Reading David Neiwert’s further take down of Jonah Goldberg’s drivel, and comically horrified to discover that Goldberg has the absolute gall to consider Neiwert an “ankle-biter” I figured I’d share with him what real “ankle-biting” looks like. Jonah, a reasoned and thorough destruction of your entire thesis is less “ankle-biting” and more “head-lopping-off.” Ankle-biting is more like going into a bookstore and redistributing copies of your pamphlet into much more appropriate - or at least fitting - sections of the establishment.
Completely non-political and genuinely eating at me this morning. I don’t know why, but hear me out…
While getting ready for work in the AM, the TV is usually on and I can hear it from the bathroom. I don’t know what channel it was on (this time it may have been on NBC or CNN, and the host was discussing the story of a woman who gave birth to twins, each by a different father.
Of course they had some medical expert on to explain how this rare event could occur (two separate eggs were released and she had sex with two different men—pretty elementary, but whatever), but then the conversation turned bizarre in the extreme.
The female host then asks the dumbest question I’ve ever heard—“Do you think these two babies will have the same emotional bond as regular fraternal twins?”
WTF—not identical, mind you, but as fraternal twins. The medical expert kindly didn’t point out the ridiculous question and simply answered that they would know each other just as any pair of siblings. Oh, god. I don’t know which is worse, the thought that the host needed to ask a question that basic, thinking the audience is that clueless, or that the host herself is that out to lunch.
Unbelievable. Watch former Congressman J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) sink in the quicksand of Bush’s failed policies as Chris Matthews asks him a simple question—“would we be better off if we had eight more years like the eight we just had?” The dodging is hilariously painful to watch, but what’s delusional is that he attempts to blame the economic crisis on a “sneak attack” on the financial system by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and George Soros. I’m not sh*tting you. Via the Jed Report:
Hayward: No, I’ll tell you what was bad. The sneak attack on our economy, the dress rehearsal of Indy bank, when Chick Schumer helped get that started and the guy in the background George Soros manipulating all the currency.
Matthews: What?
Hayward: You want to keep that going?
Matthews: You mean the economic situation we faced right now…J.D. you can talk fast but I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Oh my—the winged monkeys are aloft and soaring out of Hayworth’s *ss wearing tin foil hats.
Now that everyone’s in a holding pattern, waiting for the inauguration, and now that it’s been two weeks since there’s been any movement on this story, leading me to think it’s basically done, I feel free to share with you an interesting set of events that have occurred to me over the past six weeks. I hope you enjoy it more than I have. The tale of woe starts when Jesse wrote a post on November 25 criticizing Dennis Prager’s column where Prager claimed that liberals made up the threat of straight AIDS in order to get funding. Quoth Prager:
Even the natural sciences are increasingly subject to being rendered a means to a “progressive” end. There was the pseudo-threat of heterosexual AIDS in America—science manipulated in order to de-stigmatize AIDS as primarily a gay man’s disease and to increase funding for AIDS research.
Jesse’s post was about the way that everything that conservatives don’t like gets dismissed as a lie, no matter how much evidence exists that it’s true, such as global warming. What alarmed me was that I had just podcasted about an entirely different right wing pundit pushing the same myth that AIDS is a “gay disease”—-Jim Quinn claiming that hetero sex produces babies, but gay sex produces AIDS, which was comical in that he made it sound like they work by similar processes. In truth, of course, the HIV virus produces AIDS, and so it’s not the gayness that’s the problem so much as the presence of the virus. Or so reality-based scientists believe. I wasn’t surprised to see two instances of using AIDS in the service of drumming up prejudice against gay men—-the whole thing happened in the wake of the Prop 8 protests, so I believe Quinn and Prager were trying to revive fears that gay men are diseased and dirty. Similar tactics have been used throughout history against other marginalized groups. One of the underlying assumptions of segregation was that black people’s mere presence dirtied up white-only facilities, to draw on another example. Women’s bodies are othered in a similar way. What other purpose does douche really serve, for instance, except to treat the imaginary filthiness of female bodies?
