The first one was by Jonathan Cohn, and he wrote about conservatives and their latest meme about "free stuff". Yes America, conservatives work, and all of us other stiff just want "free stuff". Let's forget, for a minute, that most of these billies live in the poorest areas of the country that depend on a lot of "free stuff" from our government. These are the folks Mitt Romney was talking about when he referred to the 47% but they are just too dumb to realize it.
"Frustrated conservatives have a theory for why their ideas didn’t win more support on Election Day: They can’t compete with the offer of “free stuff.”
As this argument goes, President Obama and the Democrats won by promising their constituencies government goodies, but without asking those constituencies to pay for them. Women got free birth control. Latinos got more open immigration policy. The poor got food stamps. Tons of people got subsidized health insurance. And so on.
It’s basically another version of the 47 percent argument—i.e., that 47 percent of the country is dependent on the rest of the taxpaying public. It was kicking around in conservative circles even before Mitt Romney invoked it at that now-infamous Florida fundraiser. And judging by recent commentary, it’s going to keep kicking around for a while longer. Last week, National Review’s Kevin Williamson concluded that “offering Americans a check is a more fruitful political strategy than offering them the opportunity to take control of and responsibility for their own lives.” Just today, Washington Post conservative writer Jennifer Rubin wrote that the Democratic Party won by “feeding its base cotton candy.
But sometimes the argument about free stuff has a more insidious meaning—and you don’t have to strain to hear it. During the Fox News broadcast on Election Night, Bill O’Reilly declared, “It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.” In case the reference to “traditional America” was too subtle, O’Reilly went on to talk about Obama’s strong support among blacks, Latinos, and women.
And O’Reilly was simply saying the same thing plenty of other conservatives and Republicans had been saying, not least among them Romney himself. Months ago, after giving a highly touted speech to an African-American audience, Romney told a smaller audience of supporters he’d gotten a chilly reception because he’d said that, unlike Obama, he wouldn’t be giving out free stuff. We can debate whether Romney and others invoking the same line were tapping into racial stereotypes, consciously or subconsciously. But the idea that conscientious, hard-working “makers” were subsidizing shifty, lazy “takers” was—and obviously still is—an article of faith for many on the right." [Source]
I am willing to bet that these conservatives get more "free stuff" than the rest of us, but here in America we are to believe that "free stuff" is reserved for only certain people. Do they work harder? No. Do they pay more takes? No. Did they do anything special (such as serve in the armed forces) for our country? No. So why do they believe that they have the right to say these things? That was a rhetorical question. We all know the answer.
The second article was by Eli Saslow writing for the Washington Post.
This one focused on a Tennessee woman by the name of Beth Cox (poor Beth) in the aftermath of the 2012 presidential elections.
"She arrived early to take apart the campaign office piece by piece, just as she felt so many other things about her life were being dismantled. Beth Cox wore a Mitt Romney T-shirt, a cross around her neck and fresh eyeliner, even though she had been crying on and off and knew her makeup was likely to run. A day after the election, she tuned the radio to Glenn Beck and began pulling posters and American flags off the wall.
Her calendar read “Victory Day!!” and she had planned to celebrate in the office by hosting a dance party and selling Romney souvenirs. But instead she was packing those souvenirs into boxes, which would be donated to a charity that sent clothes to South America. Instead a moving company was en route to close down the office in the next 48 hours, and her friends were calling every few minutes to see how she was doing.
“I will be okay,” she told one caller. “I just don’t think we will be okay.”
Here in the heart of Red America, Cox and many others spent last week grieving not only for themselves and their candidate but also for a country they now believe has gone wildly off track. The days after Barack Obama’s reelection gave birth to a saying in Central Tennessee: Once was a slip, but twice is a sign....
...She had devoted her life to causes she believed were at the heart of her faith and at the core of her Republican Party. She counseled young married families at church, spoke about right to life in area schools and became a stay-at-home mom with two daughters.
Now, in a single election night, parts of her country had legalized marijuana, approved gay marriage and resoundingly reelected a president who she worried would “accelerate our decline.”...
“I’m worried we won’t see another Republican president in our lifetime the way it’s going,” a GOP volunteer said.
“What country would want more years of this?” asked the newly elected alderman.
Cox shrugged back at them. “I don’t know anymore,” she said. “What the heck happened to the country? Who are we becoming?”...
...Everything in her version of America had confirmed her predictions: the confident anchors on Fox News; the Republican pollsters so sure of their data; the two-hour line outside her voting precinct, where Romney supporters hugged and honked for her handmade signs during a celebration that lasted until the results started coming in after sundown. Romney’s thorough defeat had come more as a shock than as a disappointment, and now Cox stared at the actual results on her computer and tried to imagine what the majority of her country believed.
“Virginia went blue? Really?” she said. “Southern-values Virginia?”
“And Colorado? Who the heck is living in Colorado? Do they want drugs, dependency, indulgence? Don’t they remember what this country is about?”...
...She could sense liberalism creeping closer, and she worried about what Red America would look like after four more years. Nashville itself had gone for Obama, and 400,000 more people in Tennessee had signed up for food stamps in the last five years to further a culture of dependency. The ACLU had sued her school board for allowing youth pastors to visit middle school cafeterias during lunch. Some of her friends had begun to wonder if the country was lost, and if only God could save it...
..She closed her computer. “God put us in the desert,” she said. “We are in the desert right now...”
...She came back into the Romney office again the next morning. The moving truck was waiting outside.
“It’s so depressing,” she said, walking into the office. “Let’s just get it done.”
They threw out yard signs, hauled office supplies into storage and donated some furniture to Goodwill. Cox swept the floor and then came outside to watch the mover climb on top of his trailer to take down the “Sumner County Republican Party” banner that had hung on the front of the building. Four months of dedication and work — the sale of 1,600 signs, 500 bracelets, 1,200 buttons and a few hundred hats — reduced to nothing in 48 hours...
...She stood in the cold and stared at the two-story building. It had belonged to a doctor’s practice that had closed, and then to a newspaper that had downsized, and finally to a campaign that had failed to win office based on its vision of America.
She took out her phone and snapped a picture.
“So that’s it,” she said. “It’s all gone...”
..."What the heck happened to America? Who are we becoming?" [Source]
Americans?!
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