Monday, October 16, 2006
Jackasses
You deserve him.
Although I have said it before, sometimes it deserves repeating. Recently perusing the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune (that filthy rag is ubiquitous here) I noticed the usual stuff: an editorial by Charles Krauthammer, that malignant cripple, using some of the most painfully clumsy logic to justify threatening North Korea and Iran. Dennis Byrne writing his throwaway garbage--I can’t even remember what his article was about. Timothy McNulty, the public editor, writing a piece whining that an article in the last Sunday Tribune was too critical of some rich people’s houses and that rich people deserve respect, too, as well as enormous amounts of money. Not a progressive voice to be seen: in short, the reason why I usually reserve the Chicago Tribune for cleaning up after my dog and little else.
I couldn’t help but notice the letters to the editor from some people who had clearly been listening to Lush Limbaugh and Orifice for years. They were responding to a piece a while ago in which some law professor defined what a “liberal” was and advocated the general precepts: tolerance for dissent, progressive social values, blah blah blah. This prompted quite a few moral cockroaches to come crawling into the public eye after the article had left and begin gnawing away at the thesis of the story with high-school jokes about liberals and mischaracterizations the likes of which usually come spilling out of Mark Levin’s mouth at 3 am when he’s a bottle of whiskey into his night:
A liberal is someone who wants to salve his guilt with your money.
-John Knoerle
Chicago
A liberal is someone who believes government is responsible for his well-being from birth to grave. A liberal believes he has no personal responsibility for his own welfare or actions.
-Michael Sheridan
Mokena
The left does not tolerate any dissent whatsoever…The left regards the United States as evil and hence unworthy of defense, which is why the left opposes the War on Terror…The defining characteristic of the left these days is intellectual dishonesty…
-Mark G. Arnold
St. Louis
A liberal is a person who is open minded but only to his way of thinking, and he thinks that anything goes as long as it benefits him.
-Rita Rucin
Oak Lawn
And so on. The intellectual equivalent of watching four people shit their pants and then crow about how sophisticated they are. Note John Knoerle’s 11th grade, nasty little sarcasm. Note Michael Sheridan’s ridiculous, Limbaugh-like mischaracterization of those liberals. Note Mark G. Arnold’s hysterical projection of the vices of the right onto the left. Note Rita’s inadvertent sarcasm (trust me, it was inadvertent. The rest of her letter is written at the level of an 8th grader).
These are the remaining 36% who still, after six years, give a thumbs up to Drinky, the worst president in history. These are the kind of voters who, no matter what the outcome of the mid-term elections this November, will end up sending most incumbents (and most republicans) back to office.
They deserve the worst president in history and the worst Congress in history. They deserve to live in a country where wealthy individuals shift the tax burden onto them, where their poor friends and relatives get ground into meat to serve Thurston Howell III’s dogs, where their sons and daughters are kept fighting foreign wars against their will, where the conservative religious leaders they love are dismissed as “nuts” by their leader’s chief advisor and then cynically used for the votes they can deliver, in short, they deserve to live in a country in which there is no law but the law of the jungle--a country that is despised.
Driftglass echoes my writing (or perhaps I echo his). As I excoriate these Sean Hannity fans, Drfitglass urges his readers to remember that America is worth fighting for. 58 percent of people in this country officially believe Preznit Drinky “purposely misled the public about evidence that Iraq had banned weapons in order to build support for war.” A similar majority believe that terror suspects should be given due process rights. Public opinion polls usually show, to the never-ending surprise of a pessimist like me, that the majority of the American public is very frequently right in its opinions on a host of issues from the Israeli-Palestinian problem to priorities for government spending.
Indeed Driftglass, there is hope. The GOP has written off Mike DeWine’s seat in Ohio. Bwahahahaha! Lights OUT, Mike!
Occasionally, David Brooks says something that reveals what a great love of democracy the Bush Administration really has…
Glenn Greenwald, brilliant as he is, finally realizes that GOP Congresspeople are all part of the same machine. God bless, Glenn.
These are just drops in the ocean, though. A lot of progress needs to be made in this United States. I think optimists should be cautious speaking of a nation that has just officially legalized torture. I think Driftglass should be realistic hoping for a nation that, even if the election this November goes the democrats’ way, will still be run by a criminal president and a cowed and bought democrat caucus in the Congress.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 11:43 AM 
