In case anyone was wondering where Fox News gets most of its talking points, Chris Wallace last night held up a copy of the GOP's talking points responding to President Obama's apparent diss of the Tea Partiers the night before.
All the other Fox talkers in sight were no more imaginative, a Village chorus pronouncing the president "arrogant" for saying this:
"In all, we passed 25 different tax cuts last year,'' he said. "And one thing we haven't done is raise income taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year -- another promise that we kept.
"So I've been a little amused over the last couple of days where people have been having these rallies about taxes,'' he said at the end of a day, Tax day, on which the TEA Party Express had carried a cross-country protest to the National Mall in Washingon and staged rallies around the nation. "You would think they would be saying thank you,'' Obama said. "That's what you'd think.
This deeply offended everyone at Fox, not to mention the wingnutosphere, where Michelle Malkin could be found vowing revenge.
Chris Wallace, while trotting out those GOP talking points, declared it "the height of condescension."
Maybe the most amusing was the apoplectic Charles Krauthammer, who sneered:
Krauthammer: I think it was Obama with his usual condescension, except that he ratcheted it up to Code Orange into snootiness, that's where he is now, when he looks down his nose at the gun and God crowd, the lumpen proletariat, as he sees it. And he ridicules them because they're not grateful enough to him.
And look -- it's quite obvious what he's talking about here. He thinks that they are stupid because they don't recognize that he hasn't raised their taxes.
Of course, the word that really springs to mind for these folks is most likely "uppity" -- but they probably know better than to say it on TV. So they find synonyms like "condescending" and "arrogant" and "snootiness."
Most amusing, though, was their shared insistence that the president shouldn't be dissing the Tea Partiers, because they're just normal working-class folks.
Yes, that's true: They're just normal working-class folks who carry signs denouncing Obama as a Marxist/socialist/fascist and believe he needs to produce his birth certificate and are certain he is a radical intent on destroying capitalism and grabbing their guns.
It's also true that they are people motivated primarily by an animus toward him and liberals in general, and will do anything to oppose him, including believe all kinds of things that are provably untrue.
Things like birth certificate theories and FEMA concentration camp theories and the certainty he's a radical Marxist. Oh yes, and they believe he raised their taxes.
One of the signs of insanity, you know, is the insistence on believing in things that are provably untrue, even when the proof is presented clearly and irrevocably.
So why, exactly, should President Obama show any deference whatsoever to insane people who spread the nastiest and most ridiculous smears about him on a daily basis, people who never in a million years would vote for him? People who almost certainly did not vote for him in 2008, and now refuse to accept the verdict of the election they lost?
He's supposed to show these people deference exactly why?
