Wolf Howling: civility

Thursday, January 20, 2011

More Left Wing Civility, The 50 Most Loathsome People of 2010

Daily Beast/Newsweek or whatever they are called now, issues another in a tradition of left wing hate fests focusing on the righties they love to demonize, all in the tradition of 10 Conservative women they would love to hatef*** and last years "Black Folks We'd Like To Remove From History." It's the Daily Beasts 50 Most Loathsome People of 2010. The list includes a sprinkling of of people from the left - Rick Sanchez, Julius Genachowski, Charlie Rangel, and even Obama for failing to impose every aspect of the far left wish list on America. And the list includes a few out of control Hollywood types. But on the whole, the list is basically a left wing screed against conservatives, a hit list with charges of racism, tea bagging, etc. and hopes for ironic misery and death:

46) Carl Paladino
Charges: Old-school racist, homophobe, hypocrite and purveyor of small gubmint horse porn, the would-be NY Governor’s real estate wealth comes largely from government subsidy of distressed properties. The Tea Partier wanted to impose “eminent domain” to stop the “Ground Zero Mosque,” . . .
Sentence: Buttsecks with James Dobson.

42) Haley Barbour
Charges: Looks like William Shatner if William Shatner ate a racist butter sculpture of William Shatner. As the oil and death washed ashore in the Gulf, the Mississippi Gov wooed tourists to “[c]ome on down” and “enjoy the beach.” The man was a tobacco lobbyist. He thinks the White Citizens Council is an upstanding organization. He doesn’t give a shit about you or anyone you know.
Aggravating factor: “I just don’t remember [overt racism] as being that bad.”
Sentence: Denied service at his favorite restaurant, blasted with fire hose, attacked by police dogs.

41) Christine O’Donnell
Charges: Doesn’t understand that separation of church and state is in the Constitution [note to authors - she's right, but why let that interfere with the snark]; . . . doesn’t understand that being pro-life in cases of rape and incest makes one a monster; doesn’t understand climate change; doesn’t understand evolution; . . . gives anyone with even a vague appreciation of human nature the likely correct impression that you’ve had your finger in more dykes than the Little Dutch Boy. . . .
Sentence: Burned at the stake.

38) Tucker Carlson
Charges: A consummate dildo, liar and CATO Institute lackey . . .

30) Mitch McConnell
Charges: Yet another example of the direct proportionality of evil to jowl size. . . . Aggravating factor: “I mean, let’s be honest. Who wants to hang out with guys like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, when you can be with Rush Limbaugh!” . . .

29) George W. Bush
Charges: Worst. President. Ever. . . .
Sentence: Made to read Decision Points in jail.

25) David Brooks
Charges: The Bernie Madoff of American letters, . . .
Sentence: Buried under rubble; cholera.

24) Sharron Angle
Charges: Imagine the most viscerally repugnant, deeply moronic and pathologically regressive position one could hold on any given issue. Good. Now imagine Sharron Angle cackling maniacally at whatever comparatively feeble hippie shit you came up with. . . .

23) Joe Barton (R-TX)
Charges: A former oil company consultant, “Smokey” Joe is a potent combination of corrupt and cretinous. . . .
Sentence: Drowned in a shallow pool of pig vomit

21) James O’Keefe III
Charges: Like Sacha Baron Cohen mixed with G. Gordon Liddy’s fetid stool. Embodies every sniveling, Docker-clad College Republican to ever overlook the 9th fairway and obtusely bemoan lower class entitlements. A Breitbart disciple, he sparked the ruin of ACORN, an honorable advocacy group for the poor, by dressing like a pimp and editing like Leni Riefenstahl. . . .
Sentence: Sold into Bacha Bazi [underage male prostitue in Afghanistan].

18) Andrew Breitbart
Charges: Partly responsible for the abysmal online apothecary known as The Huffington Post and the career of James O’Keefe, whom he taught everything he doesn’t know. His Drudge-inspired bullshit finally hit the fan in July when he posted an out of context video excerpt of USDA employee Shirley Sherrod that implied she was a racist. . . .

