Do TeaBaggers Hate Us 'Cuz They Think WE Think They're Inferior?

snot

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Thu Oct-28-10 03:20 PM
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Do TeaBaggers Hate Us 'Cuz They Think WE Think They're Inferior?

You really have to read the whole article at http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/sore-winners-102710#ixzz13gczDwMi to appreciate it, but this gives an idea:

"Liberals are supposed to be the sensitive ones, but even the liberals who worked themselves into a froth over George W. Bush never really cared very much about what he thought of them. But conservatives care what President Obama thinks. They care to the point of imagining what he thinks. I get the same feeling listening to them that I've gotten living in the South and listening to Southerners tell me about Yankees and the War of Northern Aggression. Well, although I've lived in the South nearly 30 years I'm a Yankee born and raised, and I can tell you with reasonable authority that no one in North thinks or talks about the Civil War. Nor do they talk about SEC football. Nor do they worry about what Southerners think of them, whereas I've heard many Southerners explain the football prowess of SEC schools in terms of self-esteem — i.e., that success on the football field is what allows Southerners to feel they're "just as good" as everyone else, even though everyone else is blessedly unaware of the outcome of the Iron Bowl, or even where it's played.

"Worrying about what someone who doesn't think about you thinks about you: this is the essence of Sore Winnerdom, and it is no accident that it also the essence of the Republican animus. . . . The skin on the Republican Party's "Big Tent" is by definition thin, and under it gathers a volatile throng of people with nothing in common but the fear that outside its environs someone is laughing at them — or simply having a better time.

"Yes, I know: There have been countless articles and blog posts that attempt to puzzle out the inexplicable anger of the American electorate, when an even cursory scan of the unemployment numbers provides all the explanation you'll ever need. But, as has been pointed out and proven elsewhere, Tea Partiers tend to be quite well-off (how else would they afford all those trips to DC in their RVs?), and much of the populist rage at Obama has been fomented by the captains of American finance and industry: the Sore Winners. And once you've spent time with a Sore Winner, or entered into a debate with one, you feel that there's something afoot in America — something that's reflected in debates about policy but is never quite stated in them, and is still unnamed. It is convenient to call it racism, but when my friend tells me he's no racist, I take him at his word. After all, as he protested, I know him. And so when we were sitting outside, on his renovated deck, by his expanded pool, talking about the massive outdoor grilling apparatus he'd just installed, and I mentioned Obama's name and he responded with a visible tremor of disgust and said, in a description that was half-accurate and hence oxymoronic, "God, I hate that elitist bastard" — well, I didn't necessarily conclude that his disgust had its wellsprings in prejudice. But I didn't think that it had much to do with health care either. Indeed, it was not the kind of anger — or hatred — that finds redress in changing policy at all, but rather in making the people who've made you suffer for reasons that go beyond reason suffer in return."

More at http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/sore-winners-102710#ixzz13gczDwMi .