After inflicting Sully’s Tory fantasies on you, I thought a more accurate description of tea baggerism might be in order, from Glenn Greenwald:
What’s really happening with these protests is that the genuine rage and not unreasonable economic insecurity of these citizens is being stoked, exploited, distorted and manipulated by movement leaders for entirely different ends. The people who are leading them — Rush Limbaugh, the Murdoch-owned Fox News, Glenn Beck, business-dominated organizations of the type led by Dick Armey — are cultural warriors above everything else. They’re all in a far different socioeconomic position than the “middle-income Americans” whose anger they’re ostensibly representing. Their principal preoccupation is their cultural contempt for various groups (illegal immigrants, the “undeserving” poor, liberals) and their desire to preserve the status quo whereby the prime beneficiaries of government policies remain themselves: the super rich and the interests that control Washington. It’s certainly true that many of these protesters are driven by the standard right-wing cultural issues which have long shaped that movement — social issues, religious fears, cultural and racial divisions, and hatred for “liberals” as Communist-Muslim-Terrorist-lovers. For many, all of that is intensified by the humiliation of being completely thrown out of power, at the hands of the first black President. But much of it is fueled by the pillaging of the corporations and Wall St. interests which own their government.
As Taibbi notes (Glenn quotes this too), there’s nothing unusual about this:
Actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish . . . can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff.
I realize that we’ve probably quoted the paragraph above many times before here. But I like it.
Napoleon
I was thinking as was driving in to work this morning that as much fun is made of the winger teabagger types on left leaning blogs the contempt we feel for those people likely pales in comparison to the contempt people like Dick Armey, Newt, Jim Demint and the whole right wing crew feel for them.
Zifnab
Pro-tip: If you have an entire national news network pulling for you, and your cultural hero is a guy with his own prime time television show, you may not be what is traditionally defined as “Grass Roots”.
pablo
Gop Racist? Pope Catholic?
What they are saying is, “he’s not “OUR”>President”!
Tax Analyst
Not much to say really, except, “Yup”.
The Grand Panjandrum
Atrios added a nice addendum to Greenwald’s piece.
Tom Q
I’m actually just reading The Name of the Rose right now, and there’s a section in there, dealing with peasant discontent in the 14th century, that makes roughly the same point — “If your enemies are too powerful, find a different set of enemies easier to confront”
SenyorDave
I was thinking as was driving in to work this morning that as much fun is made of the winger teabagger types on left leaning blogs the contempt we feel for those people likely pales in comparison to the contempt people like Dick Armey, Newt, Jim Demint and the whole right wing crew feel for them.
Napoleon,
Bulls-eye!
I remember reading something about Pat Buchanan years ago when he ran for president. It was by a liberal columnist who knew Pat pretty well, and said it was ironic that Pat was running as a populist, a “man of the people”. He said there was nobody who was less a man of the people than Pat Buchanan. Apparently, when Pat travels, he travels luxury-class all the way. He socialized at that time with all the Washington elites. The idea of mingling with the riff-raff was totally foreign to him, but of course he was a populist who had his finger on the pulse of the working man.
The idea of Newt or Armey of Dicks identifying with ordinary scmhoes is laughable, although both those guys make a mint pretending that they care about them.
Bill E Pilgrim
That Matt Taibbi quote is a winner, it’s stayed with me ever since he wrote it.
It’s so frustrating watching this stuff mainly because you just know that it’s not about anything except misdirected stirred up outrage and confusion about who to aim it at.
Get pissed off at corporations for taking your massive insurance premiums and then abandoning you like an old rolled up rug the moment that you need the coverage they promised– be pissed off at that, and I’ll be right there with you protesting.
Instead they’re being duped into protesting against anyone who wants to put any limits on the corporations ability to bleed them dry.
It’s like the GOP has special tickets to Bizarro World and they go there and take lessons. Or notes.
