Most people have seen the “2030″ advertisement produced by Citizens Against Government Waste. It’s an atrocious ad — not the least of all because it’s factually wrong — and sad proof that no matter how you dress it up, ‘Yellow Peril’ and ‘Fu Manchu’ are alive and well and lingering in the American psyche.
Fortunately, not everybody is taking the ad seriously, a campus group has released their own version, one which mocks the xenophobia and factual inaccuracies of the original. CAGW was unamused and has gone to great lengths to have the offending spoof removed from video sharing sites like YouTube, in a campaign against dissent that the WSJ Real Time China Report points out seems eerily reminiscent of the CCP circa 2010.
It’s hardly surprising, really. It’s a political axiom that the extremes often have a lot in common, and this is certainly true of the CCP and the American Right. In a recent piece on the desperation of the conservative media to smear President Obama for any slight or wrongdoing no matter how trivial, James Fallows remarked, “The combination of ignorance, lack of curiosity, and certitude is a very difficult one to offset.” Anyone who has spent even a few