Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [36]
As Harris-Lacewell has said (when she’s psychoanalyzing Tea Partiers), we know “that there are individuals [who] have sort of a predisposition towards intolerance.” When “things start changing very rapidly,” people experience “this anxiety, and it creates precisely the kind of intolerance that we’re seeing.”42
Harris-Lacewell was understandably confused and anxious. She was upset that no one asked her to replace Starr Parker on The View—as she had proposed on her blog. She was exhausted from carrying that Princeton backdrop around with her for every TV appearance. She couldn’t understand why Rachel Maddow was always showering her with sickening praise that was not afforded Rachel’s white guests. All this may explain the intolerance we’re seeing from Harris-Lacewell.
As she might explain herself—at least when she’s talking about conservatives—Harris-Lacewell evinced a “certitude” about her own position and worried that her “way of life” was “under attack.” She showed a “capacity to dehumanize” white male athletes because she believes that “they are not as good as” she is. Those were factors 1, 2, and 3 in her explanation to MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann of the (nonexistent) “move to violence” among Tea Partiers.43 (There was never any actual violence by Tea Partiers—but they were moving that way!)
MSNBC’s other black guest, Eugene Robinson, was also a rape truther, long after the evidence suggested otherwise. (I’m going to embarrass Eugene by pointing out that he’s won a Pulitzer Prize. Why? Because it’s the law.) Invoking classic liberal stereotypes of “preppy privilege” and students who were “downright arrogant in their sense of superiority,” Robinson said, “It’s impossible to avoid thinking of all the black women who were violated by drunken white men in the American South over the centuries. The master-slave relationship, the tradition of droit du seigneur, the use of sexual possession as an instrument of domination—all this ugliness floods the mind, unbidden, and refuses to leave.”44
It having been established that the accuser had once stolen a taxi, led the cops on a high-speed car chase, and tried to run down a police officer with the cab, among her other prior crimes, and that none of the lacrosse players’ DNA could be found on her person or effects, a rational person would find it quite possible to avoid thinking of drunken white men raping their slaves two hundred years earlier. Me? I thought of Tawana Brawley. But the mob is immune to facts, preferring myths and images.
Liberals are the “some of the people” you can fool all the time. It’s easy to implant myths in the minds of mobs because they only grasp ideas in terms of images. As Le Bon explains:
Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action.
For this reason theatrical representations, in which the image is shown in its most clearly visible shape, always have an enormous influence on crowds. [S]pectacular shows constituted for the plebeians of ancient Rome the idea of happiness, and they asked for nothing more.…
Nothing has a greater effect on the imagination of crowds of every category than theatrical representations.45
Cut to: Maureen Dowd writing in the New York Times that a movie about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson “makes clear that Plame was not merely ‘a secretary’ or ‘mediocre agent’ at the agency, as partisan critics charged at the time, but a respected undercover spy tracking Iraqi W.M.D. efforts.”46
The movie says so!
Not only that but Dowd noted that the movie “reiterates that Plame did not send her husband, who had worked in embassies in Iraq while Saddam and Bush