Napoleon
@The Grand Panjandrum:
It has long just drove me nuts that the average Democratic officeholder/policy maker/stratagist does not understand that. Atrios’ point seems to me to have been so self evident, and has been for years, that it is amazing that any substantial portion of our political elite don’t understand it (and that entire portion of the elite just happens to be Dems, I think the Reps have for years understood that, which is why you get the means testing and the like).
Brachiator
OT but On Target. A federal judge spanks everybody over Merrill Lynch Bonuses (“Judge Rejects Settlement Over Merrill Bonuses”)/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/business/15bank.html?_r=1&hp
Right Wing Extreme
“Napoleon
I was thinking as was driving in to work this morning that as much fun is made of the winger teabagger types on left leaning blogs the contempt we feel for those people likely pales in comparison to the contempt people like Dick Armey, Newt, Jim Demint and the whole right wing crew feel for them.”
Napoleon, which is still nothing compared to the contempt we feel for you guys.
Bill E Pilgrim
Interesting background piece on where Taibbi gets some of that insight, an excerpt:
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/bullpen/matt_taibbi/backgrounder/
Sly
Social capital, I think, has been the animating principle of power relationships since the dawn of human society. The group in control wants to maintain their position, so the enlist the aid of collaborators among the out-group to put down any challengers to their authority.
In Europe this relationship has traditionally been felt in terms of class. In America, its been race. The Slavs, Poles, Finns, Germans, and Italians were never even considered white until blacks began escaping their chains en masse and started migrating northward. Then the WASPs, the traditional “Free White Men,” started drawing European immigrants into their fold, and many of the immigrants were all to happy to dance around in black face or go on lynching campaigns to please their social betters and ensure the power structure remained effectively unchanged until the 1960s.
Ash Can
In the previous thread, Original Lee posted a link to an even more damning — and deeply disturbing — assessment of the teabaggers, written by deprogrammed fundie Frank Schaeffer and published in today’s Huffington Post. He argues, in short, that there’s simply no reasoning with these people — they’ve grown up warped and abused in communities that have prevented them from having any of the contact with the real world that the rest of us take for granted, and now, as Americans technically but not philosophically, they’re free to move about and organize within the country in their efforts to overthrow the American system and replace it with a theocracy (one that reflects their own narrow and psychologically damaged world view, yet). I highly recommend reading it.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@Right Wing Extreme:
Dude, your irony detector needs to be calibrated. Did you read the Taibbi piece? Did you comprehend it?
Xenos
@Right Wing Extreme: A phrase i would like you to keep in mind over the next seven years:
Suck. On. This.
The Bearded Blogger
@ Sly
That’s a very enlightening comment. I just finished La Boetie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, and the argument fits like a glove. The reason people accept slavery is to enslave others.
Btw, pink elephants like Sullivan come off as those kids that are not in the “in” crowd but hover around it, desperately waiting for the come on in.
Corner Stone
@Ash Can: There can be only one solution:
Straight Up Death Panels!
protected static
@Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon): Oh, he read it all right. And, based upon his blog, meant it entirely.
theblackcommenter
Wow that description sounds just like all the liberals I know.
The Bearded Blogger
@14 The worst part is that their sick mindset is being actively promoted by the right wing media. Of all the dirty tricks they pull, making people sick with hatred is the worst…
Have you read The Authoritarians?
Napoleon
@Right Wing Extreme:
And nothing compared to the fact I think your type are nothing but the scum of the earth. Have fun rotting in hell, once you get there.
Sly
@The Bearded Blogger
Try “Whiteness of a Different Color” by Matthew Jacobson after you’re done with La Boetie.
It’s a moderately difficult read, because Jacobson is a historian and, like all good historians, he writes for an audience of other historians. But if you’re looking for the one book that completely deconstructs the racial hierarchy in America from founding until now, you probably won’t find anything better.
Cyrus
<blockquote.And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish . . . can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires.
