Gettysburg Address 'outrage' provides handy checklist of stupidest people in America

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

You're kidding, right?

The anniversary of the Gettysburg Address does not seem at first glance to be a subject steeped in controversy, but that is because you are not a dull-minded hack whose quest for new controversies must never fall below the speed of 50 miles per hour, lest the whole movement die.

Obama Snubs 150th Anniversary of Gettysburg Address

I'm going to spare you the actual article under that headline. I first saw the premise being propped up yesterday as a prospective "scandal" when it slithered past in a Twitter stream via the apparently-still-around Breitbart conspiracy site. I did not think much of it, because I am not a shit-for-brains, but apparently I misunderestimated just how obsessively Actual Conservative Pundits troll the conspiracy sites for fodder. Fox & Friends took it up this morning, and if that isn't ironclad proof that the story passes nicely under the you-must-be-this-stupid-to-enter bar than nothing is.

-snip-

Now here is the key point, dear reader, and the reason why shit for brains ought not to be considered a crass insult at this point but merely a reasonable medical diagnosis. In all of American post-Lincoln history, only one sitting president has ever gone to Gettysburg on the anniversary of the address. Reagan did not go. The Bush ii did not go. JFK did not go. Roosevelt never went, nor Nixon, nor President Biff the Unholy, Destroyer of Worlds. That honor apparently goes to Taft, and it has been a long damn time 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.

-more-

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/19/1256769/-Gettysburg-Address-outrage-provides-handy-checklist-of-stupidest-people-in-America?detail=email#

[Ilsa]

1. If he went, the RWNJs would claim

He was trying to start a race war over Lincoln and the Civil War anniversary.