Ok, you’ve made it through nearly the entire holiday season addressing right-wingers and their Fox talking points at the dinner table. There’s only one holiday left — New Year’s. The popping of champagne corks might lead your conservative friends to pop off once again against liberals, Democrats, President Obama and their biggest target of the year: the Affordable Care Act. In anticipation of these bubbly-filled blowhards, here are some of this year’s effective pro-Affordable Care Act talking points for your New Year’s Eve:
Fallout regarding A&E Network‘s suspension of “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson for his anti-gay and anti-black comments in a GQ Magazine interview is reaching a fever pitch. For example, “Phil Robertson” is trending very high on Twitter, with commenters voicing their opinions on both sides. However, Robertson’s suspension is hardly surprising given the long list of tv, radio, musical and other personalities who have been commercially penalized for their comments made either on or off the air. This list spans the political spectrum, and includes:
Megyn Kelly of Fox “News” waded into the imaginary War on Christmas this past week, and ended up stepping in yellow snow. First, on December 11, as indicated in the video above, Kelly said that “Santa just is white …. Santa is what he is.” Kelly went on to say that “Jesus was a white man too.”
Kelly’s remarks caused a firestorm among historians, anthropologists and almost everyone else over the age of seven. Many people pointed out that, aside from the little technicality that Santa Claus isn’t real, St. Nicholas was from present-day Turkey (and likely swarthy-looking), and the very white, rosy-cheeked Santa familiar to many American kids is merely a Coca-Cola advertising creation. After hearing about all this, Kelly took to the air last Friday to say that she had only been joking about that Santa being white thing, even though there was no indication in her original broadcast that she was joking about it. Then Kelly, apparently in her next stage of grief, said that her critics, not her, had decided to “race bait,” but that, come to think of it, it “is far from settled” whether Jesus was white (even though, according to the evidence, Jesus was a Middle-Eastern Jew who was likely as swarthy-looking or more than even St. Nicholas).
Sadly, Fox’s Megyn Kelly is not alone in having her history shaped by White Corporate America. So in honor of Megyn Kelly’s history lesson, how about we list some other myths perpetuated by some big U.S. corporations, their front groups and bought-off politicians, which make as much sense as Fox’s White Santa/White Jesus:
Amid their electoral defeats at the hands of women during their War on Women, Republicans are now being sent to school for “messaging against women.” This type of Republican message outreach hasn’t worked so well for the GOP in the past.
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith
The one-word definition of conservatism is “selfishness.” How else to explain conservatives’ (and most Republicans’) opposition to the Affordable Care Act, which will allow millions more Americans to obtain health insurance? How else to explain the Republicans’ opposition to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (“SNAP“), which feeds millions of poor children in America? Or to raising the federal minimum wage, which now sits at just half the poverty level? How else to explain Republican opposition to the extension of long-term unemployment benefits, or the GOPs zeal to cut benefits for Social Security and Medicare, which keep millions of seniors barely out of poverty? How else to explain the Repubilcans’ love affair with the draconian sequestration cuts, except when it comes to military spending?
This holiday season, as many privileged Republicans gorge themselves on a bounty of food, tax cuts and high-flying stock market investments, and many of their followers inexplicably back them up, ask them why they support such selfish conservative policies.
The very first post at Messaging Matters noted that many issues in the news seem to skew Republican. That was nearly three years ago, and it’s still the case. Many of the so-called major news stories of 2013 were ginned up by Republicans: Obamacare website glitches, Benghazi, IRS “scandal,” etc. Even the New York Times, supposedly the bastion of liberal media, fell for these Republican-created news memes. And how about the lineups of the Sunday morning talk shows? This year, only the GOP Shutdown seemed to favor the Democrats.
