If You Read The Salt Lake Tribune, You’ll Learn Words Like “Obongocare”

Many years ago, when I was young and still stuck living in Utah, one of my guilty pleasures was reading the “Letters to the Editor” and shaking my head in wonder and disgust at some of the attitudes expressed there.

Once upon a time, the minor impediment of having to write a letter, stamp and address an envelope, and mail one’s important opinions to the editorial page address prevented all but the most highly motivated crackpots from weighing in.

In the Internet age, the filters are off, the chocks are away. You can fly into the wild blue yonder to engage your perceived spiritual or political enemies instantly, as soon as you read an item that gets your bile up and puts blood in your eye.

I occasionally glance at the modern-day SL Trib comments sections, which usually consist of crackpots doing battle with a few sturdy, blue-dot liberals. Every now and then, a crackpot rises, like slowly souring cream, to the top of the “thumbs up/down” crock and comes to the attention of the Trib editors.

Here’s a fellow named Terry Lee of Cedar City, a town in Southern Utah that’s closer to the vacation-friendly national parks and the fleshpots of Vegas than it is to relatively “liberal” Salt Lake. He’s quite adamant that President Obama’s policies are bad for business and the country, and he has a not-all-that-uncommon way of expressing this opinion. The word he uses is new to me, but probably not new to anybody that keeps an eye on the crazy.

Sour grapes on steroids » There are poor losers, pathetically poor losers, and then there is Terry Lee of Cedar City. Lee is so vindictive over the re-election of President Barack Obama and the passage and court victory of Obamacare that he fired two employees because they are Obama supporters. And he seems not to care who knows about it. He posted in the comments section following a Tribune news story:

"We had to let two employees go to cover new Obongocare costs and increased taxes. Found two Obongo supporters and gave them the news yesterday. They wanted the idiot in the Whitehouse, they reap the benefits."

Aside from his poor spelling and scurrilous, racist references to the president, Lee’s rant is inaccurate. Obamacare requires only businesses with more than 50 employees to insure full-timers or face penalties. Sadly, what Lee did isn’t illegal, just disgusting.

via Short takes on the news | The Salt Lake Tribune

It’s a relief to see the Trib staffer call this Lee object out on its racist ignorance. That didn’t happen back in the old “letters to the editor” days, though I like to think that there were a few old-school lefties in the Trib newsroom who passed Skousen-inspired gems around for general mockery, before deciding which geniuses made the cut for that day’s publication. Nowadays the anti-Obama anti-healthcare conspiracy theorists take their cue from Skousen fan and TV grifter Glenn Beck, but there’s still a touch of that old-time Utah religion flavoring the crock of crackpot soup.