"Aren't You People Over the 'Rick Warren' YET?" or "Obamania as Re-Branded Nationalism"

From my blog QUEERS AGAINST OBAMA!

If there's one trait that many Obamaniacs share with their naked emperor, it's a baffling degree of audacity. Well, if it's not unbridled audacity that allows them to feel perfectly comfortable approaching the LGBTQ people who were outraged at the "Rick Warren thing" and asking whether or not we've "gotten over it yet", then I'm not sure what you'd call it. Rudeness? Narcissism? Queer-phobic disdain? Stupidity?

Whenever one of Obama's precious little agents of hope and change asks me that question, I fantasize about getting the poor misguided fool alone in a room, tying him to a chair, and practicing some of the techniques I learned from the movie Reservoir Dogs on him. As I slowly remove one of his toenails with a pair of rusty pliers, I'd put on my best Italian mafia boss accent (think Joe Pesci in Goodfellas) and, calmly disregarding his screams, I'd say, "Of course I'm not 'over' Obama's decision to honor a man who hates queer people so much that he funds groups of anti-queer extremists (whom he refers to as his "friends" and "like family") in Africa responsible for torturing and killing LGBTQ people, you stupid fuck."

Had Bush honored David Duke at his inauguration, I imagine these same liberal/"progressive" Obamaniacs would have behaved quite differently. I'm confident that the same liberals and "progressives" who currently deride me for not "letting go" of the Rick Warren incident would have literally tripped over the hems of the dresses they don when putting on their politically-correct drag shows in their race to feign righteous indignation at any suggestion that African Americans "get over it".

Another baffling characteristic of the thoroughly indoctrinated Obamaniacs is their collective inability to think about complex issues that cannot be easily summarized by a catchy slogan. I've watched some of them try, and I've literally seen smoke start wafting out of their ears when ideas beyond "change" or "hope" enter the debate . Their soundbite-based intellects are incapable of grasping the mind blowing reality that a number of the problems I and many other LGBTQ people have with Obama transcend what he may or may not believe about homosexuality or what he may or may not "do" for "us". My own personal concerns about Obama that involve matters other than his anti-queer bigotry can be found all over this blog. Due to time constraints I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the lies, hypocrisy, and warmongering that is obscured by Brand Obama.


By far the most baffling characteristic shared by these liberal and "progressive" Obamaphiles is their inability to remember the very recent past. Am I the only person who has noticed that the groupthink of Obamania is all too reminiscent of the reactionary nationalism that swept the nation after 9/11? I probably wouldn't have even thought to start this blog had it not been for the disturbingly violent reactions of liberal and "progressive" Obamaniacs to any criticism of Obama whatsoever, no matter how mild. I remember getting the same type of violent reactions from most people in the US after 9/11 when I dared to question why the fuck the United States needed to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

Although BushCo's lies were utterly (and embarrassingly) apparent to anyone with a single firing synapse who bothered to engage in the slightest amount of research (beyond simply watching CNN or Fox and listening to NPR), it turned out that the actual facts seemed to matter very little to most Americans. Instead, they were more interested in trying to outdo each other by making bold proclamations of fealty to the Homeland in the most saccharine and trite ways they could conjure up ("Where were you when the world stopped turning?"). I guess they were too busy buying Toby Keith records, placing bids on ebay for bits of rubble from Ground Zero, collecting American flag lapel pins, covering their vehicles with American flag decals, and purchasing American flag bandannas to notice that they were being manipulated and set up to get financially gang raped with a brutality lacking any historical precedent. Pathetically, even many liberal Obamamaniacs still believe the lie that the invasion of Iraq was a "mistake" due to "faulty intelligence about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction" and that the war has merely been "mishandled". They somehow manage to accept uncritically such blatant historical revisionism even now when they have the benefit of hindsight and plenty of evidence that is a matter of public record (neither of which were really necessary to divine BushCo's true motives BEFORE the invasions).

We have already seen what happens when the American public gets worked up into a lather by a government-sponsored nationalist frenzy. People abandon reason, voluntarily censor and punish dissenters, and naively accept as truth everything that comes out of the President's mouth (via his fawning corporate media megaphone). So, you "progressive" Obamaniacs can keep right on hoping to be the change you want to see to live and believe in (or whatever...Yes you can!) all you want, but that does not change the fact that Obamania is nothing more than yet another manufactured nationalist frenzy. It is having the same hypnotic effect on the American public as the spell cast by BushCo soon after 9/11. The only difference between the two cases is in how the nationalism was packaged.

These days, manufactured nationalism has been concealed inside a package wrapped in recycled peace-symbol embossed wrapping paper and accentuated by a patchouli scented bow on top. It's even accompanied by a nice card with lots of pretty platitudes and instructions for you to focus exclusively on the one thing that really matters: identity politics. If you open the package up and look inside, however, you'll find the same contents that have always been there: billions of dollars allocated each year to support Israel's slaughter of Palestinians; a multi-billion dollar per year obsession with the subversion of democracy in Latin America (a.k.a "the war on drugs"); the propping up of corporate-friendly dictators in nations around the world; ongoing war and occupation of nations that never threatened the U.S.; disingenuous proclamations of a militaristic faith in the ability of "free-market" approaches to solve all domestic problems (except, apparently, corporations going bankrupt), which leads inexorably to economic policies that overwhelmingly favor the wealthy while doing virtually nothing for the poor except fucking them over (and, before you interrupt, the much-ballyhooed "stimulus package" has followed this formula quite closely despite the spin placed on it by Obama's corporate media cheerleaders); American exceptionalism; and countless cover ups of US atrocities at home and abroad by government lies and propaganda that are transformed by PR alchemists into good-enough facsimiles of what Americans want the truth to be so that they don't start paying attention and interfering.

Of course, most liberals seem to think that the new wrapping paper covering the present manufactured nationalism is just so gorgeous and so inspiring that they simply can't bare the thought of destroying it (or their illusions) by tearing it open to gain access to the contents hidden inside. So they simply put the pretty package on a shelf to serve as a totem to which they can avert their gaze whenever reality accidentally encroaches upon the change they are trying so desperately to believe in.