Those mean spirited liberals (again)
Apr. 21st, 2005 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumThis isn't really about liberals, unless it's the "liberal press."
Ann Coulter. I keep mentioning her when people tell me about how bad, mean and small minded, liberals are. I mention her because she ought to be poor. Why ought she suffer from a lack of money? Because the vitriol she poisons the national debate with is horrid.
I, of course, am mentioning her today because I just found out she was on the cover of Time. Ye gods and little fishes. I've been in the house all week, so it escaped me. What I've been seeing on the Web implies Time has been painting her as amusing, reasoned, in some way worthy of being on the cover of a national magazine, without being called to account for what she has said.
So what has she said?
Liberals ought to be killed.
That if one has to talk with a liberal (instead of just killing them), the best medium of communication is a baseball bat.
Tim McVeigh's real crime was not dropping his truck off at the NY Times building.
Being Liberal is treason.
That she wished the American military was killing reporters, by design.
That women are too stupid to vote.
That the real question about Clinton was, "whether to impeach, or assassinate."
Those who support her (and we now know that support is in the mainstream... not that most of us doubted it) have been on the side of Iraqis, the insurgents who killed an aid worker (if you can stomach it, the conversation here at Freep, is what I'm talking about. A sample.... "My bet, of course, is that she was so concerned about the decrease in US casualties that she misread the insurgents' orders of the day and forgat to avoid a place where she knew a blast would take place."). Great company she keeps.
On the flip side we hear how evil the Dems are. They actually think judges ought to be allowed to judge. The right is calling for them to be killed. Not just the kooks and the Militia types anymore, but the mainstream. At the recent confab they called "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" a speaker quoted Stalin (you know, the guy the left is supposed to be guilty of not hating enough) Edwin Vieira, a lawyer and author of How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary, went even further, suggesting during a panel discussion that Joseph Stalin offered the best method for reining in the Supreme Court. "He had a slogan," Vieira said, "and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty: 'No man, no problem.'"
The complete Stalin quote is, "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Max Blumenthal in The Nation.
He said it twice. Just in case one has heard his explanation that he wasn't really trying to inspire another domemstic terrorist like Eric Rudolph, another attendee said something more explicit, Before I could introduce myself, he turned to me and another observer with a crooked smile and exclaimed, "I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!" This was no inbred twit from the back of beyond, no this was Michael Schwartz the chief of staff for Oklahoma's GOP Senator Tom Coburn, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Michael Moore, the present bogey-man used to paint the left as mean-spirited pales to insignificance compared to that. He calls Republicans liars and thieves. Tom DeLay calls him a political hack.
But he didn't call for anyone to kill Bush, he asked us to look at the record and turn him out of office.
On the subject of the Supreme Court... he said they made a bad decision, and called on us to turn out Bush, so that when new appointments were made, someone else would be making them.
Yep, when you compare him to Coulter, the Left sure looks mean.
Ann Coulter. I keep mentioning her when people tell me about how bad, mean and small minded, liberals are. I mention her because she ought to be poor. Why ought she suffer from a lack of money? Because the vitriol she poisons the national debate with is horrid.
I, of course, am mentioning her today because I just found out she was on the cover of Time. Ye gods and little fishes. I've been in the house all week, so it escaped me. What I've been seeing on the Web implies Time has been painting her as amusing, reasoned, in some way worthy of being on the cover of a national magazine, without being called to account for what she has said.
So what has she said?
Liberals ought to be killed.
That if one has to talk with a liberal (instead of just killing them), the best medium of communication is a baseball bat.
Tim McVeigh's real crime was not dropping his truck off at the NY Times building.
Being Liberal is treason.
That she wished the American military was killing reporters, by design.
That women are too stupid to vote.
That the real question about Clinton was, "whether to impeach, or assassinate."
Those who support her (and we now know that support is in the mainstream... not that most of us doubted it) have been on the side of Iraqis, the insurgents who killed an aid worker (if you can stomach it, the conversation here at Freep, is what I'm talking about. A sample.... "My bet, of course, is that she was so concerned about the decrease in US casualties that she misread the insurgents' orders of the day and forgat to avoid a place where she knew a blast would take place."). Great company she keeps.
On the flip side we hear how evil the Dems are. They actually think judges ought to be allowed to judge. The right is calling for them to be killed. Not just the kooks and the Militia types anymore, but the mainstream. At the recent confab they called "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" a speaker quoted Stalin (you know, the guy the left is supposed to be guilty of not hating enough) Edwin Vieira, a lawyer and author of How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary, went even further, suggesting during a panel discussion that Joseph Stalin offered the best method for reining in the Supreme Court. "He had a slogan," Vieira said, "and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty: 'No man, no problem.'"