In fairness to the right-wing assholes, I didn’t see anyone protesting in favor of AIG bonuses on Saturday. Maybe they were back in April, or maybe Taibbi would argue that some other line of complaint really amounts to a pro-bonus argument, but protesters seemed to take a nuance-free stance against the whole bailout deal, strings attached and all. (Never mind that it was started by Bush…)
Keith G
@DougJ “It’s a classic peasant mentality”
I somewhat disagree. We in the US are screwed because we were never really peasants. If you looks at what happened in many European societies, the working classes had to ban together despite individual group differences in order to combat ”the man”.
The aristocracy, the landlord class, was truly the enemy and the proles had to stick together.
Here, fed by the mythology of the American dream, the groups of workers are led to fight one another to have access to the master’s table so we can collect the scraps and maybe be invited to a stool beside the table.
If we were truly peasants, we would have rebelled by now and collected some surprised heads.
The Grand Panjandrum
Shorter Right Wing Extremist: A whiter shade of fail, bitches!
Sly
Where conservatives fall on “bailouts” will be predominantly influenced on where they draw the dividing line on their whole “no free rides!!!1!” mentality. Even the standard crazy has its nuances.
They don’t want anyone benefiting from their tax contributions at all, but will often make concessions for big business if they think it’ll make prices lower. It is noteworthy that the entirety of the “no bailouts for bonuses” argument is coming entirely from the left-of-center, but distortions about union wages at auto plants is coming entirely from the right.
In other words, their mantra is that workers can generally fuck off, but pretty please don’t harm the people who pay them.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Keith G:
Yeah but certain people are. That’s what all of that going on about “The Lord” is all about, it’s exactly where that comes from, it’s a feudal holdover.
Ed in NJ
What we are seeing right now is the large-scale equivalent of the teabaggers’ wives leaving them for a black guy.
gwangung
Is anyone surprised? In any pro sports labor disputes, it’s the owners who get most of the favorable press, not the players.
Sly
@Keith G
Oh, America did have its aristocracy at the beginning. But American nobility had the advantage of living in a nation that would see a massive influx of immigrants. These immigrants were initially spurned as not having the capacity for self-government, but were gradually co-opted by the landlord class (who were almost exclusively White Anglo-Saxon Protestants).
You can see this plainly in the evolution of our naturalization laws. In the late 18th century, citizenship was relegated only to landholding white males, whether born or naturalized. Then the property requirement was dropped, but the race/gender screen remained. In the mid 19th century, the race category was broadened to include immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (and Ireland). Persons of African decent were added in the 1870s, but laws still explicitly excluded the Chinese and implicitly excluded people from South and South East Asia (India, Afghanistan, Japan, etc).
It’s important to remember that, unlike societies with explicit class hierarchies such as England, America essentially had a class hierarchy that pivoted around categories of race and that these categories, despite modern sentiment, were very flexible. While, say, a Jewish man today could easily refer to himself as “white”, that was simply not the case a century ago. The same is true for Irish and Italians of a century and a half ago, which seems completely odd to modern Americans, but is backed by the historical record.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@Cyrus:
Nor did you see anyone that appeared to take even the slightest responsibility for the GW Bush 8-Year Clusterfuck. Somehow, the Magic Negro is responsible for it all.
The Bearded Blogger
@Sly, 32
It’s funny. In countries like Colombia or Venezuela, you are blanco unless you are above a certain threshold of blackness, then you are negro. In the US, any kind of brownness makes you black…
Brachiator
@Sly:
This is caste, not class.
And even England had a bit of this, in that Catholic Irish were a caste who were by law denied privileges that even a lower class Englishman could claim. And this is before you considered imperialism.
In addition, racial categories were not very flexible with respect to blacks or Asians or even, in some times and places, with respect to Jews and the Irish.