17) Rand Paul
Charges: Named and molded after a writer whose sheer intellectual repugnance spawned an entire generation of thinly-veiled Social Darwinists. He tried to equate racial discrimination with “free speech,” saying that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was tantamount to big government regulation. Cried, “Medicare is socialized medicine!” while hypocritically deriving half of his ophthalmology income from Medicaid and Medicare. Portrayed criticism of BP’s little “accident” as an “un-American” symptom of our “blame-game society.” And then there was that befuddling college prank where he and another secret-frat dildo tied up a girl, blindfolded her, made her do bong hits, dragged her to a creek bed and forced her to swear allegiance to “Aqua Buddha.” . . .
Sentence: Raped in a quarry by Evil Frank Gehry.

15) John Boehner
Charges: Cries so often he embarrasses Glenn Beck’s family. An incorrigibly lazy corporate puppet who owes his emotional instability to legendary Merlot consumption and his radioactive Naugahyde complexion to innumerable special interest golf junkets.
Sentence: Lung cancer.

14) Barack Obama
Charges: Outside of his promise to never end the pointless war in Afghanistan, his word has the integrity of Halliburton cement. Whether it was a “robust” public option, real net neutrality, importing prescription drugs, barring lobbyists from serving in the White House, meaningful Wall Street reform or ending the Bush tax cuts for the disgustingly wealthy, our President caved like the Metrodome under the weight of a bloated oligarchy. Most irksome, he seemed dignified doing it.
Aggravating factor: Authorized the assassination of Americans accused of terrorism.
Sentence: Primary challenge from the Rent is 2 Damn High guy.

12) Pamela Geller
Charges: The Woodward to Orly Taitz’s Bernstein, publisher of the mendacious blog Atlas Shrugs and co-founder of the hate group Stop Islamization of America. She was the bigoted fountainhead of hysteria over the “Ground Zero Mosque,” . . . This lunatic makes Ann Coulter seem the very model of civility, reason and grace.

11) Roger Ailes
Charges: His entire life is an object lesson in pernicious mendacity. Before being named Fox News President/Rupert Murdoch henchman, he was a consultant for Nixon, Reagan, Elder Bush and Rudy Giuliani. Party to News Corp.’s $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association; ultimately responsible for Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon’s fiendish email, which ordered Fox employees to use the term “government option” in place of “public option,” and more recently, responsible for Sammon’s missive requiring staff to challenge the “veracity of climate change data.” In granting the Tea Party media saturation, and employing demagogues like Beck, O’Reilly and Hannity, Ailes has absolutely destroyed the impartiality of the fourth estate and made a large segment of the population ever more stupider. . . .
Sentence: Gassed by Garrison Keillor.

10) John McCain
Charges: If you were in a coma during the ‘o8 election or too young to remember McCain’s role in the Keating Five/Savings and Loan scandal, his stance against MLK Day or his betrayal of the dinosaurs, you may have been under the false impression that he was one of the few Republicans to not be a pandering piece of shit. 2010 fully erased that unfounded myth, as he flip-flopped like beached salmon on immigration reform, the border fence, climate change and the repeal of DADT in a race to the bottom against his Tea Party opponent J.D. Hayworth. Ultimately responsible for raising Sarah Palin to national consciousness.
Aggravating factor: “Today [the day DADT was repealed] is a very sad day.” . . .

9) Tea Partiers
Charges: Openly racist and lying about it, uber-religious, hyper-hypocritical, usually-tetched old codgers who wheel around in their Medicare-provided Hoverounds® and rage against fiscally irresponsible social programs, like Medicare, because they’re too dumb to realize that they’re co-opted, Machiavellian mouthpieces of greedy billionaires.
Aggravating factor: They elected some 40 candidates to Congress.
Sentence: The consequences of their actions.

8) Jan Brewer
Charges: Gila Monster eugenics gone horrible awry. Killed two people, and another ninety-six languish, unable to afford the life-saving transplants for which she slashed state funding. Cut health care for kids too. Hates health care. Horny for the NRA; signed law nixing concealed carry permits, which had no ill effects in 2010. None. Don’t worry about it. Not a problem. Seriously. It’s totally cool. Attempted to justify the draconian racial profiling law SB 1070 by repeatedly citing fictional desert decapitations. Lambasted as the Himmler of the Southwest, she protested, saying her father died fighting the Nazis. He was never in the military. He died in ‘51. From lung cancer.
Sentence: Followed everywhere by a mirror; subsequent heart attack.

7) Glenn Beck
Charges: Cries so often he’d embarrass himself—if he could feel embarrassed or ashamed about anything. . . . This year, he besmirched the antiwar legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with his contemptible military worshiping “Restoring Honor” white power religious rally. But it was OK, he demurred, because he didn’t stand on the same exact step of the Lincoln Memorial. His dyslexic game of “Pin the Paranoid Delusion on the George Soros” directly inspired at least three would-be assassins (in 2010). A Latter Day, Romper Room Father Coughlin who screams “eugenic” as frequently as sane people say “hello.”
Sentence: Banished to the planet Kolob.

6) Sarah Palin
Charges: An ideologically abhorrent dunce whose answer to everything—caribou, wolves, Julian Assange, feminism, science, decency, accountability, the English language, Democratic incumbents—is to shoot it dead. From conspiring to advance her ham-legged, clopping daughter on “Dancing with the Stars” to successfully endorsing a slew of faux-revolutionary Tea Party imbeciles, she’s a persistent, violent rash on the entire body politic.
Aggravating factor: “But obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies.”
Sentence: Shot in the head by a bear.

4) Justices Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas
Charges: Their majority opinion in Citizens United v. FEC was the worst decision since Scalia instituted SCOTUS Hot Pants Fridays. . . . This is the very definition of “legislating from the bench” and ensures our elections will be dominated by well-funded Swift Boating for the foreseeable future. If democracy was an experiment, this case blew up the lab. . . .

2) David & Charles Koch
Charges: In a land filthy with noxious liars, these two are the filthiest. . . . How they make money is dirty; how they spend it is dirtier. From free-market-humping think tanks CATO and Heartland to Tea Party-backing Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, they invest vulgar amounts of money in misappropriating populist rage and misinforming the ignorant masses on climate change, tax reform, environmental policy, health care, and any other issue that could cut into their fat bottom line.
Aggravating factor: In a philanthropy-meets-disinformation masterstroke, the Smithsonian’s new $15 million David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins is a climate change whitewash, which teaches that destroying our environment is no big deal because we can just adapt and evolve.
Sentence: Fed to the Kraken.

1) You
Charges: Your brain’s been cobbled together over millions of years of blind evolution and it shows. You’re clumsy, stupid, weak and motivated by the basest of urges. Your MO is both grotesquely selfish and unquestionably deferential to questionable authority. You’re not in control of your life. You wear your ignorance like a badge of honor and gleefully submit to oppression, malfeasance and kleptocracy. You will buy anything. You will believe anything. . . . You believe in American exceptionalism despite the contrary, compelling and overwhelming evidence. You tacitly partake in all manner of atrocity without batting a lash. You’re actively participating in our species’ extinction and you’re either in denial or you just don’t give a shit. You escape into every sort of mind-numbing distraction and ridiculous, convoluted fantasy, so you don’t have to face the bitter, terrifying fact that your life is utterly meaningless.
Aggravating factors: The careers of Rush Limbaugh, Oprah Winfrey, John Stossel and Justin Bieber; the success of The Secret, “Medium” and Atlas Shrugged; the election of Rand Paul; the existence of Kentucky, Texas and “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.”
Sentence: Bad teeth, an affinity for afternoon tea and the guilt-plagued, nostalgic psyche of a fallen empire.

And that demonizing and snark filled wish for violence and death is what passes for humor on the left. So tell me again about how conservatives are to act with civility. There was a time when I would have laughed at the above and just let it pass. Those days are over. It is long past time to hold these people to the standards they would impose on conservative speech.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

If You're Surprised, You Aren't Paying Attention

ABC News Jonathan Karl reports:

The newfound civility didn’t last long. Political rhetoric in Congress doesn’t get much nastier than the words of one House Democrat during the debate on repealing the health care law.

In an extraordinary outburst on the House floor, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) invoked the Holocaust to attack Republicans on health care and compared rhetoric on the issue to the work of infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. . . .

If anyone expected the left to act with "civility," they must have been in a coma for the past half century. It was about then that the left stopped arguing the issues with intellectual honesty and substituted demonizing their opponents as their primary means of winning arguments. The day "civility" is forced upon the left is the day they cease to be a force in American politics.

