You have to love the conservative mass-forwarded E-mails because they just never ever stop. You can Google any series of several consecutive words in any one of them and you’ll get hundreds and hundreds of hits from where they just took the same text and pasted it, over and over, every place they could find.

I think this ties in with the fact that most big-money conservative blogs have no comment sections and why conservatives have no real “grass roots” movements. The tea parties, of course, were all astroturf: funded and organized by really big conservative organizations (that were, in turn, funded by people who think that the top marginal tax rate of the Clinton administration, a time of massive economic growth, was unconscionably high) pretending to be “grass roots.”

What passes for modern conservatism is very much a top-down movement. The message comes from the top and everyone repeats it until it’s accepted as true. Discussion is not conducive to this model and is therefore discouraged.

E-mail forwarding sends the message to hundreds of people whom you believe to be like-minded, usually your extended family and friends. Those who don’t agree are socially pressured to be quiet and not speak up for fear of offending the family, causing tension at family get-togethers, pissing off the wealthy aunt who controls everyone’s inheritance, and so on.

It looks like a discussion forum, but progressive dissent gets suppressed. Look at how difficult it was for this Daily Kos diarist to finally respond to a forwarded conservative talking-point E-mail after dozens and dozens of them had simply pushed her to her breaking point. The sender there didn’t want to give up, but in another recent case, the sender apologized—not realizing it was angry conservative propaganda, she’d just passed it along as “interesting.”

Of course, some E-mail forwards are hardly political at all (awwww), but many of them are conservative agitprop pretending to be humor or news or whatever. That’s the case with the one obliquely referenced above, that a friend of mine got through two family members in forwarded E-mail today:

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our government could track a single cow, born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she slept in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give each of them a cow…

A moment or two on Google showed me was already being forwarded in early 2004. But worse than that, it just doesn’t make any sense outside of a late-night monologue.

First, “our government” could track sick Canadian cattle because Canada has a strong mandatory animal identification system for just such a purpose. When the first BSE case hit Canada in 2003, the US had no such system. Six years later, the US has no such system, largely because the cattle and animal feed industries spent millions of dollars lobbying the Bush Administration to prevent it from happening. We have only a voluntary system in which most industrial suppliers do not participate.

It’s very similar to the problem of salmonella in chicken and eggs. We know how to cure this, and it only raises the cost of chicken by less than two cents per pound, but industry is against the idea of washing the shit out of the chicken coop more than once every two years, so we get salmonella in the poultry instead. So here, oddly, the conservative E-mail is praising an animal identification program that conservatives in the US strongly oppose.

Second, is the author of this E-mail suggesting that we would be able to track cows in the USA if they had freedom of movement? Or if they smuggled themselves into the country undetected in search of a better life? “Give them a cow” bypasses the horribly racist idea that Mexicans be fitted with mandatory ear tags with GPS receivers, but the idea that immigrants all want a cow isn’t that much better.

(Let’s be honest: the “illegal alien” debate isn’t about illegal white immigrants. It’s about the brown-skinned folks who speak Spanish. Some of those “Minutemen” have some serious racial issues.)

So, shorter wingnut joke: “If we had a mandatory animal tracking system that I oppose, we could give all those Mexicans a cow, because they’re all dirt poor farmhands, and then we could track them like the animals they are since the stupid courts won’t let us implant ID chips in them.”

Ha ha. Hilarious! I can see why conservatives have forwarded this joke to each other for more than half a decade, and why they support groups who post articles titled “Subhuman Mexicans (God’s Children?) Prey on Countrymen.” It’s hard to see why they don’t post these things in places where people might disagree with bulletproof logic like this!