The complete Stalin quote is, "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Max Blumenthal in The Nation.
He said it twice. Just in case one has heard his explanation that he wasn't really trying to inspire another domemstic terrorist like Eric Rudolph, another attendee said something more explicit, Before I could introduce myself, he turned to me and another observer with a crooked smile and exclaimed, "I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!" This was no inbred twit from the back of beyond, no this was Michael Schwartz the chief of staff for Oklahoma's GOP Senator Tom Coburn, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Michael Moore, the present bogey-man used to paint the left as mean-spirited pales to insignificance compared to that. He calls Republicans liars and thieves. Tom DeLay calls him a political hack.
But he didn't call for anyone to kill Bush, he asked us to look at the record and turn him out of office.
On the subject of the Supreme Court... he said they made a bad decision, and called on us to turn out Bush, so that when new appointments were made, someone else would be making them.
Yep, when you compare him to Coulter, the Left sure looks mean.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-21 07:08 pm (UTC)And come on hon. Her work is the mirror images of hundreds of op-ed peices I could right out of my NYT folder, toot sweet!
The problem is that I think both sides choose to actively ignore the log in their own eye. I don't care if you're bitching about Ann Coulter or Maureen Dowd - they are equally despised for responding to their political opposites with the same attitude directed at them.
I read both of them knowing their are painting caricatures of pure snark - knowing that nfortunately, their fans & their detractors will take thaier words literally, out of context, you name it.
But to use either woman's beliefs or attitudes as an illustration of EITHER party, or even as an 'average joe' of their respective parties, is just plain old stereotyping.
I see so many liberal I respect clinging to sterotypes like this, as though they define anyone who doesn't vote their way - or that the existance of such persons 'on the other side' proves that their own party is not equally distasteful at times.
And that's EXACTLY what happens on the right too!
It makes me sad... There so much that I love about the democratic party, but it just feels wrong to associate myself with it right now. Too many are unwilling to even admit the existence of the same hatred and bigotry in their own ranks - and that was the very same reason I didn't become a republican. I wanted to get away from all the preaching - all the talk about evil and enemies. But it's just the same on the left - only the enemy is my neighbor, parent, samily, friend...
It wasn't like this in the 90's, and I was too young to remember what it was like during the regean years. Is it always like this? I mean, I grew into a woman during the Clinton years - I SAW how the right was! But is it just the habit of the party not in power to claim the other is corrupt, wicked, evil, and dangerous?
no subject
Date: 2005-04-21 07:25 pm (UTC)Look at your own comparison... When has Maureen Down said the president (any president) ought to be assassinated?
When has she said the Left ought to go and kill republicans? When have those who claim to be following the beliefs of the advisors of the president been convicted of acts of domestic terrorism (a la Eric Rudolph).
The Left denounces the Ward Churchills, but the Right embraces the Randall Terrys; the Steven John Jordis. It calls the actions they take, "deplorable, but understandable."
When the number, the depth and the breadth of those who espouse such views is as great as it it, and when the leaders don't denounce it but rather make apologias, that isn't a fringe problem, it is a moral failing on the part of the leaders, and the led.
TK
What I am doing, and have been doing, is pointing out the difference in how the parties deal with such extremists. The Right is bring them to bed, The threatening tenor of the conference speakers was a calculated tactic. As Gary Cass, the director of Rev. D. James Kennedy's lobbying front, the Center for Reclaiming America, explained, they are arousing the anger of their base in order to harness it politically. The rising tide of threats against judges "is understandable," Cass told me, "but we have to take the opportunity to channel that into a constitutional solution."
They are encouraging it. This is not good.
And no, this is not how it always was. In the past it has been worse. But for the last 30+ years (since Nixon, and the southern strategy) the Right has been doing this, letting the wing-nuts froth, and then talking about "all the people" who are saying things, which then legitimizes those things.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-21 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-21 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 02:14 pm (UTC)It works this way -- the Left cares about being disliked. The reason the Right so often brings up fringe lefties and tries to paint them as the face of the Democratic Party is that the party moderates will automatically jump on board and try and denounce them, "oh no we're not all like that, oh that's just an extremist point of view," and then have a big argument about it.
The Right, on the other hand, doesn't care. Because if you get upset by what these people write, then you're just being "Politically Correct." For the most part, they don't defend or denounce them, they just quietly give them column inches and airtime and let them say the views that they secretly believe but don't have the clit to say themselves. Better media savvy? Partly. But I don't think that people on the Left wouldn't do exactly the same if the extremists on the Left were actually equivalent, if they said what moderates Truly Believed but didn't want to say.
