Oliver Willis went above and beyond in capturing the colorful mosaic that is Glenn Beck nation. I like this pic best:
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[…] This dude went galt. I didn’t realize John Galt was a champion wiener eating champion. We need them, too. Oliver Willis via Balloon Juice: […]
Laura W Darling
I do not care to see “mosaic” six short letters away from Beck’s name in a front page post, frankly.
With all due deference to BOB.
malraux
The most personally surprising element of the signs was the huge support of Fox. I can get, kinda sorta, most of the crazy on display. But support for a particular cable channel? I could understand support of Rush, Beck, or other talking head person. But not for an entire commercial venture. Something about that is very very wrong.
steve s
my favorite sign so far is the one that says “Lenin + Stalin + Hitler + Mao == Obama! Do the math America!”
How foolish. Everybody knows “(Lenin + Stalin + Hitler + Mao) / Ted Bundy == Obama” is the correct equation.
steve s
why did this tardware strip out my equals signs?
Left Coast Tom
When are they going to finally Go Galt? Are we supposed to pay them to do so?
I thought the “Where Is My White, Privilege Males At” sign had a certain…incoherence. His or her “white” appears to be doing just fine, judging from the hand holding the sign. His/her sole complaint seems to be that he/she can’t get privileged males.
MikeJ
WTF is that bee?
Incertus
So now what? What’s their next futile move?
Funkhauser
I gotta feel bad for OW – his comments are chock-full of the stupid.
Left Coast Tom
@steve s:
It went Galt. It tried to warn you, but you didn’t listen.
geg6
Meanwhile, Oprah is laughing her ass off at these dimwits. She can buy and sell them, every one of them, with not even a blip on her bottom line. Even funnier, she’s one of those uber innovators that Rand purports to celebrate and whaddaya know? Instead of being a selfish and greedy fuck, she chooses to do some good for society with her cash and power. I’m not a viewer of her show, but I admire her entrepreneurship and her soft use of her power.
Cat Lady
LOL. Each picture put together as a whole just make one big WTF? Another Exhibit A to the supposition that wingnut mythology is inscrutable and inexplicable to all but them. It sure is entertaining in the meantime, and now I haz a sad that there aren’t going to be death panels.
General Winfield Stuck
This struck me yesterday while checking out the wingnut signs. Especially on Oprah. I mean, she is about as non political a person as can be, though she did like Obama and campaigned some for him. For some obvious reasons.
And all the signs of a whole array of dem, or suspected dem boogymen caricatured as HItler was a little, or lot much. I get it about Obama and Biden and a few others, as some dems did the samewith the Hitler nonsense for Bush?Cheney. But it wasn’t for a couple of years and the underpinnings for the meme was torture, preventive, and ill thought out war, laced with lies and causing 100’s of thousands of innocent deaths.
Obama rescued the economy using some difficult but necessary powers that were begun by the GOP admin. and endorsed by about every leading economist left and right, at least in principle and necessity/ And now he’s trying to fix a broken HC system that most agree as needing fixing.
So the right disagrees with part of his plan,. but offers none of their own, and Obama IS HITLER!
Wonder what they’re really mad about?/snark
apistat
The thing that gets me here is that the people with the most extreme, ridiculous anti-Bush signs were almost always teenage to 20 something anarchist wannabe looking punks who will probably look back on that stuff in 5-10 years and embarrassingly chalk it up to youthful enthusiasm. These people, on the other hand, are grown ass adults in their 40s-60s. What’s their excuse for being this retarded and hyperbolic?
Cat Lady
@apistat:
What’s their excuse for being this retarded and hyperbolic?
I wonder that too, and can only think of one good reason.
steve s
“What’s their excuse for being this retarded and hyperbolic?”
that skinny left part of the bell curve is packed with tea baggers and young-earth creationists.
The Grand Panjandrum
OW got some good shots at the protest yesterday. But Tbogg wins the internets today:
That’s the caption below an old Fuck the Draft poster with the picture of a guy burning his draft card. Jesus, I will be laughing for the rest of the week over that one.
BDeevDad
And what’s the chance that these folks could not even dig the outhouse for their Galt dream world.
steve s
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_FdzzVlZj6so/SeojwGXhEPI/AAAAAAAAA6c/_6GPzR8gVOQ/s400/TeaBaggerLogic.jpg
SpotWeld
Not so much a mosaic as a Crazy Quit of pieced together bumper stickers and shredded logic.
Joshua
Wanna bet the dude in the Gone Galt shirt cashes his Social Security checks every month?
steve s
@Joshua:
IIRC that’s more or less why Whittaker Chambers told William F Buckley his conservative movement would fail in the end.