So, banking off Jesse’s post, I wrote a column about the resurgence of this right wing myth in the wake of Prop 8. My reasoning was that it’s popular with the likes of Quinn and Prager because it allows them to imply to their audience that they are morally superior because of the accident of their sexual orientation, as if just being straight makes you a better person that gets struck with disease less often as a reward. (Commenters joked that this means that lesbians are the most moral of us all.) There was a rush of commenters that seemed to believe that I was cowardly because I wouldn’t debate Prager, which initially struck me as odd, though it sort of made sense that they’d think this. The hope, I thought, was that they could pull me into a debate about comparing the relative risk of unprotected gay and straight sex, instead of looking at the big picture, which is that every time this disease spreads to another person, gay or straight, the health of the entire community is diminished twice over. Once because of that individual, but twice because every infection means one more person who can spread the virus yet again, putting all of us—-gay or straight—-at more risk. They want to put the debate on terms that imply that gay and straight are natural enemies, when of course, I believe that we’re all in this together, and HIV is an epidemic that concerns us all.
Why do the disgraced rabid dogs of the GOP continue to cock their legs and piss on the political discourse when they have zero credibility? George “Macaca” Allen has no shame, as he pimps the “Drill, baby, drill” meme into the ground with an assertion that the call for drilling is an expression of Americans’ desire to be free - and those with a different point of view are “elitist.”
ALLEN: I love that statement, America is addicted to oil. What an elitist point of view. Americans are not addicted to oil. Americans are addicted to freedom — the freedom and liberty to move where and when we want.
Actually, isn’t it the opposite? This incessant call to dedicate money and time to finding more fossil fuels ahead of a concerted effort to develop alternative sources of energy sounds more like Allen and McCain/Palin want us shackled to Big Oil as if this is a sane energy strategy.
Besides, the glorious Dear Leader has said that “America is addicted to oil. I guess Macaca forgot about that bit of business.
I can sort of see what Paul Campos is saying here about scandal fatigue, but I’m skeptical. Scandal fatigue is likely to make people tune out the details of any individual scandal, but they’ll pick up just enough to know that yep, Republicans are at it. Again. That’s not the worst thing in the world.
Hee, Matt made a funny. Addressing yet another article that peddles in the idea that Keith Olbermann’s success is a miracle, because liberals traditionally fail on TV, he says:
How many failed attempts were there, exactly? My recollection of the relevant history is that first O’Reilly was successful. Then, because you’re not allowed to put liberals on television, networks responded to his success by putting more conservatives on. Then someone at MSNBC had the crazy idea of giving Phil Donohue a show. Then Donohue’s show became MSNBC’s most popular program. At which point MSNBC canceled it because you’re not allowed to put liberals on television. Some time after that, MSNBC put Keith Olbermann on intending, as Boyer reports, for his show to be a “newscast of record.” Then, by accident, Olbermann started doing some liberal stuff. And it was successful, which based on the track record (one effort to put a liberal on cable and his show became the network’s highest-rated program) is exactly what you would expect.
The myth that liberals don’t do well on TV is a classic example of an Everyone Knows myth in action. Common but erroneous wisdom is more powerful than any conspiracy, because a conspiracy can be exposed, but information contrary to what Everyone Knows, no matter how devastatingly true, just gets buried under a pile of cognitive dissonance. Why something might become that untrue thing that Everyone Knows often is indeed political, but more out of convenience. It’s convenient and appealing for network executives to believe that the general public doesn’t want to listen to those liberals who’d raise marginal tax rates if they had their way, so they persist in believing it, despite evidence to the contrary. The other thing that feeds the myth is that the unwashed right wingers here in the flyover states stick out a little bit more to the coastal elite making these decisions, and so it’s easy to decide that they’re representative of Middle America, as opposed to the more mundane apolitical people who will listen to a liberal or the mundane liberals in our mundane but fuel-efficient vehicles. And of course, the idea that people living in blue states are Middle America, too, is also discarded, with a lot of assistance from the right wing noise machine.
Meanwhile, conservative talk radio, which I have been following with interest for almost 20 years, has become a tornado alley of hallucinatory holograms of Obama…It’s gotten to the point that I can hardly listen to my favorite shows, which were once both informative and entertaining. The hackneyed repetition is numbing and tedious, and the overt character assassination is ethically indefensible. Talk radio will lose its broad audience if it continues on this nakedly partisan path.
