Me: *replies with link to Snopes*
He: *deletes link to Snopes*
Me: "Look, I know that you don't like Obama, but deleting the link to Snopes doesn't change the fact that this. did. not. happen. It's a lie--I'm sorry that you've been lied to, but please for the sake of your own soul don't spread the lie to others."
He: *deletes that comment, too*
Me: *defriends*
On the one hand, he was fun to hang out with years ago when we still hung out so it kinda makes me sad, but on the other I'm sick of his shit. I'm a vicious little partisan, but this guy was one of the worst cases of ODS that I've ever seen--made me look positively lackadaisical by comparison.
It was Bush who firmly transitioned me from a good little Republican (just like Jesus would want!) to a fire-breathing liberal. Two wars of choice, rollback of civil liberties/encroachment of the security state, indefinite detention, torture, extraordinary rendition and as much debt as every previous president combined: such were my grievances. But you'll notice that these things actually happened. Contrast the current crop of grievances that so many seem to have against Obama: birtherism and conspiracy theories of illegitimacy; love child of Malcolm X; cries of Socialist!, Communist!, Nazi!; accusations of Big Government and Big Spending (he reduced the deficit); adoption of a
These things are not true. They're a fever dream of shadowy conspiracy theories replete with lurid evil, and I'm simply left wondering, as Slactivist so often does, why?
I get the human tendency to double down in error rather than accept that we are wrong. I get how one might come to believe that a political group can do no good. But what we have here is someone who lives in a paranoid nightmare of encroaching socialism/sharia/atheism/persecution and denies to its face the proof that their evidence is mistaken. The President didn't really issue the armed forces secret anti-Christian orders, Obamacare is no more socialist than social security and Medicare and the unemployment that *ahem* you yourself accepted while complaining at length about the quota of job applications you had to fill out to continue receiving it, and we are not in fact witnessing a Stalinist Muslim takeover. Surely that's good news, right?
Apparently not. Apparently there are people who would rather believe in the nightmare. Doubtless they would say that they don't prefer it this way, that they would prefer to believe themselves not besieged by encroaching evil. But when you confront them with the evidence that such is in fact the case, they plug their ears and turn away.
It was Bush who firmly transitioned me from a good little Republican (just like Jesus would want!) to a fire-breathing liberal.
ReplyDeleteSame here. It took Bush and a Republican majority in both houses of Congress to cure me of my knee jerk conservatism.