Conservative Illiteracy

OK, so I saw some pictures of the 9.12 Project rally in Washington, D.C. over the weekend.  Now, I distinctly remember watching Glenn Beck say that he wanted the 9.12 Project to get back to that feeling on the day right after 9/11.  As you know, loyal reader(s?), I riffed on that one a little bit in a previous post.   I was pretty mean to ole Glenn, but he deserved it.  He's a jerk.  Anyhow, what Glenn meant with his whole schtick was that he supposedly wanted America to feel like one country again.  That, at least, has a little validity; liberals and Democrats largely set their differences with President Bush aside and presented a unified country, until he started beating the war drums against Iraq - at which point we knew he was full of it.  One more thought, while we're at it: if it had been President Gore in charge when 9/11 happened, do you think Republicans would have rallied behind him?  HELL, no.  Every moment would have been second-guessed and there would have been 100,000 Republicans on the National Mall holding signs that said "It Was Your Fault!!" This is, of course, theoretical; President Gore almost certainly would have paid attention to the memos, the 9/11 hijackers would have been rounded up and stuck in jail, and no one would have publicized it except perhaps on page 16 of the NYT as "The Attack that Didn't Happen."

So on 9/12, we all came together in support of our country and our President.  How does 9.12 stack up to 9/12?  Not too well.  Do we have that feeling of unification?  Hardly.  I don't recall any Democrats convening in D.C. with signs that displayed the President with a Hitler mustache, or signs that talked about hating the government, or signs about secession, or any of that crap.  Yeah, way to bring that 9/12 spirit back, guys.  What was the whole thing about, anyway?  It was just one big I-hate-the-government rally.  Let's be honest, though: when spending went through the roof, and there was warrantless wiretapping, and a whole new Federal bureaucracy (e.g., Homeland Security Department, still the creepiest Cabinet name ever), today's tighty whitey righties were all loosey-goosey.  Oh, they loved it!  Homeland Security and wiretapping was a-gonna catch them Ay-rab terrists!!  So it's not really about government.  It's not about spending - otherwise the stories of Halliburton employees playing touch football using $100 bricks for the football would have made them lose their collective minds.  It's not about morals - otherwise, they would have gone bonkers over Abu Ghraib, torture, and the idea that our country has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.  It's about hating the Democrats.

"But Yellow Dawg," you say, "your title is about illiteracy!  When are you going to get to that?"  Well, I'm just laying some groundwork.  This rally - and the outrage behind it - didn't start as a grassroots movement.  Every concern noted by Teabaggers was violated by the Bush administration.  Corruption? Check.  Lying to a joint session of Congress?  Check.  Outrageous, unreasonable deficit spending?  Check.  Kill Grandma?  Check, if you're Iraqi (but killing brown people doesn't really register with Republicans, does it?).  Violating the Constitution?  Check.  Pandering to special interests?  Check.  Curbs on personal liberties?  One big fat Patriot Act check.  Once again, what does this have to do with illiteracy?  Patience, dear reader.

If you look at the signs hoisted by the Teabaggers, you see rampant illiteracy.  They call others "Morans."  They call President Obama a "comunist" or a "terorist."  They are all about "capitolism."  They'll tell you they're not "raceist."  Perhaps they'll mention "Section 110, Artical III" of the Constitution.  Some are still complaining about President Obama's "telepromter." And my new personal favorite is the video of the guy who says that immigrants simply must be literate in English while holding a sign that says, "Politicians are like dipers - they must be changed often and for the same reason."

I don't say this just to mock them, although there's plenty of fun to be had there.  I say this because I think the illiteracy is symptomatic.  I really think that the best way to write well is to do a lot of reading. Well, Teabaggers aren't going to read a lot.  After all, newspapers, especially the New York Times, are liberal.  Books are for pointy-headed ivory-tower intellectual liberals, unless they're by Hannity, O'Reilly, or Coulter.  The point is, I don't think of Teabaggers as readers, at least of anything substantive.  It's simply too hard.  If you think Presidentin' is hard, try reading.  If you don't read much, you inevitably lose spelling and grammatical skills.  I think this is what's happened to the Teabaggers.  Why read the Bible when Joe Bob Fundamentalist Preacher can yee-hah his way through a sermon for you and tell you what's in it?  Why read a book about politics when Glenn Beck is there to tell you about it?  And why read a bill when Beck and FoxNews will be happy to "inform" you of its contents?  This is why they're so ill-informed.  They don't read.  They can't research.  They don't have critical thinking skills.  They have no BS detectors.  Their objections come straight from right-wing radio and/or FoxNews.  The signs are merely symptomatic:  FoxNews reports and decides, the Teabaggers follow, and spell poorly.

So that's it.  Before I go, though, I've thought of a new flag that can be hoisted at Teabagger rallies: