Jonathan Addler: Jenny McCarthy Is A “Bimbo”
Goes without saying that Jonathan Addler needs some better manners:
Oprah Winfrey has decided to promote the career — and by extension, the dangerous and lunatic ravings — of professional-bimbo-turned-anti-vaccine-activist Jenny McCarthy.
Why Addler thinks it couth to call McCarthy a bimbo is beyond me and beneath respect. This is the kind of snark that gives the right a bad name.
Get a clue Addler, please stop this kind of behavior.
Liberal Trolls On Twitter Dishonor Jack Kemp
Taking a moment here to immortalize the small minority of base liberals on Twitter who revel in the death of a conservative.
First we have this jem, a combo ReTweet of two snipes at Jack Kemp:
The trolls feel quite justified in being base because, as they say, the conservatives did it first:
I’m sure some base minority of conservatvies did say awful things about Kennedy and Wellstone, yet any sane person knows that if someone wrongs you it does not give you just cause to wrong them.
Trolls will be trolls, great examples of How Not to Be Human.
Yglesias Falsely Credits White Supremacists With Inventing Judicial Activism
Matt Yglesias lamely attempts to tie conservatives to white supremacists:
I wish progressives wouldn’t be so defensive about this. The idea of an “activist judge” is something that was cooked up by white supremacists in the 1950s and 60s who didn’t like judges bossing people around and telling them they had to let black people vote and go to school. To me, frankly, it’s a bit shocking that modern-day conservatives are still so eager to associate themselves with the legacy of the racist backlash of a couple of generations ago.
Do I even have to explain why this feeble-minded sewage is so wrong?
Ugh, I suppose I do, for Matt’s sake.
White supremacists did not cook up the idea of an “activist judge,” or judicial activism. The concept was around earlier, but the term itself came from a January 1947 article in Fortune Magazine written by Arthur Schlesinger.
From California Law Review’s THE ORIGIN AND CURRENT MEANINGS OF “JUDICIAL ACTIVISM”:
Schlesinger’s article profiled all nine Supreme Court justices on the Court at that time and explained the alliances and divisions among them. The article characterized Justices Black, Douglas, Murphy, and Rutlege as the “Judicial Activists” and Justices Frankfurter, Jackson, and Burton as the “Champions of Self Restraint.” Justice Reed and Chief Justice Vinson comprised a middle group.
What’s even more fun is the article was about the New Deal - you know – one of Yglesias’ favorite pieces of legislation:
By 1947, none of the justices openly questioned the constitutionality of the New Deal. Instead, the Court split over the interpretation of legislation and “the proper function of the judiciary in a democracy.”
How ironic is it that the term “judicial activism” came about because, from the beginning, progressives have tried to change inconvenient laws to suit their paradigm. There is good reason progressives feel “defensive” about something so obviously unethical.
So judicial activism wasn’t invented by white supremacists – Matt will be very disappointed. He is either making this stuff up or repeating something he read/heard. But, again, the facts don’t matter much to progressive bloggers like Yglesias – it took me about 30 seconds to find the California Law Review paper.
Hmm… frankly, it’s a bit shocking, don’t you think?
Full Text of Article 3, What The Left Doesn’t Want You To See
The deceptive Andrew Sullivan calls coercive interrogation defenders ignorant because they allegedly don’t know that Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions bans “waterboarding, forced nudity, total sensory deprivation, slamming against walls, multiple beatings, hypothermia, stress positions, hooding, phobias (dogs, insects), confined coffin-like spaces, and brutal long-term sleep deprivation.”
How does he prove his point? By citing commentary about Article 3, of course! In Sullivan’s world, approved commentary = fact:
Article 3 has been called a “Convention in miniature.” It is the only article of the Geneva Conventions that applies in non-international conflicts.
It describes minimal protections which must be adhered to by all individuals within a signatory’s territory during an armed conflict not of an international character (regardless of citizenship or lack thereof): Noncombatants, combatants who have laid down their arms, and combatants who are hors de combat (out of the fight) due to wounds, detention, or any other cause shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, including prohibition of outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment. The passing of sentences must also be pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples. Article 3′s protections exist even though no one is classified as aprisoner of war.
The article text for Article 3 of the Second Geneva Convention differs from the other three Conventions in that it adds “shipwrecked” to the “wounded and sick.”
Article 3 also states that parties to the internal conflict should endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of the Geneva Conventions.
Oh no! Whatever will the “torture lovers” do when they read this? Sullivan triumphantly beats his chest and authoritatively declares:
Notice that this isn’t just a ban on “torture” however legally parsed. But a ban on all inhuman treatment, including outrages on personal dignity.
Yes, Sullivan, that IS indeed what the commentary is implying. So, why, oh why, did he NOT cite the full text instead of commentary? What a GREAT question!
That would be because the spirit of the full text doesn’t fulfill Sullivan’s neurotic need for reality to conform to his viewpoint.
Here is the FULL TEXT of Article 3
In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:
(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed ‘ hors de combat ‘ by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) taking of hostages;
(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.
An impartial humanitarian body, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, may offer its services to the Parties to the conflict.
The Parties to the conflict should further endeavour to bring into force, by means of special agreements, all or part of the other provisions of the present Convention.
The application of the preceding provisions shall not affect the legal status of the Parties to the conflict.
My, my OH my – isn’t THIS interesting? So, according to Article 3 Section 1a, “torture” is grouped with “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment.” That effectively excludes ALL of the coercive interrogation techniques used by the CIA; that would mean that they aren’t classified as torture. That’s what Sullivan means by “legally parsed;” yeah, that crazy technical leagalese, LOL.
Now it’s clear why Sullivan deceptively quoted commentary and tried to pass it off as the actual Article 3 – it makes him look like a dunce and obliterates his huffy puffy arguments on “torture.”
Crazy Bob: Hey, Let’s Gamble With American Lives!
There’s lots to challenge in this latest HuffPo post from Bob ‘conservatives please kill yourselves‘ Cesca, but this I found most amusing and disturbing:
On average, the same number of Americans who were killed on September 11 will die from cancer over the next two days. 40,000 people this month. More than half a million throughout the course of the year.
Your chances of being killed at the hands of a terrorist, on the other hand, are comparatively remote. Some estimates show the odds at one in 9.3 million.
So what if OTHER Americans get killed in a terrorist attack, it probably won’t happen to you so you need not be concerned. Forget that those odds can fluctuate depending on how well the Obama administration handles homeland security. Forget that another successful terrorist attack would have a disproportionate psychological effect, discouraging Americans and empowering terrorists. Forget the massive economic damage it would likely cause.
Just fugettaboutit! Ol’ Crazy Bob and his pals have everything under control.
Eeesh.
Not Cool: NewsBusters Calls Cleese, Chan “Celebutards” and “Idiots”
Warner Todd Huston of NewsBusters apparently thinks that it’s A-OK to make use of the invectives “celebutard” and “idiot” when making the case against the ignorant rants of Jackie Chan and John Cleese. Though Huston does call Cleese and Chan “useful idiots,” he does not use “celebutard” in the text of his post. His post does, however, have a graphic that uses the word:
Not Cool
Using such words goes beyond civil discourse, especially “celebutard.” This is beneath the talent of Huston; there are more effective and clever ways of highlighting the foolishness of celebrities like Chan and Cleese. I implore Huston and NewsBusters to issue an apology and take the next fork to the high road.
Tea Party Snark III: Working-Class Schlubs, Abnormal Teabaggers
A continuing series covering snarky, condescending and inappropriate liberal response to the Tea Party Movement. Snark I | Snark II
David Neiwert closes his eyes and flails his arms while running at the Tea Party movement, calling it “populist.” Well, duh, of course it’s populist. Neiwert thinks, however, that right-wing populism “in the process of taking the reins of the leaderless conservative movement,” calling it “sucker populism” as though left-wing populism is somehow less impetuous. I would guess that right-wing populism has approximately the same hold over conservatives as left-wing populism has over Obama’s liberal establishment. If you want to really understand populism go here.
Neiwert prattles on until he gets to this juicy part:
It is, in essence, predicated on the psychology of celebrity-worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they too can someday become rich and famous too — because when they do, would they want to be taxed heavily? It’s all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the poor stiffs who were never any good at math to begin with.
My, my, isn’t that interesting? Neiwert looks down his fancy-pants liberal nose at “working-class schlubs” who have no chance whatsoever to “become rich and famous.” Those “poor stiffs” who aren’t “any good at math to begin with.” How… condescending.
Neiwert inadvertently reveals the crux of modern liberalism: that we poor “schlubs” need the the know-it-all liberals to rescue us from ourselves.
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Thers at Firedoglake snarks directly at Tea Party protesters saying, “Hey, Tea-Baggers — you’re not the majority; hell, you’re not even normal”
Thers is referring to the “Slient Majority No More,” saying there is NO WAY the Tea Party’s anti tax, anti-spending message could be representative of a majority of Americans:
There are no poll data whatsoever to support the idea that Americans are Fed Up when it comes to taxes.
Uhhh. Yes there is. Great job on the fact checking, there Thers.
The Gallup Poll Thers, the Washington Post and rest of the Liberalati are touting shows that:
48% of Americans saying the amount of federal income taxes they pay is “about right,” with 46% saying “too high”
That’s with a ±3% margin of error, of course.