Bubblegum Tate
@Joshua:
I’d further bet that he wants to keep the government out of his Medicare.
steve s
I wonder what would happen if you went to one of these things with an american flag with Obama’s face glued to it, and set it on fire? Would they cheer, or attack you? I honestly don’t know.
Leelee for Obama
@The Grand Panjandrum: Took me awhile, your link sends you to the top of this post. However, it was worth it. Funny stuff. Go read it, everybody,and the poster about the draft is priceless.
Was listening to some caller on Wash Journal this AM, bitching about the raised taxes. He didn’t sound rich, so I assume he got a tax cut or at the least 250 bucks from the Stim. The only tax that went up that I know about is on cigarettes, and if I’m not bitching about it, why is anyone else? I don’t even own the pot I p___in. Wankers!
BDeevDad
The Obama Redskin’s jersey is particularly awesome as 44 was John Riggins’ number.
Incertus
@steve s: That’s a really good question. I’ve got enough wingnut Facebook friends that it might be worth a poll.
The Grand Panjandrum
@Leelee for Obama: Yikes! Thanks for the heads up.
@The Grand Panjandrum: Here’s the Tbogg link
steve s
It might be fun to imagine that you’re a tea bagger. What would your sign say? I think mine would say
“WHERE’S THE DRIVER’S LICENSE?” just to be kind of inscrutably nutty. Or I’d I’d just try to be shameful and my sign would say “Obama hates ‘real’ Americans” and ‘real’ would be conspicuously white. Maybe with some pictures of white people in case anyone missed it. And I would have a t-shirt that said “ME GO GALT!”
kay
@steve s:
Very, very funny. I just love the driver’s license idea.
Cat Lady
That Hoot-Smalley tag is perfect, innit. The one and only time I will ever thank Michelle Bachmann for her contribution to the discourse.
Davis X. Machina
We’re the Saudi Arabia of stupid. Half the world’s proven reserves, baby!
Betsy
@Left Coast Tom:
I think a lot of us can relate to that, amirite ladeez?
Morbo
50 bucks* to the first person to find a black person in those pictures.
*Not redeemable anywhere in this universe
Betsy
@Cat Lady:
I actually live in fear that seeing that tag so often will cause me one day, in front of students and/or faculty, to call it that. Because, as a reader of Balloon Juice, I see “Hoot-Smalley” far more often than references to Smoot-Hawley.
Cat Lady
@malraux:
Fox keeps them infromed.
FlipYrWhig
Isn’t the point of swapping a dollar sign for an S to make a derogatory comment about it? I’ve seen M$M, U$A, Bu$h, etc. So “Atla$ Shrugged” has to be anti-Randian. Maybe she’s accusing Oprah of being an objectivist?
Betsy
@Cat Lady:
That has to be photoshopped. It cannot be real. It is too perfect to be real. It’s like the “get a brain morans” sign.
kommrade reproductive vigor
So. Looks like you’re allowed to take breaks from Going Galt. ‘Cos I thought the whole point was to withdraw to one’s mountain top fastness and smoke cigarettes while the world fell apart without one’s guidance.
Perhaps these intellectual giants and captains of industry were giving us one last chance.
BDeevDad
@Cat Lady: Someone pointed out last night that the infromed are from Amercia.
TR
Wow, 30000 protestors. The 9/12 crowd has managed to match the protest numbers of a midwinter antiwar protest in Iowa City.
No wonder the liberal media put them on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Their numbers were so mighty than not even the liberal liberals of the liberal media could ignore their non-liberal power.
Matthew Hooper
Well, to at least attempt to be fair, it’s a rare thing when conservatives take to the streets like this. Hasn’t happened in oh, at least eight years or so.
Cat Lady
@Betsy:
That picture will explain the early part of the 21st century to future historians.
maya
And on the pedestal these words appear;
“My name is FOXimandias, look upon my walks ye mighty
and despair”.
Around the decay of that colossal dreck,
bagless and bare,
the long and level Pennsylvania Ave stretches far away.
joe from Lowell
OK, I’m not exactly David Axelrod or anything, but it seems to me that building a political movement on the strength of people who want to keep the government out of their Medicare isn’t a very wise long-term strategy.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Shit, that is easy to answer. They would cheerfully attack you!
dr. bloor
Is it really a “mosaic” if all the tiles are white?
Russ
Newshounds has a pretty good one too.
http://www.newshounds.us/2009/09/13/one_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_words.php#more
Cat Lady
@maya:
Apropos of this, I stole this post from an anonymous poster at the Hillman Foundation site and tucked it away:
I met a man beside the firewall Who said: two vast and empty halls of stone Stand in the city. Near them, on the mall, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, Truthiness of mouth, which to pow’r gave head, And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is WaPo, King of Mainstream Media: Look upon my works, ye Bloggers, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of those colossal wrecks, in troubled air The newsprint crumbles, rips, and blows away.
dmsilev
I like this one, dug up by the fine folks at LG&M.