Update: From Peter Wehner at Commentary, via Instapundit:

In our post-Tucson world, I’m eager to see people like E.J. Dionne Jr., Dana Milbank, and Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post; George Packer of the New Yorker; James Fallows of the Atlantic; Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and the editorial page of the New York Times; Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, and Ed Schultz of MSNBC, and scores of other commentators and reporters all across America both publicize and condemn Representative Cohen’s slander.

Each of them will have plenty of opportunities to do so. I hope they take advantage of it. I hope, too, that reporters ask White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs what his reaction is. And I trust President Obama, who spoke so eloquently last week about the importance of civility in our national life, has something to say about this ugly episode as well. If the president were to repudiate Mr. Cohen quickly and publicly, it would be good for him, good for politics, and good for the nation.

But if the president and his liberal allies remain silent or criticize Cohen in the gentlest way possible, it’s only reasonable to conclude that their expressions of concern about incivility in public discourse are partisan rather than genuine, that what they care about isn’t public discourse but gamesmanship, not restoring civility but gaining power.

Hopefully, neither Mr. Wehner nor Instapundit will be holding their breath while awaiting the forceful denouncements of the left. Let the deafening silence commence.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Heh

(H/T Maggie's Farm and Theo Spark)

And in the same theme, Gerard Van Der Luen at American Digest channels Dirty Harry about all these calls for civility:

My nice, reasonable right guy is all used up these days. I've got compassion fatigue. I see the left dealing, once again, from the bottom of their media marked card deck (when do they do otherwise?), and I’m not feeling too civil about them and their plans these days. I've seen enough of their "handful of 'gimme' and mouth full of 'gimme more'."

Speaking for myself -- in a calm and rational tone as I reach to upset their crooked card table and draw my metaphoric popcult pistol -- I have to say, “I know what you're thinking. ‘Did he fire six insults or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as we're playing for the future of the Republic, and being as this is a 2010 iMac, the most powerful personal computer in the world, and would blow your premise clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk? ”

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Civility & Other BS

Republicans took 63 House seats and 6 Senate seats in the 2010 election. That occurred because the majority of Americans were mad as hell - mad at the direction Obama was leading the country; mad at the way the left was thuggishly going about its business; and mad at the left's disregard of America's core principals. The majority of Americans voiced that anger in the lead-up to the 2010 election, and they were motivated by that anger to vote the Democrats to the most devastating defeat of either party in nearly a century.

Make no mistake, today's calls for "civility" from the left are nothing more than a call to curb the momentum of the right and to blunt their disagreement with the left's agenda. It is the last gasp of the left's recent effort to delegitimize conservatives with a blood libel - that the right's passioned disagreement with the left's agenda led to the mass murder in Arizona. And the only reason that effort failed was because virtually everyone on the right side of the aisle stood up and called "Bull S***!!!!!"

The right's problem over the past decade has been far too much "civility" whilst the left has daily used scurrilous ad hominem attacks to delegitimize the right. Obama, in just the past three months, has referred to conservatives as "hostage takers" and "enemies" of Hispanics. Rep. Clyburn has spent the past year calling the Tea Party movement "racist" and, most recently, described Sarah Palin as attractive but stupid. How's that for civility?

Where were the calls for civility when the far left was calling Bush a liar and comparing him to Hitler, or when they were calling Cheney the second coming of Satan? What about when the left were willing to do or say anything to undermine the war in Iraq and our nation's national security for their own political gain?

If the left wants civility, they should start with their own house. Knock off all the ad hominem attacks, apologize for the grotesque attempt to tar the right with a blood libel, and admit that their effort was undertaken without a shred of evidence. They should further come clean that the aim of this attack was not to improve civil discourse - charging your opponents with complicity in murder is not not conducive to that end - but was aimed at delegitimizing conservative speech. Until then:

And here is my prediction. Any new found "civility" on the left will not last more then nine days - which is when Obama will take the podium to give the State of the Union speech. You can rest assured he will make ad hominem attacks against the right. The guy is a child of the far left - and that's what the far left does. Intellectual honesty and a desire for robust debate on the issues are far from their strong suits. It's just that, up until a few days ago, their rhetorical paradigm usually worked.

Update: Don Surber expresses similar thoughts, as does I Own The World and Nice Deb.

Related: This on the intersection of left wing civility and logic (H/T Legal Insurrection)