So, why conservatives are always mad at Obama, when after all, they're why he's president today?
America, as we all should have figured out already, is not and has never been a meritocracy. Unfortunately, this "meritocracy" bullshit is just the sort of myth that has been passed down from our parents as a scam, I suppose, that they've used to trick us into eating their horrible cooking, like runny oatmeal, boiled okra or my own personal bête noire… brussels sprouts.
"Eat up now, dearie. Those sprouts
aren't going to regurgitate themselves."
Once the habit of telling lies to encourage favorable outcomes in our behavior became such an addictive habit, that habit was pretty damn hard to break. Those lies have always been used to mask the true nature of living in a nation with a permanent overclass of lazy, manipulative landed gentry, all with a superiority complex so large that it could sink a battleship. After all, these midday sipping, alcohol sopped dilettantes needed someone to work at their beck and call for a pittance. It wasn't as if they were going to throw the doors of the country club wide open, so that the hoi polloi could hob-nob with their sons and daughters. Also they are well aware that the rest of us could figure out that the game is rigged against us and break out the torches and pitchforks.
They needed tricks to get the unwashed masses to think that they could work their way up that long ladder of success, so they could piss down on everyone else below them. "Trickle Down" has so many connotations in this country, that's why so many Americans have been suckered into believing that it could work for so long. They have done this partly by creating the image of their own necessity, as well as the myth that anyone, through enough gravity defying pulling up of ones bootstraps, could get to their level. Even as things get worse, we are stuck on believing that we can control our situation. We blame ourselves for our own victimhood, just as the wealthy credit their own success in life despite the fact that most of them get that way by winning a genetic lottery. It's cognitive dissonance that's as American as cherry pie.
THE REALNESS
The sober fact is that America is and always has been a country that has made most people living here a disposable commodity. Disposability is our American nightmare. Even those tricks that our parents used to get us to eat their lousy cooking were borne from the fact that they didn't want to raise lazy, good for nothing n'ere-do-wells, to be tossed out on the trash heap of society.
America has been built on a design of recursive disposability. From slaves, to immigrants, to women, to children, to share croppers, to more immigrants, to prisoners who are actually the newest form of slaves, to low wage workers, to kids who have to go into debt for an education, to just about anyone who has to work from paycheck to paycheck. Your status as a disposable person in this country is a given. Disposability is a sport in this country, from the political arena to the sports arena. Every poor kid who has ever dreamed of making that big paycheck, when so few actually do, has fallen into nothing more than a form of social darwinism, so that they could whore their talents out for the sake of making profits for team owners.
If your ancestors were never part of that WASPy overclass of monied assholes who felt that they've owned all that they've surveyed, chances are that at one time or another, they were part of the disposable class too. And unless your wealth and family stature was built as a bulwark against any future stage of disposability, chances are still good that circumstances could have you finding yourself tossed out like so much of yesterday's newspapers.
"You and I are just alike, newspaper. That's why I love you so much."
Instead, the American narrative was and still is a vast saga of fixing the inequalities of class throughout our population. This is our legacy. A legacy that is contradictory to the opposing American meme, as championed by conservative philosophy, that the necessities of life should be profited from. That, in the richest country on this planet, were wealth and a high standard of living can be fairly shared, that these things must be earned, as all the odds are against us. It's a form of built in unfairness. Our system was never supposed to be fair. Fairness, were are tricked into thinking is actually unfair. We're supposed to overcome the unfairness of the system. It's supposed to be a test of our character. These are lies, of course. Just because someone wins the genetic lottery, it doesn't give them any more strength of character than someone who wasn't. Be we have had it beaten out of us, to care about any of that.
THE PLAY
Of course, these things have played into how our political system works. And this is where it gets very interesting. Being a long time observer of American politics, I would have to say that the greatest difference between conservatives and liberals is based on a sliding scale of a sense of ones entitlement. Basically, the more entitled you'd feel, the more you're likely to adhere to a conservative philosophy. You're entire goal in life, as a conservative, is to preserve the greatest amount of rights, privileges and wealth as possible. You consider it your inheritance. Your entire value as a person is based on your ability to stand as high as you can on top of that ladder of success and piss down on everyone else. Achievement through legacy is the American way to you.
There is a very serious consequence to this particular philosophy… It rewards incompetence. Which, I would say is exactly why so many rocket scientists end up in being conservative Republicans. They don't know how hard it is to make a living in this country, because they've had their lives handed to them. The system works quite well for them, so why shouldn't it work that way for everyone else? If people fail, it must be their own fault right? The main problem with this ideal is that it's the default.
I guess that explains this guy.
On the left, we all know that the system is unfair. We spend our entire lives trying to fix the unfairness of the system. Which is why, I'm sure that liberals are so enamored with facts. Facts are our friends, they keep us warm at night. We really hate it when they're pissed on by right wing assholes. We defend them and if we could, we'd make sweet-sweet love to them. It's a love story, with facts and liberals, as romantic as one would find in a Harlequin romance novel. We, on the left, are quite sure that whatever successes we make, we're doing so against the prevailing odds. Knowing where you're from is very important and we have to be cognizant of our own empathy for those who are coming up behind us. Our job is to improve their prospects, to blaze a path and create a sense of mutual support. Unlike those on the right, we believe that we have to always earn our success, because we know that we're not automatically entitled to it.
