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August 16, 2009

The Village Idiots

By Michael Shaw

Anti-health care bigot.jpg

What's notable about the sign is not just the starker condescension and racism (with the birther chaser), but the way it reframes and proposes an equivalency between Obama and the worst president ever.

(And in San Francisco, no less.)

(image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. caption: Protestors hold signs during an anti-health care reform rally August 14, 2009 in San Francisco, California)

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  • bystander

    Projection and imitation/mimicry is about all the Right has left. The originality they need to reinvent themselves and recapture the voters is much more difficult to accomplish than banging on a drum yelling No, it’s you! and appropriating the material of someone else. The game is obstruction. The method is crazy gear. And, the intellectual ground has been salted until it’s sterile. This photograph captures much, if not all, of it for me.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0120a4fba493970b AllesK

    I saw the rally on Friday. The picture above is quite misleading because it makes the scene look packed. If you look closely, you’ll notice that there are a lot of folks close and then everyone else is way back — there’s no midfield. That’s because there were maybe 100 people there supporting the Free Republic effort and the rest were bystanders gawking at the Health”s”care protest. What came from the stage was a bunch of ad hominem attacks on Barbara Boxer’s hair, Dianne “Frankenstein,” and Nancy Pelosi’s plane.

  • cj

    Minor point – the guy has clearly botched the word “its.” The use of an apostrophe denotes the contraction of “it is,” and not the possessive tense of the pronoun “it.” Not exactly “Get a brain! Morans” but, still – come on, dude! If you’re going to dub someone an idiot via poster, get it right! Otherwise… *you* look like an idiot…

  • Tena

    I’m seeing this crop up all over the place – every person on the right wants to set up a false equivalency between Obama and Bush. It started as a defense to people who are outraged by all the Nazi stuff in the Town Hall riots. At first it was just “You did it to Bush” nevermind we were right.
    Now it’s just everything and anything. This may be the weirdest part of this yet.

  • http://www.victorfitzsimons.net Victor F

    Two signs in this picture say “Obama took six months to pick a dog, why rush health care?” Another bad attempt at connection. The Obamas probably had lots of other things to adjust to in their new home, and they didn’t need to pick a dog. They could have chosen a cat or a rabbit or hamster or something. Decided what kind of dog to adopt is a personal matter whereas health care reform is a rather urgent public matter. Lives of humans are at stake.
    That “No on ‘Barrack’ Obama” sign puzzles me. I suppose it is a rather distasteful military housing unit? What do these people have against the troops? Farther down the sign, too crowded with text to be readable, it suggests we “impeach them [Pelosi and Obama] both.” For offering a public plan that can keep more Americans healthy? If that’s all it takes for impeachment, what would these folks have to say about FDR in his day? (if we had a time machine, of course)

  • http://www.woodka.com donna

    I’ve yet to meet a winger who can actually put together a coherent sentence without grammatical errors.
    But then, this might be a point of pride to them….

  • http://profile.typepad.com/6p0112793fb32528a4 paulo

    All Right / All White

  • dada

    A breakdown of politics within this crowd would be interesting. The Freepers, small L libertarians, Ron Paul libertarians, Lyndon Larouche libertarians.

  • DanM

    Just ask them about prayer in schools and step back fast

  • gryphon

    this picture is just like the media coverage then if it overemhasizes the protesters. can’t read the crazy if you don’t zoom in unfortunately.
    clearly there should be barbed wire between these people and the nice bystanders just like in the bush era.. the one bush thing he drops and it could have been useful…

  • charlie

    Or guns, and run.

  • bob h

    Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death!

  • http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081401495_pf.html Robin Lee

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081401495_pf.html
    Check out this excellent article by Ricke Perlstein in the Washington Post. Don’r forget that Teh Crazy had a political party in the mid 19th Century that named themselves the “Know Nothings” They aren’t new.

  • g

    I was struck by the fact that the guy in Maryland who was arrested for his “Death to Obama” sign had made his sign from a roughly torn piece of brown cardboard, scrawled on with a black pen.
    It made me wonder – did he make that sign in advance? If so, why so shoddy and sloppy? Or on impulse? What kind of impulse makes a person write a threatening sign? Is this an indication of how people’s emotions get whipped up within these demonstrations – so whipped up they grab scraps of carboard boxes and scrawl death threats on them?
    How much planning and thought go into these signs, anyway? Clearly someone put in some time and creative effort drawing the one with the scroll, but then it seems the process broke down a little when it came to the text and the layout – such a jumble of lines, letters and words it’s practically illegible. The ones with the computer printing show some indication of pre-planning – one can’t help but think whoever went to the effort of doing that printed multiples. The two signs that mention the dog – one handmade and one computer generated – clearly show there’s some common message pool they all draw from.

  • DanM

    republicannedmessage.com?
    republiclipart.net??

  • http://thenewsguysletters.blogspot.com/ Russ Nichols

    That thing with its and it’s drives me nuts and it is such a common mistake. But I don’t think this guy made that mistake. Looking carefully, I don’t see it.

  • yg

    caught some footage of protesters on cnn. one woman’s sign read “I’M A REAL AMERICAN.” i don’t know what the rest of the sign read cause i got stuck on that. so what are the rest of us? chopped liver?
    there was also a black male protester wearing an obama as the joker mask. somebody riddle me that, cause i don’t get it.
    the people in the above pic clearly aren’t real americans. real americans have an assault weapon slung over their shoulder, everywhere they go. everybody knows that.

  • http://www.prospect.org/galleries/img_articles/090819_starr_lead.jpg yg

    for the why rush healthcare ppl :

  • We Are The 801

    AllesK:
    “I saw the rally on Friday. The picture above is quite misleading because it makes the scene look packed. If you look closely, you’ll notice that there are a lot of folks close and then everyone else is way back — there’s no midfield.”
    Yeah this looks like a telephoto lens was used…

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