Postmodern Relativism and Obamania

Politeia offers an analysis of the left's response to the New Yorker cover satire of Barack Obama's fist bump from heaven, "Obamaphobia!":

In the humorless, pathological personality cult that is the Obama campaign, all supporters had to to do was reverse the mechanism to morph satire and caricature - in fact all criticism of the Obama couple - into something morally equivalent to blasphemy.

Here's more on that moral equivalence:

Relativism is an ideological hell-hole ... made acceptable and fashionable in speculative-philosophical circles by the anti-modernists Kant and Hegel (see also the Introduction to "The Dialectics"). Further investigations produce a host of other infestations: discrepancies, inconsistencies, as well as paradoxymora lurking under every stone; realivori, and objectiraptors pouncing at every turn.

Relativism is an oxymoron that causes serious cognitive as well as psychological damage. Those affected confuse fact with opinion, people with ideas, public opinion with truth, religion with parliamentary democracy, it undermines self-esteem, crushes morality, causes tolerance of the intolerant and turns tolerance into intolerance, confuses criticism with offences against etiquette (and now blasphemy and racism), reality with myth, truth with delusion, and equal with identical; it polarizes, and leads to making moral choices on the basis of other people's opinions; it leads to malignant Narcissism and severe egocentrism, but other than that, it's perfectly rational ...

See also (and perhaps as a case study), the New York Times, "We’re Not Laughing at You, or With You."

Related: "The Postmodern Culture of Animal Rights Activism."