And that's why Coulter can be successful in the mainstream where those of similar standard on the left remain entirely on the fringes. The right don't care that there are hideously offensive bigots resting in their fold. They are the attack dogs that they use for their own purposes. The Left, crazy bunch of hippies that it is, hates its own extremists as much as it hates those on the Right.
If Coulter's views weren't accepted, someone would say something about her. The Braying Masses would take the collective silence of the GOP establishment as damning, just as they jumped on every left-winger who didn't denounce some university lecturer they'd never even heard of before he was trumpeted as "the true face of the Left." The silence, though, is deafening.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 03:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 04:21 pm (UTC)I waste to much of my time as it is. This is a hopeless endeavor I'm not even going to bother with today -
If there was even a hint y'all hadn't already decided what my views are, I might, but this happened the last time I dared share an opinion here to. I'm done.
Have fun kids - and as a word to the wise, I'd throw fewer pies. You're only giving people like Coulter more ammo with those kinda stunts. I know she's fun to wank on, but such behavoir tends to bother those of us who think even people we disagree with are entitled to, ya know, a shred of respect.
Sorry for interrupting your Hate Ann Coulter party by trying to stick up for those on the right who's colors clash with the brush y'all are painting them with.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 05:07 pm (UTC)We haven't decided your views in a vaccuum. You have consistently, repeatedly here, and in your LJ expressed them. That we take what you have said at face value isn't unfair, it's what we expect people to do.
As for the last bit, about giving respect to those with whom you disagree... where is that in the people you are defending?
Where is the respect in calling a man who gave three limbs for his country a coward and a traitor?
If I was as knee-jerk as you have accused me of being, that single thing would be insurrmountable. That's some swell support for the troops. Question, no not even question, dismiss; with extreme prejudice, the sacrifice of body parts, and say he is treasonous because he is on the other side of the aisle.
Coulter, and Rush, and Savage, and Brooks, (the last two of which get big play on the Op-Ed pages of the NYT), and the Hannitys, and Norths, and the Malkins offend me because they don't believe in the idea of a loyal opposition.
They say I am unpatriotic, even treasonous. They have not done anything, in the years I've been watching and reading them (and that goes back to watching Oliver North, in uniform; under oath, lie to Congress, for days; and the boast about it) to make me think they don't mean it.
When the song stays the same, and when they are asked to explain themselves; and do so by saying they did mean it (as with Coulter and the NYT statement) I have to assume they mean what they say.
Why shouldn't I take them (with the possible exception of Ollie North) at their word?
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-04-22 06:07 pm (UTC)You tried to minimize her statement by caling it a "gross generalization" instead of the hateful slander it is.
If anything, I'm the one who should feel offended, not you.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-25 02:01 pm (UTC)But they don't run the Republican Party and, by and large, they don't write the influential articles in newspapers and magazines.
Frankly, in denouncing the idiots at the top of the food chain, I rather think that I may be doing even a little something to maybe get back to the days when conservatism was actually conservative and where it was possible to vote GOP without tacitly putting the seal of approval on deficit spending that would make Keynes shudder, the torture of POWs and congressional overreach into personal decisions about sex and death.
It's sad for both the right and the left that at the moment the Democrats are becoming the party of States' Rights and Balanced Budgets, the party that opposes torture and thinks people should have a decent standard of healthcare even if they lose their jobs. I could never vote Republican, but there are Republicans whose views I can argue with coherently and rationally and agree to disagree, whose voices are of benefit to the political dialogue, despite my disagreement. Seb Holsclaw and Von at Obsidian Wings being amongst the prime examples.
Coulter and Malkin and Hannity's voices are not these things. They are the voice of the new vocal movement that has taken over the GOP, the Moralising, big government, over-spending liars.
Unfortunately, this path seems to garner votes. So people do listen to DeLay and Frist and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Coulter and Hannity, and vote accordingly. And one gets the impression that if these people were a genuine liability for votes on the right, they would not be so free to plant their lips on the rectum of Mr Rove and Mr Bush. So sensible Republicanism, of the sort I can respect and appreciate, is unfortunately losing in the marketplace of ideas, and it's left to the Democrats to pick up the few sensible bits and pieces and use them to attract the people in the middle.
At the end of the day, you on the right can either reject these cretins, or they will be associated with you. If you choose not to, that's your choice.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-23 11:07 pm (UTC)Malatesta? He was far more coherent in his writing, though. Czolgosz?
no subject
Date: 2005-04-26 06:05 am (UTC)Ah, the joys of the semi-obscure.
Makes me want to buy something from Iver-Johnson while I hum a Boiled in Lead tune.
TK