ChrisS
@Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon):
Well, the thing is, is that it’s a natural business cycle and Bush had nothing to do with that. In fact, if it weren’t for Bush’s economic policies, the Clinton Collapse would have been longer and more damaging. Additionally, if the pantywaists in Congress would just let the US Military do it’s job in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war would be over and peace would bloom.
Again, Bush didn’t do anything wrong. He was the most courageous president in 150 years to knock back the creep of the socialist nanny state. Obama, on the other hand, is actively legislating the intrusion of government into a market and growing the size and scope of government when we least need additional government spending. Besides that, he’s a fucking liberal and they hate guns and Jesus. And he’s racist.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to work and earn my $35k/year, unlike you rich snobby elites.
/rightwinger.
LD50
@Right Wing Extreme: Thank god, if you assholes approved of *me*, I’d know I’d REALLY fucked up.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Sly: Also there’s the simple fact that the US is populated by a lot of immigrants from Europe who were from those old world peasant-Lord societies, not only at the start, but who kept coming right up to the 20th century and beyond.
Being the offspring of Irish immigrants I can tell you certain aspects of it were alive and well, hermetically sealed and delivered right into our society, as it were.
LD50
@theblackcommenter: Uh oh, looks like “Right Wing Extreme” is getting frisky with the sockpuppets.
Thoughtcrime
I think these are on topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvKIWjnEPNY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjz16xjeBAA
Michael
In other fun knews, a Citadel knob gets in a “Is Obama a liar” dig.
http://www.theitem.com/article/20090914/APNEWS01/709149918
“I’m just a knob and as a knob, I don’t understand anything,” said one freshman cadet wearing the short haircut given to all incoming students so their heads resemble door knobs. “Is Obama a liar, sir?”
“No. I don’t believe it’s appropriate to use that kind of language,” McCain said to applause from the crowd. “I do not disparage the character and integrity of any of my opponents in this debate.”
Its a shame that Sherman didn’t have thermonuclear weapons in his Carolina campaign – we might have been spared a lot of the stupid emanations from America’s largest trailer park and klavern.
Sly
@The Bearded Blogger
A lot of that has to do with what standpoint a culture is operating from in terms of what group is “in” and what group is “out”.
I’m admittedly a lot less familiar with Central and South American culture as it pertains to matters of race, only that I suspect it was largely influenced by existing tribalism and Spain’s success at supplanting the major empires in the regions (Aztecs, Incas) as the major locus of power. Spain had driven out the Moors fifty years or so before the Aztecs fell, and much of their assimilation efforts toward Spanish Muslims was based on racial homogeneity. It seems reasonable that they would bring this mentality to the Americas, but is just an assumption.
Ash Can
@Michael: I’d like to think that the dean, or The Citadel’s equivalent thereof, took this “knob” aside afterward and said, “Son, if you think it was appropriate to speak in public about your Commander in Chief in this manner, perhaps you should consider other educational and career options.”
Right Wing Extreme
@ Montysano
Probably, had a late night a work earning money to give welfare to illegals and slackers,so not at me sharpest this morning.
@ Xenos
Your a neo-lib, we all know that means what you have to suck on is not even a nibble.
@ protected static
Thanks for reading. I do have a few lib friends and family. we do our best to either discuss other topics or at least remain respectful.
@ Napoleon
By and large think the same about you guys, but you will probably arrive first so save me a seat.
@ LD50
I on occasion, rarely, agree with libs on some topics, though not many. So don’t be surprised I occasionally approve of something you say. I would not neccessarily agree that agreement would mean failure on your part. As for the sock puppets, well I am to busy supporting the welfare class to play with toys. Usually don’t have much time to play with my kids, though I make the effort. Between raising my brood, work and my ginormous honey-do list, no time for toys of my own.
LD50
@Right Wing Extreme: Dude, if you put up some candidates who were a bit less loathsome and if you didn’t spend 8 years kissing the ass of a president who was fucking up the country so thoroughly and lying about it the whole time, maybe, just maybe most Americans might not hate you guys so much and you might start winning elections again? Wouldn’t that make you a *less bitter* person?