But wait – this survey includes ALL Americans. I wonder, just wonder what the numbers would look like if you asked only those who actually pay income taxes? Hmmmm…
Thers goes on to snark at Tea Party protesters some more:
The Grandma-haired Byron York went to one of these small-town tea-bags, like I did, though, as he says, “organizers posted a note on their website asking that everyone “Please DO NOT personally attack the President or any member of Congress by name” — as it was a classic conservative Republican, limited-government, anti-spending talkfest.” Well, when you’re told top-down what the message is, it cleans up real good, I guess. But everywhere else, Glenn Beck won, it was all very wingnutty sloganeering, and well, good luck building a winning electoral coalition on that, Republicans.
So it’s bad to encourage civility and respect when protesting???? I think Thers is upset at being denied the opportunity to snark at protesters who may have otherwise been disrespectful.
So, I guess it’s abnormal a) to be upset at wasteful government spending and over-taxation b) to believe that most people don’t like wasteful government spending and over-taxation c) to protest about it and d) to be respectful while protesting.
Tea Party Snark II: Cooper At 8, Boorish Definitions, Twitscoop Bullsh*t
A continuing series covering snarky, condescending and inappropriate liberal response to the Tea Party Movement. Snark I | Snark III
First Greg Gutfeld at BigHollywood brilliantly takes on Anderson Cooper’s tasteless teabagging shtick:
Now, if you`re too old or too high to get what`s going on, here`s the joke: The liberal-leaning media are goofing on the tea parties by invoking the term teabagging, a phrased used to describe an act of oral sex performed by a man – either on another man, woman, or in Alec Baldwin’s case – a cheeseburger.
And so you have Cooper`s joke – it`s just a shame he ripped off the shtick from David Shuster, who apparently has never met a joke he hasn`t beat to death like a hunter on a harp seal. On MSNBC, Shuster repeats testicle-based puns with a fervent relish not unlike an eight-year old boy who just can’t stop sniffing his fingers. And, this, coming from me. I`m mean – I always thought I was the king of obvious jokes, but I relinquish that crown – because the real obvious joke is Shuster.
4/17 Edit: Commenter BB brings up an excellent point. Gutfeld was being just as rude and crass as Cooper when he snarks at Alec Baldwin and he goes to far when he describes the 8 year old “who just can’t stop sniffing his fingers.” In retrospect, it was poorly chosen on my part – though comparing Cooper’s behavior to that of an 8 year old boy is quite apt.
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The callow behavior continues at DailyKos as Kos-hack Greg Dworkin spits up some unseemly Urban Dictionary definitions:
Teabagger n. A conservative activist who is so ignorant that they protest against tax cuts (that benefit them) by throwing tea into a river.
Teabagging: The mornic [sic] act of conservatives/Republicans sending used teabags to lawmakers because they think Obama is a Nazi.
Uhhh. How… unclever. The Chairman of Urban Dictionary’s Bipartisan Committee for the Prevention of Vulgar Behavior could not be reached for comment.
Dworkin continues by cluelessly claiming that the Tea Party had no buzz on Twitter because Twitscoop‘s tag cloud didn’t show any tea party related words:
Dworkin's Twitscoop Screenshot
Riiight, because the fact that the #teaparty hashtag stayed at the top of Twitter‘s “Trending Topics” nearly all day means NOTHING! It’s still #3 as of 10:35 AM EST 4/16/2009 – that means nothing too.
Perhaps Dworkin should have read Twitscoop’s explanation of their tag cloud:
Through an automated algorithm, twitscoop crawls hundreds of tweets every minute and extracts the words which are mentioned more often than usual. The result is displayed in a Tag Cloud, using the following rule: the hotter, the bigger(no joke here).
Someone please tell Dworkin that words are not necessarily hashtags. Gee – ya think Twitscoop might be filtering out the hashtags??? Could it be that Twitscoop isn’t the best indicator of overall buzz? “Bullshit” is also listed as a trend in Dworkin’s TwitScoop screenshot – how appropriate.
Tea Party Snark I: Zero Thought, Anti Tax Porn, and Unicorn Nuts
The Left Blogsphere joined hands today to commit mass abuse of conservative Tea Party protesters. The left’s putrid hate rained down upon the Internet like sewage dumped from 1000 Hollywood-owned airplanes. Unable to contain the sludge within their minds, the left uniformly referred to the Tea Party Movement with the crude sexual reference “Tea Bagging,” showing just how immature and unprofessional they really are. More > Snark II | Snark III
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Steve Benen attempted to discredit the Washington DC/White House Tea Party protest with the “if it’s not well planned it’s not legitimate” bit. Protesters threw a box of tea into the White House lawn and got in trouble with authorities. If this were a liberal protest and Bush was in the White House, you better believe Benen wouldn’t have this snark to offer:
So, these guys didn’t think it was important to come up with a rationale for the protests or to get permits for the protests … It’s hard not to get the impression that very little thought went into these far-right festivities.
