DownWithTyranny!: Catching up with the Great Gettysburg Address Scandal: Could the Right-Wing Noisemakers be any stupider?

The Real Housewives of Nosepick Junction?

by Ken

Q: Let's say the Right-Wing Noise Machine was blaring away in the forest and there was no one around to hear it. Would that make the Noisemakers any stupider?

A: Trick question! Could anything make the Right-Wing Noisemakers any stupider?

Since I make it a habit to keep as much as possible out of earshot of the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine, I missed out on the story of the Great Obama Gettysburg Address scandal until I caught up with a glorious post from yesterday by Daily Kos's Hunter, "Gettysburg Address 'outrage' provides handy checklist of stupidest people in America."

Hunter himself didn't pay much attention when the story "slithered past in a Twitter stream via the apparently-still-around Breitbart conspiracy site. (There is, apparently, an "actual article" that appeared under the headline "Obama Snubs 150th Annivesary of Gettysburg Address," which he spares us.") "I did not think much of it," Hunter tells us, "because I am not a shit-for-brains, but apparently I misunderestimated just how obsessively Actual Conservative Pundits troll the conspiracy sites for fodder." The story turned up on Fox & Friends, which he takes as "ironclad proof that the story passes nicely under the you-must-be-this-stupid-to-enter bar." He quotes from a MediaMatters blogpost by Ellie Sandmeyer:

Fox News's Brian Kilmeade discussed with Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger whether it is ""inappropriate for our president to bypass" the commemoration ceremony of the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address during the November 19 edition of Fox & Friends. At one point Kilmeade asked whether Henninger thought Obama was refusing to attend because "after that address and after the Civil War we still weren't a perfect union? We still had to wait for the Civil Rights Act and so many -- the integration of schools, Brown vs. the Board of Education?" Henninger replied, "I think probably that President Obama does think the unfinished business remains unfinished in bringing the country and its races together."

To which our DK scribe replies: "Christ, people. Just ... Christ."

Nevertheless, nevertheless. When "resident White House moron wrangler" Dan Pfeiffer tried to sidestep the nonstory by alluding to the "whole website thing" that might be occupying the president's attention, the story escalated into this National Journal headline: "White House: Obama Can’t Go to Gettysburg Because of Obamacare Mess."

I suppose the main question here," says Hunter,

is which of these various shameless dunderhacks was the one who first came up with this as a plausible attack line -- I am loathe to pin that on the Breitbart crowd when it could have been tossed over their transom by an even more eager shit-for-brains, or perhaps there is a collection of fabled shit-for-brains pundits that gets together each evening to determine who among them has the most foam-laden idea for an attack piece and they all clap their little hands together and run with it. That would mean all the others saw it floating around and said I believe I shall run with this, which makes them even more goddamn stupid and hackish than the original stupid hacks.

To return to Ellie Sandmeyer at MediaMatters:

Obama's decision not to attend the Gettysburg commemoration ceremony is typical for a sitting president. President Reagan did not attend the 125th commemoration of the Gettysburg Address -- in fact, Reagan never visited Gettysburg during his tenure in office. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton also never visited the battlefield as president, and President George W. Bush toured the site in 2008, but did not speak or attend a commemoration ceremony [he visited in September -- Ed.]. In fact, according to Hanover, Pennsylvania's local paper, The Evening Sun [which lists names and dates for the 16 presidents who have visited Gettysburg -- Ed.], William Howard Taft was the only sitting president to ever visit the site on the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.

"And it has been a long damn time," Hunter notes, "since anyone in the national press furrowed their brows and pondered what William Howard Taft would do in a given situation."

So no, we do not have to take any of this seriously. Nor do we have to take the purveyors of such obviously stupid faux-scandals seriously. Nor do we have to treat them with respect, or pretend for a bare minute that they have anything worthwhile to say about our political discourse that could not be better said by contemplating the contents of a litter box. The problem here is that there is no shame to be had in peddling conspiratorial trash in public. In better days people would cross to the other side of the street so that they would not have to listen to the nice man on the large box preaching about how President Obama is probably not attending the event only one other president in history (well, two, counting Lincoln himself) attended, and how that probably means the current president resents the tardiness of Brown v. Board of Education, and when a newspaper man walks up to that fellow with a notebook in hand, nodding and scribbling things down, that does not make it suddenly respectable. It only means there are two nuts standing on a street corner instead of one.

Cross to the other side, America. For the sake of pride and patriotism, will you just shun these damn people already?

WILL THE GETTYSBURG "SCANDAL" SPLIT OBAMA-
HATERS INTO PRO- AND ANTI-CONFEDERATE CAMPS?

Say, where was Smirkin' John on November 19?

Just a couple of additional notes:

(1) I see from Ellie Sandmeyer's 125th-anniversary link above that Chief Justice William Rehnquist was at the 1988 Gettysburg ceremony. Has any Noise Machine heck been directed at his successor, "Smirkin' John" Roberts?

(2) Is anyone else bemused that the Noisemakers would jump on a Gettysburg-bound bandwagon? I know that Republicans somehow still pretend that they have something in common besides party label with their first president, but do we really expect to hear right-wing loonies invoking the Union leader during the Civil War (or, as they would probably say, the Yankee devil during the War Between the States)? Isn't the heartland of today's Right the Old Confederacy? Are these not people who believe that when General Lee surrendered at Appamatox, he was speaking only for himself? I would expect right-wing sentiment to be solidly pro-Confederate as far north as the Palins of Alaska, who surely believe that secessionists of a feather flock together.

Do you suppose any of these folks have read the Gettysburg Address?