LD50
Dude, are you badmouthing the military again?
The hell you say.
LD50
@Right Wing Extreme: You guys want to run the country and the best you can come up with is “I know you are but what am I?”
Michael
@Ash Can
You kidding? In a normal place, he’d be quietly advised that he’ll never get a commission. At the Citadel, they’ve probably fast tracked him to run the Cadet Regiment, and may have him “guest lead” them as a knob.
There’s a long tradition of coddling secessionist, racist, servant diddling little shits there.
Leelee for Obama
What I found interesting about Shaefer’s article was the comment that the tea-baggers are like our very own Taliban. Taibangelists, was used. I read that term a couple years ago, so it’s not even shocking to me anymore. These home-schoolers have scared me for quite awhile. I’ve met one or two in the course of daily life, and they really do think the way Shaefer describes. I was in a home -school classroom once and saw the opening pledge(s) on the wall. Part of it says, I pledge allegiance to the Christian Flag. I never took another stamping class with her, I was too unnerved. White flight schools were pretty rare in NY, but my Sis lives in OK, and she would point them out when I visited. The home-school movement gave birth to George Mason University, and some of those kids were shown in a History Channel documentary a few years ago. One of them declared that property taxes were un-Christian and un-biblical, and there wasn’t a lick of doubt in his mind. Guess render onto Caesar isn’t in his version of the Bible? The scary thing is, some of them are the ones we saw, who seem to find spelling impossible. But, these George Mason kids are bright, and they are training for jobs in Government. To take back America for Christ. Like Monica Goodling et al from Pat Robertson’s diploma mill?…Frank’s right, they don’t play by our rules, at all.
Leelee for Obama
The strike-outs are a mistake, don’t know what I did!
Brachiator
@Sly:
Back in 2004, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a great exhibition of Mexican “casta” (caste) painting from 18th century Mexico, which demonstrated that race in Spanish (and Portuguese) America was, and still is, more complicated than most people in the United States recognize. From a blog notation of the exhibition:
http://www.studio-international.co.uk/painting/inventing_race.asp
To follow are just a selection of the accompanying text.
From Spaniard and Black, a Mulato is born.
From Spaniard and Mulato, a Morisco is born.
From Spaniard and Indian, a Mestizo is born, generally humble, quiet and unassuming.
Mulato and Indian make a Calpamulato, of impulsive temper, strong and stocky.
From Indian and Calpamulato a Jibaro is born, usually restless and always arrogant.
From Spaniard and Mestizo, their fondness of horses is passed to a Castizo.
From Castizo and Spaniard, a Spaniard is born.
From Spaniard and Morisca, an Albino is born, nearsighted, weak, gentle and benign
From Spaniard and Castiza, the beautiful result resembles her father in every way.
Stefan
What I found interesting about Shaefer’s article was the comment that the tea-baggers are like our very own Taliban. Taibangelists, was used.
I prefer Genitaliban, myself.
rs
@Right Wing Extreme: And that’s how we’re different. Even though you useful idiots make our job harder, we don’t hate you – we feel sorry for you.
Joshua
@gwangung: Yea, the way the media treats sports labor disputes is quite simply embarrassing.
This is especially evident now with the NFL’s labor problems brewing. On TV its all “the rookies need a pay scale, they shouldn’t be paid till they earn it” (yea, like the veterans will get any of that money), or “the players need to accept reality, they are doing really well” (yea, the reality that NFL franchises are worth 10 times more than they were in 1999 and NFL players have worse pay and less protection for a shorter career in a more dangerous sport), or the ESPN talking heads falling over themselves to praise big daddy Goodell for breathing.
Yet it’s always the union that takes the hit. People back the owners unequivocally, even as ticket prices go up, as teams implement draconian PSL systems, as teams threaten blackouts and demand public funding for stadiums, and so forth. It’s weird but I guess that’s the whole point of this thread.