We also know that not a lot of thought went into the civil rights movement at first, it started as slowly building emotion.
*****
We hear only muffled sounds from Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo as he attempts to remove his foot from his mouth for calling this picture and the 28 subsequent pics of protests “Anti-Tax Porn:”
John Marshall Calls This "Porn"
*****
Everyone’s favorite fake conservative Andrew Sullivan featured a post from hard left Pandagon blogger Jesse Taylor. From “Unicorn Nuts…On Your Face,” a shrill upchuck of liberal malevolence:
This gets to the basic issue with the whole Tea Party movement. It’s a group of fucknuts joining other groups of marginally related fucknuts to protest something or other, in a hugely fucknutty way. The point of the Tea Party movement, besides the largest thrusting of testicles to America’s collective face since the Soviets launched Sputnik, is to protest…well, basically the entire functioning of the government with no alternative plan or goal whatsoever.
LOL, what great prose and impeccable logic! Good to know what Sullivan considers to be “curt.” He thinks “the goal of the Tea Parties” is to “DOMINATE THE AGENDA,” whatever that means.
Stay tuned for more, folks…
Digby Advocates Abuse of “Eliminationist” and “Facist” Conservatives
In an amazing feat of über-condescension, liberal busybody Digby openly sheds all pretense of willingness to engage in civil, reasoned discourse with anyone she deems to be on “the modern American right,” and, she encourages the presumably heroic liberals to treat the right with even more “ridicule and contempt;” as if that were possible.
Digby begins by heaping undeserved praise for lefty bogger/author David Neiwert‘s new book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right:
The moral heart of David Neiwert’s absorbing new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, is Chapter 8, “Eliminationism in America: A Brief History.” It is a heartbreaking narrative of virulently hateful rhetoric and bigotry sparking hundreds of years of unspeakably atrocious crimes against Native Americans, against Africans and African Americans, against Chinese Americans, against Japanese Americans, against Jews, Irish, Italians, against anyone who didn’t look like, speak like, act like, or think like those in the dominant white culture. The goal was to extirpate the different by any means necessary, including rape, torture, and murder.
Then Digby spends a moment constructing the keen idea that:
[the] sharing of values between the “secular” cosmopolitan and fundamentalist rural cultures occurs – not inside a specific religious tradition, but within the secular moral space created by the structure of American governance, a structure which produces a tolerant environment by denying the establishment of any religion. In other words, it is only within a liberal cultural space that such a genuine tolerance and respect of radically disparate worldviews…
Sounds great to me! But, alas, Digby casts an awfully wide net, wide enough to include most mainstream conservatives:
Fascism feeds on oversimplifications, bigotry, and violent provocation. It parries logic with toxic nationalisms, tribalism, and a fist. No amount of calm persuasion will open the mind of a Christian Reconstructionist, a white supremacist, or their more cleaned-up-for-primetime enablers like Coulter, Limbaugh, Bachmann, and Palin.
Ahh, there’s the dig. These “facist” people are also the “Eliminationists” of which Niewart speaks so verbosely in his Great new book!
Unable to ponder past her own rhetoric, Diby decided long ago that SHE is responsible for “confront[ing] the right:”
This brings me back to the question that has puzzled me from the day I began trying to find active ways to confront the right in an effective manner: How can liberals prevent proto-fascists, para-fascists, and fascists from seizing power in America (and I would add, although Dave probably wouldn’t, “again” )? Surely, as Neiwert urges, we always need to better understand our world – not only our own values but the values of those who disagree with us. But that is nowhere near enough.
Nowhere near enough???? What’s THAT supposed to mean? It means this:
To counter the modern American right will take a rhetoric that surely places reality, reason, and logic front and center. But that rhetoric needs also to contain a healthy dollop of ridicule and contempt (thank you, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert). It must know when to confront the buffoons (such as Dave’s willingness to rebut Jonah Goldberg), and when to usefully ignore them (e.g., well-known scientists’ refusal to debate creationists).
Digby is saying the “modern American right,” which happens to include mainstream conservatives, can’t be reasoned with, so they must be treated with “ridicule and contempt.”
Haven’t Coulter, Limbaugh, Bachmann, and Palin already been treated in a manner that far exceeds the descriptor “ridicule and contempt?” So what behavior “needs” to happen that has not already happened? What the hell is Digby advocating here?
That tolerant, compassionate, urban liberal Digby is advocating abuse toward mainstream conservatives that exceeds current levels!!
The next step in Digby’s line of reasoning is to advocate the detention of “Eliminationists.” And, what step is after that? How much is “enough,” Digby?
Watch out for this reprobate ideology, folks.
