I've long maintained that the American right doesn't have a hive-mind, it has a hive-ass from which it pulls out bullshit talking points. The current crop of crap is the assertion that Eric Garner's death can be blamed on high cigarette taxes, not a chokehold forbidden to police officers. The usual suspects, such as repulsive Rush, crackpot Rand Paul, ghoulish Ann Coulter, idiotic Jonah Goldberg and most likely your goofball right-wing uncle/cousin/in-law, are all poop-parroting.
I imagine that Jon Stewart will have quite the montage of right-wing creeps spouting this nonsense about "liberals" and the "nanny-state" cigarette taxes being responsible, never mind what the goddamn video tape shows. The crazy thing is that the mainstream media won't be calling any of them out about their patent-falsehoods.
UPDATE: Tengrain has this covered!
The message doesn't need to make any sense. It's just a tribal battle cry.
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I will grant that NY's excessive tax on smokes is a remote cause on a long chain of causality leading up to EG's strangulation. That's why RW talking points have such staying power: there's a grain of 'truthiness' to them that resonates in the hive mind's preferred narrative.
ReplyDeleteBut the proximate cause was a police gang using an illegal chokehold to subdue a large, unruly, asthmatic, unhealthy man. Racism, too, was a cause—but it was further up the chain than the choking yet way nearer than the taxation and thus more relevant. The lack of accountability, however, is what truly brings the racial aspect into closer focus and pertinence.
They react to everything. Every single event is an opportunity to wallow in spittle flecked outrage or smug cultural assessments. Always guaranteed to be as ugly, tribal, and inhumane as possible.
ReplyDeleteSometimes it takes a little while for them to settle on the message. They throw a lot of stuff at the wall and wait to see which causes the most horrified squeals from the left, then they adopt that talking point for a couple news cycles. But tomorrow will come a different event requiring a new round of weaponized stupid...