This is true, especially for minorities in this country. We know that the system has been unfairly aligned against us. We know that there aren't any shortcuts to success. We also know that there is quite a different standard for gauging success that's applied to us than there is for those who are not minorities. If you're a black person in America, you know that you have to work twice as hard to be considered at least half as good as any non-minority with an equal resume. Remember that point I made about disposability being a sport in this country? That's exactly how this pans out. It's hunger, hunger to make in a world that has classified you as less than. You know full well that a successful life isn't your entitlement, which I'm sure, is why so few minorities in this country end up being conservative Republicans.
THE MONSTER THEY CREATED
This is the entire preface that has created the CURRENT presidency of Barack Obama:
Now first, I have to stipulate that I believe that Obama always had the potential to become president. He's smart enough, he worked hard enough, he was determined enough and, of course, he definitely has the temperament for the job. He earned his success, no doubt. No question at all.
But it's not like he didn't get any help from both the American adherence to regressive conservative philosophy and the Republicans themselves. As a black man in America, Barack Obama knew that he had to use every once of his own intellect to succeed and he did. From every stage of academic achievement, to all of his community work, to every climb up the political ladder, he fought hard and long to make it… Including exploiting the times when the Republicans created opportunities for him.
These are the two main ones:
Jack Ryan. No, not the Tom Clancy hero.
"Sorry, it's my job to keep Obama in office, not put him there in the first place."
But the former Republican candidate for the Illinois US Senate seat who ran against Obama in 2004. The politician, also known as the former "Mr. Seven Of Nine" turned out to be a total creepy perv and had to drop out of the race, leaving the GOP senate candidacy to perennial loser and certifiable right wing nut job, Alan Keyes. His TV star ex-wife, Jeri Ryan, wasn't all too pleased with his penchant for taking her to swinger's clubs and all other sorts of various freaky-deakery and decided that a little pay back was in order. When you get fucked over by the Borg, you stay fucked for sure.
Basically the rich pretty boy, hot shot Wall Street banker with the hot ex-wife thought the he was completely entitled to the senate seat being vacated by the Republican, Peter Fitzgerald. It was obviously his place to hob-nob in the corridors of Washington power circles. But as it turned out, Ryan also turned out to be a really bad campaigner in spite of all of that. Besides all of the gory details that plopped on the floor like a jello mold from his divorce procedures, he sent one of his own staffers to follow Obama around with a video camera, in order to catch some sort of wrongdoing. When the word got out about his dirty tactics, it became seen as unsavory as Ryan's own rubber underwear. After all the mess, he dropped out to be replaced by that wacky Keyes fellow and the rest was history.
"Pay back is an assimilation."
The second stage, of Barack Obama's rise to the top, of course, was following that incompetent frat boy of the Bush Crime Family, Dubya. Clearly a man who turned out to be the worst person elected to the White House in most of our lifetimes.
Bush's incompetence, not only had ruined the chances for another conservative Republican to get elected directly after him, I'm absolutely sure that he was instrumental in helping Barack Obama get elected president eight wholes years earlier than the median age for US presidents of fifty-five years. Given that Obama had done everything to earn the presidency without any assistance of both the Republican penchant for rank incompetence, as well as our American cultural penchant for wringing a higher degree of achievement out of minorities, a regularly paced attainment of becoming president would probably around 2016 or later.
BUT WHY DO THEY HATE THE GUY?
In spite of the fact that they're partially responsible for his selection, they can't but to help but to fall upon their own sense of entitlement. Because they're incompetent and can't recognize competence when they see it, they can't see how much they're fucking up. I'm quite sure that the entire Republican party is now nothing more than a running experiment of the Dunning-Kruger Effect in action. I'm quite sure that they won't reverse their shortfalls any time soon.
But in spite of all this, America is still an oligarchy, with rich assholes steering our government into a crevasse. Despite that Barack Obama is the living embodiment of every mythological American pathos, (I'm quite sure that HE ate his damn Brussels sprouts) the rich masters feel that he hasn't given them enough due deference to their own sense of entitlement. The Republicans, as directed by their overlords, will always follow suit.
In a way, given Obama's record of self-acheivement and ingenuity, plus his sense of liberal empathy, the reaction of the right is pretty much a pure confirmation that America's status as a meritocracy is nothing more than a bald faced lie.
How dare someone overcome all of the things that were stacked against him?
How dare he defeat his "betters?"
How dare he try to make the system more fair?
How dare he "defy" the owners of America?
How dare he expose the lie about America?
It's clear that Obama's very presence in office is an intrinsic threat to the masters of the system, even if he himself works in someways to preserve the structure of the existing status quo. Obama is no radical, he's a cold, hard pragmatist who, on one hand wants to improve the inherent flaws of American existence, he also believes that it's his job to protect the integrity of the American infrastructure. He thinks that government should basically FUNCTION. Which actually means his approach to the job is the same as would a 1950's Republican.
The Republicans almost destroyed America with their incompetence, and in response, America elected a Black Eisenhower. Since they're not getting any better, the next stage, of course, is to reverse the last thirty years of right wing conservative Republican bullshit.
Let's keep it all from falling apart for now, as how Obama is doing that, and afterwards we need to put the regression fully in reverse.
Get out the vote, mutha-fuckas!
= new reply since forum marked as read
except it's "ladder," not "latter." 
but sometimes some things just grate...
