When you have nothing to sell but fear itself

By Rod Haxton, editor

Some will argue that the United States doesn’t produce anything these days; that we’ve managed to ship our jobs, our technology and our manufacturing base elsewhere. All we’re left with is an auto industry on life support and two all-beef patties that probably got their start in Australia.

These naysayers are wrong.

Whereas, FDR tried to comfort us by saying we had “nothing to fear but fear itself,” Republicans see opportunity. Fear isn’t something to be suppressed, but to be embraced with open arms. This represents the last, real growth industry in the U.S. We may experience housing bubbles, high tech bubbles and Bazooka Joe bubbles, but you never hear of a fear bubble.

That’s because fear is the one industry that always drives the Republican economy.

As soon as President Barack Obama is elected the gun industry experiences a huge growth. Why? Out of fear that Obama and Democrats will repeal the Second Amendment.

But the GOP is savvy enough to know that you can’t hedge all your bets on fear alone. When fear is combined with ignorance you’ve hit the political jackpot.

Americans elect a black president and it stokes suppressed fears within the Republican Party. There’s no way a black man could have earned this election legitimately - not the son of a Kenyan father and a Kansas mother who grew up in Hawaii. Sounds too un-American.

The result is an entire industry, including websites, devoted to keeping alive the belief that President Obama isn’t a U.S. citizen. According to some polls, that belief is shared by upwards of 58 percent of Republicans, most of whom spend their evenings watching “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?”

According to the non-partisan Public Policy Polling, 20 percent of respondents correctly agree that Obama was born in the Hawaii, but six percent don’t believe Hawaii is part of the United States and four percent aren’t sure. Two-thirds of that same 20 percent “weren’t sure” whether Obama was a Frenchman.

You can’t manufacture this level of stupidity. It’s a gift to the Republican Party that keeps on giving.

When you have voters with this degree of difficulty in sorting fact from fiction, it’s easy to create non-issues such as whether it’s okay for the President to use a teleprompter when giving a speech. After all, being intelligent and well-spoken are not the traits you want in a President, particularly a black president.

It sounds, well, uppity.

Not like President George Bush who felt he was “misunderestimated” or like Sarah Palin who “will have to get back with ya” when asked about a Supreme Court decision she doesn’t agree with other than Roe v Wade. If a President talks or acts “too intelligent” then he’s not “one of us.”

Of course, being “one of us” has different interpretations. Conservative Republicans have to be careful not to harken back to their knuckle-dragging roots. Part of that genetic tree includes TeaParty.org founder Dale Robertson who was seen at a rally carrying a sign that referred to the leader of the free world as a “niggar” (misspelled).

And this is the movement that the Republican Party wants to claim as their heart and soul.

Other Republicans try to be a little less obvious. Rush Limbaugh likes to stoke the fear of fellow conservatives with words like “reparations” when talking about health care reform. He has described the President as a “black man-child.”

The intent is clear. The image is unmistakable. For some, the fear is real.

By playing on these fears Republicans have been successful in avoiding intelligent and reasoned discussion on issues that should matter to most Americans. By tapping into the pool of ignorance, we spent a summer hearing from people who feared the “government takeover” of health care while reaping the benefits of Medicare and Social Security. We’ve wasted the past six months talking about “death panels” that don’t exist and trying to protect a health insurance industry that is shedding millions of high risk people in order to protect their profits.

We’ve spent months arguing whether it means the end to our way of life if majority rule is allowed to prevail in the U.S. Senate.

Conservatives have been successful in fostering the opinion that even though nearly 50 million people are without health insurance, even though about two million people are forced to take medical bankruptcy each year, and even though about 530,000 Kansans have been without health insurance for at least six months during the last two years, we shouldn’t change.

As bad as things are for tens of millions of Americans, we are supposed to live in fear that they would be much worse if we did anything about it.

Forget Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Government involvement in anything will fail. And, if it did succeed, you couldn’t afford it . . . kind of like private health insurance.

If it’s real solutions you want to real problems, don’t look to conservative Republicans or the Tea Party movement. All they’re selling is fear . . . and it’s flying off the shelves.

Rod Haxton can be reached at editor@screcord.com

User Comments

• Intelligent and well-spoken?

  ""After all, being intelligent and well-spoken are not the traits you want in a President, particularly a black president" Surely you can't be referring to a man who pronounces "Ask" as "Axe" and "Corpsman" as "Corpseman" I would also like to see proof of your statistics of "According to some polls, that belief is shared by upwards of 58 percent of Republicans, most of whom spend their evenings watching %u201CAre you smarter than a fifth grader?%u201D but some polls say democrats do not watch %u201CAre you smarter than a fifth grader?%u201D because they do not understand the questions."

  Posted by K on Mar. 14, 2010

• me

  "I do not think the problems stem so much with polictical party affiliations. I think the problems stem from over priced oil and our need for it and our lack of technolical advance in practical things. We still burn coal primarliy to create power a 200 year old peice of technology, we still use gas cars 100 year peice of technology and instead of computers making us more efficent they now make us more unefficent and waste endless amounts of time. Globalization is also a contributor of our downfall to our nation. The minute we tried to compete with 1 cent per hour labor we just cut our own throats. We need to think about are at home economy and stay out of other countries issues, we should not play the international police. When the twin towers got tore down we should have drop a big bomb or when we invaded pakistan and iraq they should have become the 51st and 52 states with us getting all of their oil and tax revanues. insted of wasting years of time and endless amounts of money in those countries and having nothing at all to show for it."

  Posted by A on Mar. 9, 2010

• retired

  "your editorial is one of the most conise and well written i have read concerning what's going on in american politics today. keep up the good works!"

  Posted by g.c. jones on Mar. 9, 2010