You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March, 2007.
Dan Paden is at it again. He’s pretending that the Right doesn’t use eliminationist rhetoric more often than the Left, in the face of clear evidence
...they make it hard for you to be taken seriously.
Employing fundamentally dishonest arguments makes it hard for anyone to take you seriously, Paden.
...these characters will count, as I said, dead-lawyer jokes told by the Right as a real threats…
Fine. Show us several examples of an actual ‘dead lawyer joke’ being counted as a ‘real’ death threat, Paden.
Go ahead. Post the evidence for your claim.
...[the Left] discount[s] threats and nastiness from the Left as mere joking, or blowing off steam, or — rarely — admit that it exists, but discount it as infrequent (it isn’t, as any quick perusal of the comments at Democratic Underground will demonstrate)...
One site… wow. Amazing. Were these comments posted by the blog owner, the way Ann Coulter’s are?
Remember when you got caught lying about what ‘eliminationist rhetoric’ meant? And when challenged, you changed your tune and claimed you had been comparing two classes of rhetoric? Nothing like a blatant lie to kill your credibility, Paden.
You were also challenged to name the specific Democratic candidates for President who had murdered a baby, after you made a fact-free accusation. Your silence was profound.
You are a liar and a coward, Paden. You’ll never be anything more.
...should you dare to suggest otherwise, attempt to shut you up by challenging you to produce a detailed count of such comments by both Right and Left…
Which you know you cannot do. Thus you pretend that no evidence is necessary—we should all just take the ever-so-pious Dan Paden at his word.
You are a liar and a coward, Paden. You’ll never be anything more.
I commented a few days ago at Gateway Pundit that its proprietor, ‘Midwest Jim’, was engaging in a favorite winger pastime: pick out the most outrageous acts of a tiny minority of war protesters, and use those acts to smear the majority of Americans who want the US out of Iraq. And of course, Heidi Thiess at Euphoric Reality cannot resist using the same dishonest tactic:
Portland Peace March : Euphoric Reality
They burned the American flag, they burned an American soldier in effigy, and then, most shocking of all, one of them dropped trou and defecated on the smoldering American flag.
Yes, Heidi. A few people will do that sort of thing. And yes, it is reprehensible. But it’s not the way the vast majority of those who oppose the war choose to express their views:
“This was a splinter group. It was not the group we negotiated with for weeks before the march. Those people had a peaceful march and went home,” said [police spokeswoman Officer Cathe] Kent.
Glenn Greenwald exposes this tactic for exactly what it is — dishonest and manipulative:
One of the reasons why I wrote about that HuffPost story when it was still nothing more than infected bile bubbling up in the right-wing blog sewers was because it was glaringly clear that it was going to worm its way through the standard channels and become a major media story. And the reason that was clear is because the tactic embodied by that “story”—namely, finding isolated, obscure, stray, unrepresentative individuals or comments and obsessively focusing on them in order to imply that they are representative of “liberals” or “the Left” generally—is a deceitful tactic that is one of the most commonly used by the right-wing noise machine, and the national media has been trained to ingest that tactic and disseminate it.
The Ward Churchill whirlwind is one of the classic examples of this rotted genre. “Stories” of that type—which are, as I’ve noted before, perfect examples of the logical fallacy of “argument by anecdote”—are naturally attractive to lazy journalists because they enable broad political points to be made simply by focusing on single anecdotes in isolation. Very little analytical or journalistic work needs to be done in order to covert those anecdotes and cliches into a sensationalistic, attention-generating story.
This is why Michelle Malkin blog’s (and LGF), for instance, constantly hypes photographs of the single most “offensive” sign at every protest march, or why Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh single out some obscure comment by some unknown or inconsequential “leftist” and lead their shows with it regularly. It is a manipulative and slothful—though highly effective—means of assigning attributes to a large political movement based on nothing other than cherry-picked and highly unrepresentative examples. And that is why Malkin’s screaming about the HuffPost comments she found was so clearly going straight to the national press. That tactic almost never fails.
Wherever intellectual dishonesty and an aversion to a substantive discussion of the issues rear their ugly heads, you can bet that ‘Midwest Jim’ and Heidi Thiess will be eagerly trotting alongside the larger winger blogs, yipping ‘me, too! me too!’.
Allow me to express my thanks to two of my fellow bloggers for their recent shout-outs to this humble corner of teh intarwebs:
- Kevin Beck of Dr. Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge makes a cogent point about the comments I get here from the Mouthbreather-American contingent:
From what I’ve seen, responses to these challenges in meatbrain’s comments field take one of two general forms: “Have fun with your five readers” or “Get a life, you obsessed %%$^.” That a representative of this breed of righty would malign someone for being overly fixated is the height of gurgling irony, but hypocrisy is such an ingrained element in the wingball ethos that about the only remaining irony is for one of them to not exhibit self-contradiction.