It’s just wrong, on so many levels that it’s impressive.
-dms
Jamey
28:
Mine would say: “US out of NORTH AMERICA!!!!1”
Cat Lady
@dmsilev:
That’s really weird, but fairly well executed. Think about how many ways this went wrong before the final product was proudly displayed. If you can’t articulate a simple concept on a 2′ x 3′ piece of cardboard with paper, scissors, a Sharpie and a dictionary with several days of a head start, then you’re a moran.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@steve s: Greasy Forane Hands of Leshp!
The t-shirt would read “Amercia 1st!”
mutt
And if these self declared Galts WERE to remove themselves, who would miss them?
Like the Crapture moonbats- wouldnt we have a nicer country without them?
Go, Galt, GO!!!! Skedaddle. Step off. You are an albatross of Stupid around the country’s neck.
Betsy
@mutt:
I know! They keep promising…
Gwangung
these folks are overly impressed with their numbers. They seem to think they’re hot stuff and disdainful of the antiwar numbers.
Cognitive dissonance.
Davis X. Machina
It’s a bathroom floor.
Onihanzo
The Go-Galt/Randroids and the pro-lifers might need to sit down for a minute.
-The Objectivist
And 30,000 heads exploded.
someguy
You people are being waaaay too tough on the teabaggers. C’mon. They were really impressive, considering the material they started with.
For one thing, they didn’t lynch any negroes yesterday. For another thing, they didn’t chase the Jews and Papists out of town. For another… well, I’m sure there’s something else praiseworthy about their 3000 Man March.
General Winfield Stuck
@Onihanzo:
Stop it now before you make baby jeebus cry and then go off on librards.
cleek
@Cat Lady:
and look right behind that one: “Deficit neutral is psyhco talk” !
WTF?
Onihanzo
@General Winfield Stuck:
Ahem.
kommrade reproductive vigor
No discussion of Galting is complete without Bob (not BOB).
Bumper crop of Randroid mocking here.
@Betsy:
They are like a little kid who is threatening to run away. And like a little kid, if they ever stop telling us how sorry we’ll be and actually GtFo, they’ll be back the minute they get hungry.
Donald G
What would Atlas do? She’d show us her juggs.
Sorry, ladies, sorry, but ever since someone on Balloon Juice referred to Pamela Geller as “Atlas Juggs” in a comment, the appellation has stuck in my mind. And I’m not one who’s normally fixated on the mammaries.
Donald G
@kommrade reproductive vigor: To the Galters: How can we miss you if you never actually go away?
bellatrys
The depressing thing to me is that all the 9/12ers-FOXfans-Beckists I know are pretty well to do. Not in the upper 5%, and not all of them in the 10% but a good number of them, and the rest are at least property owners.
They are for the most part (not all, mind you) still essentially illiterate, even if they own businesses and multiple houses, and this includes the college grads – one wingnut family I worked for used to regularly insist that wrong punctuation in their publications HAD to be right because “it looked right to them” and so they made us in the production dept print things wrong in order to conform to their unique vision of how the rules of English punctuation went (and not in a jokey, LOL-cat way.) All of them went to college, and half of them couldn’t spell the brand names in the product lines they marketed, even when said brands were 4 letters long.
(The head of that business was also convinced that science fiction was somehow Satanic and dangerous to my soul. Not fantasy, mind you, which would be marginally more comprehensible involving as it does *dragons* and *magic*: a totally “hard” sf novel about rocketships and particles.) My current wingnut boss is convinced that FOX is the only TV outfit that “tells the truth” and can’t spell worth a damn – yet somehow has an MBA.
(It was very depressing when I realized that all the asshole bosses I had had, and all the asshole customers, who were all so much wealthier than I will ever be (unless Fortuna takes a hand in my fate) were also all paraliterates who did not have any intellectual curiosity or even much common sense, but were very arrogant, pushy, and good at snow jobbing other people out of their money – so much for all that expensive coursework and that Magna Cum Laude, suckAR!)
But – stupid, greedy, moderately-rich people engaged in mutual cheerleading (or circle jerks) dedicated to the protection of their pride and their property – this is the teabag contingent, at least up here in the Northeast.
Dan
I’ve seen lots of pictures, most of them some flavor of crazy. In the credit where credit is due department I must say this one made me laugh. And yes I got it from No Quarter.
gbear
@Morbo:
OMG. If you follow @Russ: link and go back about a half dozen pictures, there is a photo of a <a href=”http://picasaweb.google.com/AUAndi/912Protest#slideshow/5380668551902060386″teabagger of color. This guy must live a very sad life.
Can I have my $50 now. I owe a friend $10 for a church-basement turkey dinner earlier today.
gbear
the words in between ‘a’ and the period should be ‘person of color’. I miss edit.
