Why so Angry?

I paraphrased the line Why so serious? from the movie "The Dark Knight". Conservatives in this country are angry and they are not taking it anymore. I have asked several times when I encounter a conservative that is angry why they are angry. It mostly stems around Obama but the answers I get as to why they are angry at him are almost always (not 100%) based on a complete falsehood.

-They are mad at him because he is a liberal. He is not, but do not try to convince them of this. Despite all the evidence to the contrary they fully believe he is a liberal. Take the health care reform law. It is a fairly moderate law as more conservative ideas were installed in the law than liberal. Obama's plan when he came into office was supposed to be the public option where every American could have the option of having government health care if they chose. Instead he completely backed off the public option and instead championed the mandated insurance, which Americans have to take otherwise they would be fined. This was a conservative proposal that for whatever reason Obama thought was a better idea than people choosing.

Several states sued specifically over the mandated insurance. The first state has been completed and a judge has ruled in favor of the government saying that not only is not unconstitutional Congress actually has the right to impose the mandate through the Constitution.

This mandate is not set to take place until 2014 and I still stand by my original stance and predict that this will be fixed by that time.

-They are mad at him because he is a communist, fascist, socialist, Nazi. He is not any of them. The fact the four cannot exist in the same ideology is completely lost on some. Fascism and Nazism are a right wing ideology while communism and socialism are a left wing ideology. Go a little deeper and you will find that fascists and Nazis never really liked each other and communism is a derivative of socialism but does not represent it very well. There are some that point to the fact that the actual name of the Nazi party was the Nazi Socialist Party. There is a really good reason for this and it is also really simple. At the time of the formation of the Nazi Party, socialism was a very big thing in Europe. In order to tap into the fervor for socialism the Nazis added Socialist into their name in order to attract the new Socialists.

-They are mad at him for being (or at one time in his life) Muslim. There is absolutely no proof for this except that he attended a Madrassa when he was younger. What they often leave out is that the particular school they believe he became a Muslim in did not actually focus on religion they focused on education. Another issue that some conservatives like to always say when they bring up his religion is that "it does not matter if at one point he was a Muslim". This has always confused me and when I hear that statement the next logical question is "If it is not important then why bring it up at all?" to which I commonly get answers ranging from because it is important to no answer at all. It seems rather simple if his religion really does not matter to you then why even bring it up?

-They are mad at him because liberals treat him like a god. This one has always made me laugh because so many of the national conservatives and conservative bloggers (including our very own Sam) spend an huge amount of energy convincing anyone that will listen that all liberals are atheists and then turn right around and pronounce that all liberals also see Obama as a god. I will let you ponder on that for a minute.

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If you are still trying to figure out how all liberals can be godless but think Obama is a god it all goes back to Chris Matthews. During the 2008 primaries, Matthews (a man who is hardly a liberal) stated that listening to Obama one night sent tingles up his leg. In other words he was stating that Obama has a speech making ability that few have. Conservatives and conservative bloggers heads collectively blew up and started decrying that liberals saw Obama as a god. This never once came out of any supporters mouths about Obama. Obama as a god has been a complete incarnation of conservatives.

That is all the time I will spend on Obama because it is old news. Most of the things that conservatives are angry at Obama over have all been busted as pure myth or absolute lie. Unfortunately this has not stopped a great many of them from continuing to push them as truth and they will continue to do so.

Moving on...

-They are angry because their taxes have gone up since January 2009. Actually taxes have gone down for 98% of Americans since January 2009.

-They are angry because Congress is more concerned with their own matters than they are the Americans. This I actually almost completely agree with them. The main difference is that they almost solely blame Democrats, while I blame both parties. Here in Arkansas we have two career politicians running for the Senate. Both of them, however, are trying to convince us that they are not Washington insiders. One of them will win (Boozman most likely, though I have to admit just listening to his voice will put just about anyone to sleep. Listening to Lincoln's voice will make you run for the bathroom). They have similar voting records so for me it does not matter whether it is an R or a D neither has nor will represent Arkansas' needs.

-They are angry because their side has not been allowed any input in any of the new laws passed in the last two years. They have been more than involved getting the majority of amendments put in the laws than moderates or liberals. Yet when it came time to vote their representatives still voted no, many times on amendments that they had just introduced.

In the end I just don't understand the anger. Washington has been status quo for at least the last twenty years through both Democratic and Republican majorities. They apparently honestly believe that if the Republicans do take over in November that something is going to change. If you like government stoppages, money wasting investigations, nothing getting done then getting a Republican take-over is in your best interest.

For me though OUR Congress needs to put down their silly differences and work together to fix the economy. Doing nothing has shown that the economy will just keep getting worse (Herbert Hoover attempted that before the Great Depression) doing too much but in the wrong direction causes things to get worse as well (the much maligned TARP signed into law by Bush, not Obama as has been completely assigned to him. But in the end TARP has nearly been paid for and it looks like it will shutter before the end of the year). We also know that doing too little will only put a band-aid on the situation. Of course when one of the top conservatives in the land, Rush Limbaugh, proclaims that he hopes Obama fails (note, he never said he wanted America to fail. But seriously, when you are hoping the chief executive of the country to fail, part of the country has to fail before the president can) it becomes very hard to trust the national conservatives have anything but their best interests in mind.