- Mel of Æsahættr (please don’t ask me to pronounce that) notes that being a ‘meathead’ (an epithet thrown my way often by the wingers) isn’t the stigma one might think:
We are all a bunch of meatheads. Disgusting, ain’t it? Our primary virtue, one that sets us apart from pure meatheadedness, is that we use our meat to think and our meat has become more or less aware of itself.
My thanks to you both. A little attaboy now and again goes a long way in the encouragement department.
Over at And Rightly So!, Kim is having a little hissy fit because a Marine Corps unit has been ordered to leave Afghanistan in the aftermath of the killing of eight civilians:
Marines kill. If the General expected less, he should have called upon the Army SpecialOps. Even under another’s command, Marines KILL. Every Marine is elite, not just those who are titled Special… and every unit is trained. To Kill.
Everyone knows it. Enough with the sappy bullshit. We can bet this will turn into a political hot potato. Leave the Marines alone. They were doing what they do best.
Apparently Kim believes that what the Marines do best is kill civilians — especially those of the Terrifying Brown People™ persuasion. if someone in the military command structure entertains thoughts that Marines should be, oh, I don’t know, fighting the enemy instead of killing civilians, well, those pantywaists are just engaging in “sappy bullshit”.
Now, far be it from me to instruct Kim in the finer points of online warmongering, but there are a few questions I would have asked myself before posting such tripe:
- If the marines can be trained to kill, can they not also be trained to distinguish between hostile targets and civilians?
- Aren’t Marines already trained to distinguish between hostile targets and civilians?
- Do we want soldiers who cannot stop themselves from killing civilians? Do such soldiers really serve the best interests of the United States?
This is the kind of simplistic, jingoistic thinking that got us into the current mess we are in. We need less of it, not more… but if you’re the sort who enjoys this sort of hogwash, Kim and her buddies at And Rightly So are veritable founts of inanity.
Lying lizardbitch Cao just cannot let go of a lie, no matter what. She still claims that Valerie Plame was not covert. In doing so, of course, she is implying that CIA Director General Michael Hayden, a Bush appointee, must have been lying:
Plame’s testimony on the covert nature of her job was buttressed by a statement that Waxman read at the hearing’s opening which, he said, was approved by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the CIA’s director. The statement said that Plame worked in a covert capacity at the time of Novak’s column and that her employment status was classified under an executive order.
Only by ignoring the facts and twisting reality can Cao continue to spread this lie. Of course, ignoring the facts and twisting reality are the only talents that pathetic, mendacious asswipe has ever had.
Two well-done guides to check out:
The Heterosexual Agenda: Exposing The Myths is a brilliant parody, with explanations, of the anti-gay screeds so popular amongst the wingnuts. Author Jim Burroway makes the case that the heterosexuals are hellbent on destroying society — using exactly the same techniques as the professional homophobes. Read his footnotes carefully to learn how statistics can be twisted to demonize anyone at all. (Hat tip to Mike the Mad Biologist for this find.)
Chris Hoofnagle’s Denialists Deck of Cards describes the tactics used by those who spread doubts and misinformation about many sorts of problems — global warming, tobacco, pollution, and on and on. Know the cards that the obfuscators will throw down!
The tendency of the unhinged right to want to kill anyone they don’t like has been well documented, particularly by David Neiwert. Seldom is this utter lack of moral competence so blatantly expressed as in a recent column by Mike Adams, who somehow conned a major university into granting him a professorship. Adams suggests “the cleansing and purification of society via the mass murder of homosexuals”, the distribution of “videos… showing the actual murders of homosexuals”, and the circulation of “instructions on how to bomb gay bath houses in San Francisco”.
Adams may think this is some form of humor. Would he think that a website that displayed his home address and the names of his family, coupled with a suggestion that he and his family be murdered, was a big joke?
Kudos to Michael Petrelis for finding this latest example of a morally neutered lizard in human skin. Follow his suggestion, and contact Adams at adamsm@uncw.edu or (910) 962-3425.
I just can’t help myself. I know that Ed Brayton has already done a perfectly adequate takedown on Andrew ‘Gribbit the Dipshit’ Richardson’s latest example of blogging-while-psychotic, but this is such a perfect example of the man’s mental deficiencies that I just have to say something about it.
Look carefully at the first sentence of this post:
The Washington Post in its leftist wisdom is allowing Hillary Rodham (I’m refusing to call her Rodham-Clinton because I believe she’s about to shed the married suffix) to call herself the JFK of this race!
Now, look carefully at the underlying HTML (I’ve shortened a bit of the URL for clarity):
<a href="http://www.nypost.com/seven/03112007/news/nationalnews
/hill__im_the_jfk_of_2008...correspondent.htm">The Washington
Post</a> in its leftist wisdom...
Yes, you read that right. When Andykins was composing this post, he pasted in a URL that starts with http://www.nypost.com/. He looked at nypost.com, yet that miniscule collection of loosely-knitted neurons he uses for a brain said to itself, “duuuuuuuhh…. Washington Post…”.
