Last week, a young wingnut named Holly Fisher tweeted a photo of herself smiling in front of a Hobby Lobby store while holding a Chick-fil-A cup; the photo was accompanied by the message "ATTENTION LIBERALS: do NOT look at this picture. Your head will most likely explode."
Fisher followed this, on the Fourth of July, with a tweeted photo of herself holding a rifle and a Bible in front of an American flag; as a Slate writer noted, "Her pose was soon compared to the image at right of Reem Riyashi, a mother of two from Gaza who killed four people and herself with a suicide bomb in 2004." Liberals lashed out at her. Wingers, naturally, rallied around her.
So what was Holly Fisher up to today?
Well, she was on Fox & Friends -- and she wants her Twitter fans to know precisely where her loyalties lie:
I was wearing these bad boys on @foxandfriends --> pic.twitter.com/w6e3SOL0NW
— Holly Fisher (@HollyRFisher) July 9, 2014If you're squinting at a cellphone and struggling to figure out what I'm referring to, I'll explain: she's wearing GOP elephant earrings. Holly Fisher, the conservative movement's new bad girl, the female Ted Nugent, a person who clearly has no enemies to her right, rocks Republican bling. Conservative schism? Clearly she's never heard anything about that.
Fisher's newfound celebrity has won her more than 41,000 followers on Twitter, and I might have thought that one of them, in a friendly way, would have suggested that the GOP isn't what it used to be in the glorious days of the Ronaldus Magnus and that all True Patriots ought to start a third party -- but no, all the tweets in response are of the you-go-girl variety, as, presumably, are the 37 retweets and 263 favorites. (Fisher also has a different photo of herself in GOP earrings in the banner on her main Twitter page.)
Yes, right-wingers may grumble about the GOP and lament that it isn't conservative enough, but it's still the enemy of their enemy (us), and it's still the biggest gang in town. It's the party of Reagan. It's the party that made Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of its congressional takeover class in 1994. They're never going to leave it.
Wait until Holly Hobby Lobby and her conservative twitter pals find out that every Hobby Lobby store is chock full of abortifacients:
ReplyDeleteKnitting needles.
I think these are just really different things. The Tea Party and the dissociating fringe are just looking for reasons to love Icons and to love a winner. If that winner/icon is associated with the Republican party they will go for it. If that winner/Icon is associated with a fringe conservative party, a niche market, they will go for it. The voters and the base don't have any loyalty to the Republican party as a party and they don't identify with its goals in terms of corporate benefits, corruption, or even running the country. They respond at this point only to tribal shibboleths. So they respond very well to mascots, pretty women, armed men, who pose iconically without offering any particular political program.
ReplyDeleteThis is politics stripped of politics, government stripped of governance. They are interested, and emotionally invested, in culture war and political action of the "attenat" or the significant blow against what they see as the overwhelming, stultifying, authority of the current democratic government. The question of who should actually run things, or how, is left to another venue.
When people actually have to vote, in their local places, they return to the Republican party because they understand the issues and the players a little more and they are looking for someone who can do X, or Y, at the local level. But for most of them the federal government has become an abstraction--it does stuff they don't understand, at a distance that is too far for them to grasp. For those positions they will continue to vote Republican because it is at least a brand name they can identify. The teabagger identity is a sub-republican identity that enables them to participate and experience rebellion within an overall conformity.
What aimai said!
ReplyDeleteDarlin', I think you should keep on pounding down the tubs of sugary soda and fried chicken sandwiches in your wish to upset me. Keep on doing it, maybe by the time you're 250 pounds my head might just explode.
ReplyDeleteI find it pretty funny that the idea of the pic was to infuriate liberals. Do you know any liberals who were infuriated by that? Or did they (like me) just roll their eyes and move on?
ReplyDeleteWould these folks' "heads explode" if they saw a married gay Muslim couple hugging a tree while drinking Starbucks lattes?