It's become a normal part of any day: read Pandagon and count the number of times the Pandagonidiots mischaracterize conservatives/religious people/straight people/suburbanites and Amanda Marcotte misses the point of any article she links to.
In this case, Amanda links to this Nate Silverman post, in which he contends that the exaggerations of the 9/12 rally in Washington are wrong and not uncommon. But the salient point about the rally comes at the end of his post:
Mock the protesters at your peril: business as usual suddenly isn't so good for Democrats these days, and the sentiments of the 70,000 people who marched on Washington surely mirror those of millions more sitting at home.
For Amanda, of course, the march is about what else? Racism. And what better example of racism than the idea that conservatives clean up after themselves.
This is the first place that Amanda gets it wrong. Cleanliness isn't necessarily a conservative value, although self-sufficiency is. It is a working class value. Being a pig and expecting others to clean up after you is an attitude of the wealthy. But in Amanda's world, it's just another example of how racist conservatives are.
The “we don’t leave trash” thing is a way of saying that their shit don’t stink...
A lot of bloggers made fun of the teabaggers for not having coherent policy ideas, but they’re way beyond that even being a possibility. They just want to shut it down, at any cost. They don’t want to share health care with the Unclean People. The abortion example is a really good one, and I’ve noted before that they’re bone scared of having to share medical facilities with the Unclean. That’s why Joe Wilson nearly had a heart attack at hearing about illegal immigrants getting care. Yes, he heard it in the context of this being denied, but he was forced to picture it: Mexican immigrants, the sort he would let work on his yard but not use his bathroom, sitting right there in the hospital next to you! Taking this attitude into account, you can really see why a lot of them are just as motivated by the fear of abortion, which they associate with dirty girls---there’s a genuine fear of having to share medical facilities with sluts, I guess. It’s catching, particularly if you have to wear a hospital gown.
Never mind, of course, that all the Unclean People already share their medical facilities. Maybe they don’t realize this, because generally speaking when you go to the doctor, you only see a minuscule fraction of the patients he’s got in the waiting room. Maybe they’ve convinced themselves that the Unclean People are kept out from lack of insurance. Sadly, many of us are, but certainly not all or even most. We’re already sharing their facilities.
Again, Amanda mischaracterizes the views of conservatives and 9/12 protesters. The problem with giving health care to illegal immigrants isn't because they're Brown; it's because they're breaking the law.
My sincere hope is that at some point in the next four years, the charge of racism will have been so overused that it becomes meaningless. Surely charging that every objection to Democrats' overreaching and usurpation of individual liberty is because of racism has to become ridiculous at some point.
H/T: Chuck Serio for the Pandagon link.
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