The politics of mass hysteria

The politics of mass hysteria


http://www.spectator.co.uk/search/author/?searchString=
Friday, 31st October 2008







So what if The One should actually lose next week? The brainwashed hysteria whipped up on his behalf is, to put it mildly, dangerous. The media proclaims daily that Obama has already won. He cannot lose. He is the Saviour of the Planet. McCain is a mumbling senile idiot. Palin is evil incarnate. The polls show an Obama landslide. So if the world should revolve backwards on its axis next Tuesday and people wake up and find he has lost, then either the election will have been stolen in the way we all know evil Republicans always steal elections – or the American public will be proved to be, as we all know they are, irredeemably racist. Accordingly, we are warned that there would then be riots on the streets.

Those who see a racist in every non-Obama voter are themselves the people for whom Obama’s race is his defining characteristic. They say in terms that his race is the reason we must vote for him. They are the people who, by smearing every conceivable criticism of Obama or revelation of his unsavoury associations as ‘racist’, have emptied the term of its meaning. They are the people who, posing as ‘progressive’, display daily their utter contempt for their fellow human beings who are apparently incapable of voting against Obama on the rational grounds of the disturbing information they have learned about him, because by definition such information is just a load of racist smears. It cannot be true because there cannot be any dissent.

The same media which is whipping up this hysteria has failed to tell people that some polls are telling a different story – that the gap between the candidates is closing. The same media have either failed to tell the American public about Obama’s deeply questionable record, influences, sayings or associations, or the fact that it is the Obama campaign which has tried to steal the vote by delivering more than a million fraudulent voter registrations, or its systematic lies about all of the above, the equivalent of any one of which affronts would have instantly sunk a Republican candidate -- or else have trivialised and dismissed them.

Insofar as the American public has managed to obtain some of this suppressed information, it has been delivered by the Western Resistance comprising internet journalists, Fox News and talk radio. The British press, however, have taken their cue entirely from the fifth-columnist liberal US media. So the Telegraph’s Andrew Gimson reported yesterday his deep distaste, upon arriving in America for the election, to encounter on Fox News a

sustained exercise in character assassination, in which Barack Obama was subjected to volley after volley of slurs and innuendo. Viewers were assured that Mr Obama was associated with an ‘unrepentant terrorist’, was helped by ‘a convicted Chicago slum landlord’, was connected with someone else who made ‘grossly inappropriate videos targeted at your children’, and was even acquainted with a Communist poet who ‘advocated for black soldiers to take up arms against the United States’.
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Tsk! Just fancy!! ‘...even acquainted with a Communist poet’ ? Presumably this is a reference to Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist Party anti-American agitator and black power racist -- with an FBI file an inch think -- who was Obama’s most important mentor for most of his younger life, and whose unshaken influence on Obama’s thinking is plain from everything he has done and the associations he has formed. To call this merely ‘an acquaintance’ is just risible.

In similar vein, Obama’s relationship with the ‘unrepentant’ former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers is dismissed as of no consequence on the basis that this was a chance association. But the real issue is that Ayers stopped being a terrorist because he realised that he could more effectively undermine America through radicalising the young through education. As this article reiterates, Obama and Ayers -- at a fund-raiser in whose front room Obama's political career was launched -- between them systematically funded radical school projects to indoctrinate American children in sedition. This is all part of a pattern. Daniel Pipes has further essential facts on Obama’s links with corrupt sources in a web that extends all the way back to Saddam Hussein. Join up the dots.

But what is frightening is the way so many people are suspending their rational faculties so that they shut their minds to all this on the basis that it is all just ‘smears’ -- and instead fire an unparalleled barrage of smears at the other side. Thus Christopher Hitchens launched a vitriolic attack on Sarah Palin on the grounds that she had demonstrated her deranged and medieval hostility to science by ‘denouncing wasteful expenditure on fruit fly research’ which she said she would rather spend on children with special needs. This was particularly unfortunate since the fruit fly was

useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature ‘issue’ of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina.
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This has prompted an incredulous and horrified David Horowitz to rebuke his friend Hitchens thus:

... she wasn’t campaigning against fruit fly research. She was campaigning against earmarks – the $18-billion-a- year scam under which forces taxpayers to underwrite personal favors that congressmen perform for their ‘constituents,’ like giant agribusiness corporations. Such earmarks are transparent bribes since they are bound to encourage constituents who receive them to fund congressional campaigns. The fruit fly earmark was the project of a California congressman named Mike Thompson; the service provided was to the California agribusiness community, which was looking for taxpayer help with a fruit fly problem that threatened their designs to turn olive trees into a profit. The earmark was not about autistic kids. It was about a corrupt patronage system used to benefit one congressman and the olive oil industry’.
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Ah, but what’s a little thing like ending corruption, to say nothing of behaving rationally, when we are all just about to be Saved?

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