Who is the right calling "loser"?

[babylonsister]

Who is the right calling "loser"?

The GOP is whipping up resentment of Obama and "loafers" who defaulted on home loans. But it crashed the biggest welfare Cadillac in history.



By Gary Kamiya
Pages 1 2


Feb. 24, 2009 | CNBC stock analyst Rick Santelli instantly became a right-wing hero last week when he launched into a five-minute on-air rant from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Shouting "This is America," the former derivatives trader attacked President Obama's housing plan as "promoting bad behavior" by rewarding the "losers" who took on more debt than they could afford. Sporadically cheered on by a small group of stock traders in the background, Santelli said Obama was turning America into Cuba, and called for a capitalist "Chicago Tea Party." He finished by calling the floor traders "a pretty good statistical cross-section of America," a "silent majority" who were opposed to socialist policies that would make "Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin roll over in their grave."

Santelli's diatribe has become the most popular video in the history of CNBC: A copy posted on YouTube had nearly 700,000 viewers. The Drudge Report splashed his remarks on its front page. "Watch for the Palin-Santelli 2012 signs," Kathryn Lopez wrote in a post on the National Review Online, adding: "The reaction to Rick Santelli's Chicago-trading-floor incident this morning echoes the emotional reaction my inbox had to Sarah Palin's convention speech this summer." Right-wing blogs were filled with excited commentary about how "grassroots tax revolts are springing up all over." One of the Web sites that sprang up promoting Santelli's "tea party" exulted, "Our founders have stopped rolling over in their graves. After months of tossing and turning, we have finally taken back the banner of hope that has been hijacked by the 'do-good' saviors."

The right wing hasn't been so excited since Obama used the fateful expression "spread the wealth" in his interview with noted tax analyst and Middle East expert Joe the Plumber.

None of this is surprising. Whipping up anger at the undeserving poor, whether yesterday's "welfare loafers" or today's irresponsible borrowers, has been a winning Republican political tactic for more than 40 years. In his first national political speech, a televised address he delivered for Barry Goldwater in 1965, Ronald Reagan told an apocryphal story -- the first of many he would tell over the decades -- about a woman who had six children and was pregnant with a seventh, and who wanted to divorce her husband because welfare would pay her $80 more per month than he made. The do-good Democrats, Reagan warned, were preparing to install "socialism" in the U.S.

The right's assault on the undeserving beneficiaries of federal largess has always contained a thinly disguised element of racism. The GOP's successful "Southern strategy," in which it appealed to white Southerners' anger at federal civil rights laws, was all about race. When Reagan in 1976 referred to working people being outraged at a "strapping young buck" using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, everyone knew whom he was talking about.

Although it's less explicit, there's also a racial element in the outrage over Obama's housing plan. Banks disproportionately targeted minorities for subprime loans, which of course means that large numbers of the "losers" Santelli ranted about are black or Latino.

more...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/02/24/rick_santelli/

[YOY]

1. "a pretty good statistical cross-section of America," ...the floor traders.

Fucker needs to get in the car and drive a little and see "real America".