CLASS WARFARE: APPARENTLY IT'S OK WHEN THE RIGHT ENGAGES IN IT

For years, right-wingers have railed against people from the left who denounced economic inequality. You're playing the class warfare card! How dare you! they howled.

But when guns are involved, I guess it's OK:

The National Rifle Association released a new television commercial Tuesday night charging President Barack Obama of hypocrisy for being "skeptical" about placing armed guards at schools, while his own two daughters are protected by the U.S. Secret Service.

"Are the president's kids more important than yours?" a narrator says in the 30 second ad. "Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools, when his kids are protected by armed guards at their school."

Oh, right, because there's absolutely no difference between the number of people -- terrorists, lunatics, hatemongers -- targeting the president's family and the number of people targeting yours and mine. It's just silly to think there's a difference.

Here's the ad, via BuzzFeed:





The ad, we're told, "is running on the Sportsman Channel, a cable network focused on outdoors programming such as hunting and fishing. It is also posted on a dedicated web site 'Stand and Fight.'" A rural sports channel and a site called "Stand and Fight"? That makes me think about something George Packer quoted in a recent New Yorker piece about the South:

Alabama teams have won the past four college football titles. After the Crimson Tide's big win over Notre Dame on January 7th, a Web site called Real Southern Men explained the significance in terms of regional defiance: "Football matters here, because it is symbolic of the fight we all fight. Winning matters here, because it is symbolic of the victories we all seek. Trophies matter here, because they are symbolic of the respect we deserve but so rarely receive."

Since the end of World War II, the South has just become richer and richer, and more and more politically powerful -- and yet people in the South, the epicenter of movement conservatism and the home base of the GOP, never stop insisting that we don't give them enough respect. In fact we completely ceded control of the U.S. government to the South (and honorary Southerners like Ronald Reagan) for a couple of decades, while Southerners accused us of treason just for not agreeing with them, the descendants of the folks who actually engaged in mass treason in the nineteenth century.

The right-wing South has taken the complaint about inadequate respect nationwide, and made it the common complaint of Fox/talk radio right-wingers everywhere in America. In recent decades, this phony class-warfare fight has been the only successful class-warfare fight, because we actually did kowtow to the South (and the honorary-Southern Fox/talk radio audience) by giving right-wingers what they want. And they're still not satisfied. They still want more respect -- respect defined as giving them everything they want -- and they'll never stop demanding this.

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