He has had three days to fix this, and it just hasn’t occurred to him to correct this glaringly obvious error. I’d make a comment about his being dumber than a box of rocks, but I don’t think that rocks deserve to be put in the same class as Andrew Richardson.
In Andykin’s defense, he did get one thing right. If you look just below the end of the post, you will see that he has placed it in the category of “Utter Stupidity”. You got that right, dipshit…
On the inanity scale, Heidi "call me a cold-hearted bitch" Thiess and Kit "support-marines-who-kill-women-and-children" Jarrell fall somewhere between ‘pathetic’ and ‘ludicrous’. Their latest pile of crap only serves to confirm this. Something happened to their site, and Kit is claiming to know that the (supposed) hacker was a liberal:
I’ve finally gotten a working install of Wordpress on here after the liberal hack that took us down for 3 days…
Can these two get any more stupid? News flash, ladies: it is not possible to know the political orientation of a hacker just by looking at the logs of a server that has been hacked. Can’t be done. What you are engaging in here is pure fantasy. Anyone could have hacked your server… or the problems with the site could have been a result of your own incompetence. (The best you could come up with was a two-week-old backup? Good grief…)
But then, we are all used to seeing you make utter fools of yourself in public. In that, at least, you shine.
Over at “Welcome to Pottersville”, ‘jurassicpork’ has a truly stellar collection of screen shots from Fox News (the cable channel and its website), that illustrate perfectly just how far into the deep end of the rightwing propaganda cesspool they’ve gone.
Larry Johnson has a mirror of the collection. I can only echo his suggestion:
The time has come that every thoughtful, informed person should refuse to watch Fox, appear on Fox, or support the advertisers who enable this group of nuts.
David Neiwert has compiled a selected list of the eliminationist rhetoric he has been documenting since 2003. You need look no farther to find evidence that the unhinged right in this country cares little for civil discussion or the right of dissent. Worth bookmarking.
The more one engages (well, tries to engage) wingers in substantive debate, the more one becomes aware that they just are not capable of it. Take Ric Ottaiano and his current attack poodle Mike Bliss. Ric appears to have blocked me from commenting at his blog, or perhaps his spam filters have simply gone into overload. I will therefore respond to the latest comments on his post
“My, My, Mr. Gore, What A Big Carbon Footprint You Have” here.
Ottaiano jumped on the ‘Gore-is-a-hypocrite’ bandwagon a few days ago, and I pointed out what he was doing: ignoring the substance of Al Gore’s message on climate change, choosing instead the simple-minded expedient of the ad hominem attack. He tried a straw man:
you still haven;t told me what was incorrect about the facts i set out… not my opinion, but the facts of Al’s energy usage
Ric is apparently either incapable of or unwilling to understand that whatever Gore’s energy usage may be, that bit of trivia is entirely unrelated to Gore’s message.
The latest comment from Bliss is a classic of fallacious argument. Read the rest of this entry »
Lying lizardbitch Cao is on another tear about “hate speech”. Apparently she has forgotten that she was enthusiastic about the ersatz hate speech posted to her site some months ago, just so long as it promoted hatred of Muslims.
Over at StopTheACLU.com, that reliable fount of inanity, JonJayRay makes a startling admission regarding the recent brouhaha about the removal of a cross form a college chapel:
If I were a Christian who went into that chapel for prayer and mediation, I would think that my freedom to exercise my religion was GREATLY interfered with by the removal of the cross.
What is JonJayRay telling us here? As near as I can make out, he is saying that his personal faith is so weak that he can’t get it up to pray unless he’s got an object to pray to. Didn’t the Christian God have something to say about that, somewhere in those famous commandments that the biblethumpers are always going on about?
Heidi "call me a cold-hearted bitch" Thiess posts a Thought (sic) For The Day:
“We know exactly where one cow with mad-cow-disease is located among the millions and millions of cows in America, but we haven’t a clue as to where tens of millions of illegal immigrants and hundreds of thousands of terrorists are located. Maybe we should put the Department of Agriculture in charge of immigration.”
This is to be expected, of course. When Heidi looks at Terrifying Brown People™, she sees cockroaches.
That’s what bigots do.
UPDATE 03/06/07 6:53 PM EST: Reliably, Heidi’s little bootlicker Justin Higgins is all too happy to kiss her ass, and approves wholeheartedly of her bigotry.
Via Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars comes word that Ann Coulter’s blatant bigotry is prompting advertisers to pull their ads from her website.
Yes! Coulter runs her potty mouth to pump her book sales. Those who live by the dollar die by the dollar.
There is a collection of contact info for Coulter’s advertisers and ad networks at DailyKos. And Nicole also points us to some excellent advice on writing effective letters.
Fire up those word processors, folks.
UPDATE 03/06/07 2:05 PM EST: Kos makes a very good point:
Ann Coulter exists because the conservative movement craves her brand of hatred, and she delivers the goods.
