of his peers. No, no, no - he should be judged entirely by what he chooses to tell the media about his motives, and anything anyone else says that might serve to cast a dubious light on him must be disbelieved as part of the heinous conspiracy to tarnish him. Starting from the premise of hating Obama, we must love Snowden. We must cherish him like a little puppy, and angrily defend him from all impious skepticism.
To the same extent that Obama is the embodiment of all things evil and beyond all benefit of doubt, so Snowden must be the opposite - almost a Jesus-like figure descended from the Mount that was the NSA to deliver the truth unto his disciples. Once again, neither element of the Derangement mentality has any relevance to the reality of either Barack Obama or Edward Snowden. The raving hatred of Obama carries no tarnish on his character, and the messiah-like regard for Snowden does not in any way remove whatever tarnish is there anymore than unfair attacks on him by conservatives would add to it: These are both real people who do real things, and reality is the last thing on the Derangement-addled mind. It's a mind that has no capacity for meme filtering or rational reflection on any subject that can relate to Barack Obama. By whatever bizarre process, their whole universe spirals inward to a single focused point where all lines of thought associated with the negative converge on the person of Barack Obama.
And because this is the case, failure to exhibit the same symptoms is interpreted as suffering from an opposite malady. They cannot conceive of a fact-based assessment of Barack Obama: Such a thing is beyond comprehension. You must either hate him as they do, or you are his fawning, adoring fanboy. This is the same way that right-wingers cannot conceive of both criticizing and supporting your country, or both recognizing hostile foreign powers as hostile while acknowledging our nation's role in exacerbating that status. Their wiring simply will not permit examining facts before reaching conclusions about them. You must have your conclusions pre-wired and then arrange the facts accordingly to justify it.
Now, can there be a cure for ODS? Frankly I'm pessimistic on that. People who wrap themselves in epistemic bubbles make a choice to value their own emotions over a basic regard for the truth and for treating people as they themselves want to be treated. All reason and morality go out the window except as they can be cynically and selectively harnessed in service to their one, all-consuming objective. These people would probably cheer if the GOP impeached Barack Obama. People who talk like this are not folks of strong and passionate values who have simply gotten overzealous - there are no values in evidence. They've all been devoured by hate that has been cultivated over years through a process of selective perception. Good things done by the administration go in one ear and out the other; bad things not only stick like velcro, but are amplified and endlessly expounded to an infinite degree until the real policy that originally disappointed them is lost in a sea of lies and conspiracy theories.
It can't be overstated how useless and destructive ODS is to progressivism. Maybe, if there is an element of racism involved, it would be less pronounced with a white Democratic President, but even so it demonstrates a self-defeating phenomenon that we must be aware of and avoid: The proclivity to be more focused on on our own team's shortcomings than on leveraging its advantages, which as we've seen can spiral into absolute madness and fanatic Big Lying. Contrary to what you might think, I don't enjoy talking about this phenomenon: It's sickening.
But I'm obligated to stand up to it, to shine a spotlight on it, and from now, to exercise my TU status according to the reality that a lot of these comments that are allowed to slide or are even highly promoted are CT and/or outright lies. I can't and won't tolerate it, especially as ODS sufferers have become increasingly brazen at abusing their own TU status to silence people who question them. Pacifism only works on people who are capable of shame, and I'm afraid that's just not possible when reality itself is no longer valued. Of course, I can't HR comments in my own diaries, so I will have to depend on others to exercise their good judgment and moral courage.
ODS Glossary
Jobnesia: Forgetting what Barack Obama's job is, or extending general responsibilities outward to absurd lengths.
Duopotence: Holding Obama to be simultaneously omnipotent and impotent.
Obamanic-depressive: Oscillating between manic, frenzied hatred and mopey expressions of doom and bitterness.
InfiniTea: The need to connect all negative subjects to Barack Obama, no matter how tenuously.
Hystory: History rewritten or discarded entirely to fit the narratives of ODS.
8:43 PM PT: Here's a thought regarding Eric Holder: Suppose the President did fire him. How is he supposed to get someone better confirmed by the Senate without Harry Reid axing the filibuster?