Mnemosyne
@Cat Lady:
Wow. That is seriously impressive.
steve s
“To the Galters: How can we miss you if you never actually go away?”
Maybe there are no banks in Galt’s Gulch where they can cash their gummint checks.
shoutingattherain
@dmsilev:
Funny picture. The catagory which it is in at LGM is funny too:
Labels: i can’t believe it’s not self-parody, IT’S HARD TO THINK STRAIGHT WITH A TEABAG ON YOUR CHIN, wingnut silliness
Joel
In other words, Nate Silver is concern trolling re: these douchebags. Too bad, I thought Nate was a bit smarter than that.
b-psycho
“Psst…hey you, the teabagger with the sign referencing Atlas Shrugged: y’know Ayn Rand was an atheist, right?”
These people have the accuracy of a pack of blind monkeys on shrooms. Citing objectivism, the constitution and the bible when each disagrees with the other strongly, calling their opponents both fascists and soshulists when the two are in opposition…almost makes you grudgingly respect the open bigots in the crowd for getting to the point, doesn’t it?
Zuzu's Petals
@dmsilev:
The guy who took it has a really impressive collection on Flickr.
The best part is the comments, though. BJ quality in fact.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Talk about a good joke on the crowd numbers at the “event”. Someone pulled a good one and the Galtians fell for it.
Mike
what’s with using the word retarded? still stuck in 7th grade.
slippy
It was just recently that I discovered, from a footnote I think, what one of the main premises of Ayn Rand’s work was: the stumble-fuck stupid notion that the “leaders” of our society would pack up and just stop doing their sacred leadery thing, and leave the rest of us “looters” flapping helplessly like dying fish should we fail to reward them fulsomely enough.
I look around at the tiny head of the social pyramid in America, and how many of these people are little more than frauds, phonies, thieves, and liars. At the dawn of the 21st century, most wealthy Americans’ stash is inherited or stolen. And the notion that they’re going to go “Galt” on us just cracks me up. GO AHEAD PEOPLE. DO IT! WE WON’T FUCKING MISS YOU.
I think the aspect of Randian idiocy that cracks me up most is the air of superiority these folks assume. As if there were no other talented or intelligent folks waiting for an opportunity. And as if our social hierarchy never denied anyone anything, ever.
Give me a fucking break. And libertarians wonder why I can barely engage them in conversation — I’m doubled over laughing at their fucking stupid ideas.
liberal
@General Winfield Stuck:
While the stimulus was a good thing, Obama’s continuing of the Bush administration’s giveaway to Wall Street and its bondholders was not. Nor was it necessary to rescue the economy.
Flugelhorn
@Mike: You will find that to be the case with many of the posters in this arena.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Mike:
If you have to use it then you must be. I know people who are “retarded”, one who was related and passed away due to complications from her disability, and they are much better people than those who are frequently referred to as “retarded”.
Those people are really just simpleminded, ignorant fuckwits. Calling them retarded is an insult to developmentally disabled people.
General Winfield Stuck
@liberal:
That’s your opinion liberal. I don’t like what was done with all the bailouts, especially at first. I changed my mind on the need for it, and agree it was necessary, though not enthusiastically, and not always how it was done.
But you should take heart. The teabaggers agree with you 100 percent.
Leelee for Obama
I’m watching CNN, and they have some film from the tea-partiers, of course. Some guy just said the Gov is taxing us into Bolivian. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I didn’t look at all the pictures, so I know I’ve missed some of the best signage, but I thought this was worth mentioning.
Carry on.
Brachiator
@Leelee for Obama:
I guess this means that “real” American women will all soon get some cool “Bolivian” hats.
http://ngm.typepad.com/pop_omnivore/2008/10/hats-on-for-bol.html
Steaming Pile
I gotta wonder, how does a dimwit go Galt? Does that mean he’s going to give up his highly skilled job as a…a…whatever it is he does and do…what, exactly? I wonder if the person with the “hey Oprah” sign has ever read any of Ayn Rand’s rantings. I hear they’re kind of a heavy lift for a mental lightweight.
Steaming Pile
@Joshua: Naah, he doesn’t look old enough to be on Social Security, but I bet he factors it in when looking at his retirement plan.
Steaming Pile
@Onihanzo: Is that an actual Ayn Rand quote? I love it!
Brachiator
@Onihanzo:
Thanks much for the link to the Rand Lexicon. So much fun stuff there.
Ayn Rand on Christianity…
Ayn Rand on The Feminine
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/femininity.html
I seriously doubt that the wingnuts and tea baggers could ever measure up to Rand’s … standards.
JustMe
That’s actually not such a bad sign. Pretty coherent, simple message, the spelling is correct, and the color scheme is creative.