This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1440660
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1440660
No bigger p?$$y than a conservative male. They’re all narcissistic cowards who’d throw their own mothers under the bus to avoid getting attacked by a squirrel and break into tears when they get a paper cut. It’s always all about them, and things are always so unfair for them. I’d boil them alive in a vat of their own piss and tears if I could.
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IMO Talk Radio is a major cause of the victim complex. They may not have invented it, but they sure helped make it a big part of every GOP member’s arsenal.
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Republicans have a massive sense of entitlement that they are owed being bullies and anyone getting in the way of them pushing people around is oppressing them. The kind of person who’d beat up an old man and complain that he scraped his knuckles on a tooth.
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Years ago I was doing some work for a conservative guy, he was nice enough and a big hunter, he had all kinds of mounted animals he had killed all over his den. One day I was getting tools from his garage and I hear him screaming like someone was killing him and when I rushed out of the garage he was freaking out because he’d discovered an opossum was in a 5 gallon bucket beside his garage. I calmly put a lid on the bucket and later took the possum a few miles away to a rural area.
I swear I thought he was going to have a heart attack.
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They’re just not normal, or quite right in the head. When I was a kid there were this brother and sister who were scared of everything. If you merely say “boo” to them, they’d start crying and run off in terror. It was both funny and weird.
Well, that’s your average conservative male. They like to dress up and play the part of tough guy, but they’re p’s to the core and the first to flee in sheer terror at the first sign of danger.
US President Donald Trump has said he would have run in to the Florida high school where 17 people were shot dead this month even if he was not armed.
“I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon,” Mr Trump told a group of state governors gathered at the White House.
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^1000 likes.
Dictatorial cults always need an enemy.
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Run is not in his inventory. tfg hasn’t run since he thought he was gonna to be drafted.
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Talk radio at least fuels it. The most rabid conservative victims I know listen almost exclusively to talk radio. They tend to be either business owners who can afford to listen to talk shows during the work day or people who drive a lot, visiting clients or spending time on the road for other reasons. The business owners responded well to the idea that they were “job creators”. I always thought it was interesting that the credit for job creation wasn’t placed at least partially on the customers of those small businesses. You know, the demand for the supply.
I don’t mean to paint small business owners with too broad a brush; I also know owners who put themselves on the line or their progressive beliefs. It’s not fair of me to suggest that they are some kind of monolithic group.
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They may create jobs but that wasn’t the point of starting and running their businesses, and if they could get away with it, they’d fire everyone and put in robots. In fact most of them view employees as necessary evils. It’s like taking credit for increasing a company’s profits by buying their products, when that wasn’t the point of buying them.
But, yeah, these are mostly older white men with too much free time on their hands, and, ironically, most are doing relatively well. All of the whiners I’ve met are. They’re just not doing as well as they believe they’re entitled to do. Just as the world’s (soon to be formerly) richest man–or Trump, who’s never worked a day in his life at anything real.
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“If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high“
Richard Hofstadter, The paranoid style in American politics, 1964
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You’re right. Those same people are the first to complain about any expense they have; the cost of purchasing supplies or merchandise to resell, the regulations that prevent them from providing unsafe services, the expense of hiring people and the fact that they can’t hire quality employees for substandard wages (the government is paying people to stay home and not work,you know), and so on, ad nauseam.
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The conservatives think they should get the entire pot - they do not want to share. They cannot come to grips with the idea that when everyone does well, they and society do well. The more prosperity at the bottom, the more prosperity up the ladder.
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Do not discount the part that fundementalist religion has played in this. A lot of the persecution complex comes straight out of those churches.
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THE most pertinent essay for this time in our national life.
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Seeing the picture of Reagan, I was reminded of his “I paid for this microphone!” outburst when a debate moderator tried to enforce the rules during the 1980 election. It was illuminative of the mindset of conservative elite, who were and remain a driving force behind the grievance politics that animates their voters.
They have the money and feel constrained when forced to live by a set of common societal rules — their money should give them rights above and beyond those of lesser means (and lesser worth, in their thinking) — they DESERVE that bigger microphone! Egalitarian society threatens their patriarchal/racial supremacy and they work to resist it…has been and will continue to animate the fight we’re in.
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even this city gal knows opossums don’t carry rabies. And they tend to move along on their own.
Had one under my porch once, it was gone the next day.
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I guess because I grew up in the country I knew they were as dangerous as sparrows. A big macho hunter like him being so afraid just blew my mind.
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All I can say here is that there is a rending of the Social Contract associated with FDR. And that is a tragedy, because people need to see what they have in common much more than they do.
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