The Hills Are Burning

The Obama campaign has reached the point of assured victory, as long as Obama doesn't
suddenly openly support killing puppies and banning chocolate-chip cookies. Even if Hillary insists on finding a way to overturn a pledged delegate lead and risk the implosion of the Democratic Party, enough people in the remaining states will be turned off by her attempts that they will go towards Obama, making the lead insurmountable.

So please excuse me for taking an inordinate amount of pleasure in killing time between classes by watching the commentary on certain pro-Hillary websites turn vile, ignorant, and generally ridiculous. Some, probably most, Hillary supporters are starting to concede that things aren't going their way. Many of them express disappointment, but see the world hasn't ended. And wherever this kinder group is, it is not on these websites. These supporters cannot and will not concede, and seem to motivate themselves by upping their negativity and condescension of all non-supporters.

These comment threads lend a fascinating look into the psychology of rejected hopes and lost perspectives. The lesson here? Even though giving into your most negative mindset might be the easiest and most fun thing to do, it may cause you to act like a complete lunatic. And yes, there are Obama supporters and supporters of every candidate that have failed to learn this lesson. But right now it is the lunatic fringe on the Hillary side that grasps at negativity while staring into the jaws of defeat, making an exploration of this crazy fringe even more fun.

Our adventure today will explore the comments on posts from hillaryis44.org, an unofficial website, which I guess you could call grassroots:

h and I run the Irish 4 Hillayr myspace page, so there is one for England and one for Ireland. Satan doesnt have any support groups here that im aware of, only our girl:)

Now is not the time to give up guys–wins on March 4th will tilt this campaign back to us and give us momentum going into a key PA contest. Hillary has kept fighting for us, and she will NOT lose this contest. We are a comitted, strong willed, and stubborn bunch of people–not the type of people that Obambi wants to pick a fight with. Remember, Hillary's fans always stick by her–but Obambi is the one who's going up and down nationally for the last 3 months, depending on if he wins the last primary or not.

There are some common trends that this post makes use of, including making fun of Obama's name and a refusal to accept the bleak outlook for the Hillary campaign. While referring to Obama using his middle name "Hussein" is a popular tactic with the anti-Obama side and a lot of right-wing commentators, apparently there's some new cooler lingo with these people at the front of the movement. This includes Obambi, probably one of the more amusing attempts to paint Obama as a good-looking empty suit, but I was most surprised in the above post by the use of Satan. Yes, without any apparent attempt at irony, some Hillary supporters as referring to Obama as Lucifer, the Fallen Angel, source of the fall of man and all the world's evil, who engages in an eternal fight against our savior. Classy.

Maybe we should all stop after writing web comments and ask ourselves, "Hey, am I acting batshit insane?"

I should note that the blog which all these comments are coming from compares the Obama phenomena to the Music Man, the pet rock craze, and the Heaven's Gate cult all at once. This is their suggestion of where the Clinton campaign should take their argument. A general complaint on the site is that people like Obama because they're too ignorant, so instead of trying to educate them on what's good at Hillary, the campaign should just make comparisons to pop-culture that Obama supporters and undecided voters just haven't thought of yet.

This group has also bought on to the idea that media is biased to Obama, and they've bought on big time. Guess you can't have a fringe without an obsession with media bias.

MSNBC wants all the Obamabots watching their network for the next eight years because, god knows, it's quite clear most of them aren't capable of thought.

I guess blaming the mainstream media for Obama's success explains how he's done so well without acknowledging his actual strength. This is probably vital to the Hillary crowd, who has gone in way too deep to acknowledge that anyone could like Obama without being deceived or swindled. If they do so, apparently the cognitive dissonance would cause them to explode.

This trend of apparent deception continues to projections in the general election. Despite polling strongly showing Obama should fare much better against McCain, these fringe Clinton supporters seem to think the general election would be a catastrophe:

You don't know how HARD it was for me to live down Kerry getting swiftboated O_O and now, the most easily bashable, peace-calling, stuttering, porky-pig like, scandal ridden candidate is within steps of the democratic nomination

And, for all the talk that some Obama supporters are hurting the Democrats by threatening to not vote for Hillary, here's some proof that it goes both ways:

Obama is a cult and he likes it that way…I will NEVER vote for Obama because he is teaching our children the wrong values. That’s through threats, whinning and gang mentality is alright if you get your way

Huh. I have reservations about Hillary because she's not fighting monied interests enough and refuses to acknowledge she made a mistake voting for the war. But, right, Obama's rallies make use of "gang mentality", which is just as much of a substantive objection. So much for Paul Krugman of the New York Time's accusation that "most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody". He was writing a column against this kind of negativity and managed to fall, in a small way, into the same trap of tunnel vision. But I digress.

As much as the Obama campaign has been called a "religious movement", there's still some faith on the Hillary side:

i am now furious and disgusted with David Axelrod. I hope karma gets that SOB and his candidate too. If there really is a greater being, they will see how terrible and horrible these people are

And we would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids.