Daily Kos Week in Review: Whacking Witchy Wingnuts

The Daily Kos gang enjoyed President Obama's lefty second inaugural address both because it affirmed their views and because they knew it would anger and annoy the right, many of whose beliefs are, one Kossack opined, "melting away." 

As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.

tmservo433: Surrender, conservatives

...I always loved the Wicked Witch scene [in The Wizard of Oz], as she melts away and all of her base folds from under her. 

Republicans and Conservatives are up in arms over Obama taking a second term. The reason why they are wailing louder and harder now is that the death throws [sic] of some ideas are entering their final phases, melting away...

Nulwee: Obama smacked down the Pharisees

...This speech [was] more partisan than [Obama's] previous inaugural address. It directly chastises our modern Pharisees including Paul Ryan and their austere worldview...

Hunter: The NRA is a front for racist nuts
 
...We are told that we currently have the Right Amount of mass murders, because having any fewer would infringe on a very, very narrow set of conspiracy-minded people who want to reserve the right to commit mass murders of their own, so long as those murders coincide with the "right" political purpose. That the NRA and congress caters to this crowd, people for whom a "traditional way of life" has profoundly racist, distinctly anarchist overtones is a question that we should have been asking earlier...
 
chmood: Anti-government righties psychoanalyzed

...[A] TON of this is straight outta Hollywood:  visceral, violent, potently symbolic, full of celebration and righteous vengeance...Another ton of it is straight out of Reconstruction, when the forebears of these people, almost exclusively - yet almost invisibly - WHITE suffered horribly in service to their lords and masters, blind to their own enslavement to the wealth and power of others.

That make for an explosive mix:  the original 'southern strategy' of divide and conquer has kept the folks from making common cause with their multi-hued compatriots against those who used black and white against each other quite profitable.

The really peculiar thing about it is how DURABLE that attachment has become, to upper-class wealth on the one hand, and a correspondingly virulent antipathy to those they foolishly believe are their zero-sum competitors.

Thus we have a deliberately crafted, literally home-grown subservient bully class, the same as in Germany from which Röhm stocked his thug army, the SA (the "folk heroes" behind Kristallnacht, if you don't know)...

Troubadour: Dumbing it down so Republicans get it

You may have seen a brilliant xkcd comic that diagrammed the Saturn V moon rocket using labels limited to the thousand most commonly-used words in the English language - e.g., Saturn V is "Up-Goer Five", and thousand is "ten hundred"...[A]n Up-Goer Five text editor that warns you whenever you type something not in the thousand most common words has been posted.  Now, I know what you're thinking, and I'm thinking the same thing: This is a perfect way to explain basic concepts of grownup society to Republicans - although Tea Party members might need the lexicon reduced to 100 words, and all them would have to be misspelled...

chaunceydevega: Dr. Obama unblocks conservatives
 
...Obama's election, and the demographic changes associated with it, i.e. the oft-discussed "browning of America," have been a political enema for the Right. As such, the presence of a black man and his family in The White House has brought to the surface what were thinly disguised--and apparently quite deep--veins of bigotry, xenophobia, and intolerance on the part of the Tea Party GOP...