Right Wing Extreme
@all
If you think any pol, on either side, looks at us, the little people, with anything except contempt, then you are fooling yourself.
@ LD50
“if you put up some candidates who were a bit less loathsome”
See I told you guys we occasionally agree on something.
“if you didn’t spend 8 years kissing the ass of a president”
I didn’t. I am originally from TX and I thought that overall Bush was a much better governor than a president.
“lying about it”
If it is about WMDs, then show proof he was lying an not mistaken. As for other things, he sometimes did, and sometimes it was just an accusation. I didn’t blog then , but I would have called him on it. I did speak out against somethings he did to the people I talked with. No one is perfect. You support the good things and call them on the bad. It is the job of the people to keep the politicians honest, because god knows they won’t do it for themselves.
“maybe, just maybe most Americans might not hate you guys so much and you might start winning elections again?”
This is your sides opinion. If you look at the polls, for what they are worth, both sides are outnumbered by the unaffiliated middle. However, those same polls, again for what they are worth, say that affiliated or not, not Americans identify with a more conservative view. As for being hated and winning elections, I am more concerned with issues and couldn’t care less if some one hates me. Wouldn’t be the first, won’t be the last.
“Wouldn’t that make you a less bitter person?”
By and large I am not bitter.
“Dude, are you badmouthing the military again?”
Wasn’t, but since you bring it up, I served, and can say that overall a bigger bunch of slackers you would be hard pressed to find. Granted that because at anytime they could be called off to die, I say it is a soldier’s (enlisted anyway) duty to slack as much as he can get away with. That is why we have Sergeants, to keep the lower ranks from doing to much of it.
“so not at me sharpest this morning
The hell you say.”
Save me from my own spelling errors. :)
“You guys want to run the country and the best you can come up with is “I know you are but what am I?” ”
It is funny, but much in politics seems to come down to, “I know you are but what am I?” no matter which side they are on. Personally I do not want to run anything besides my family, but it would be nice if things were a little better for everyone, and all them damn pols had to be held to the same standards as the rest of us.
Zifnab
@Joshua:
The team is highly visible. The owners are not. I’ll be that for every ten people that know the Cowboy’s quarterback, one knows the current ownership.
And while ticket prices tend towards the outrageous, you see it more among the scalpers than the stadiums themselves. Minute Maid park will sell you tickets for $7 in the nosebleeds. But if a game sells out, the cheapest seats won’t go for less than three figures on Stub Hub or the like.
The public relations are non-existent with the players unions. No one understands why a pro athlete should make six figures, much less seven or eight.
Right Wing Extreme
@ rs
By and large we feel the same about you, but I have more class, usually, than to quote Lenin or to call you an idiot useful or otherwise.
Xenos
@Right Wing Extreme: Indeed. It was very tacky of me to get so Friedmanish there.
Contempt is poisonous. It has poisoned a great deal of discourse in this country.
oliver's neck
For an historical exploration of Greenwald’s thesis that
, please see Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”.
Zifnab
@Right Wing Extreme:
As a fellow Texas resident, I would kinda request you stop here before you get yourself hurt. Bush was as crappy a governor as he was a President. But since the House Speaker wields the lion’s share of power, all he could do was play Yes Man to the legislature.
That’s really not hard to do. Go back over his previous speeches. He says, definitively, that Iraq has a nuclear weapons program. Cheney’s little independent research group put together the UN presentation Collin Powell gave, highlighting aluminum tubes and mobile weapons labs.
You don’t march 150k into Iraq stating a clear and present danger of WMDs being handed out to Al Qaeda terrorist cells and follow up with the “Whoops! My mistake!” card.
He stated a certainty and trotted out “proof” after “proof”. And when the tanks rolled into Bagdad, his administration made more fallacious claims that WMDs had been moved to Syria and Iran, after he could produce the weapons he insisted Saddam had.
Or, if you prefer, ask yourself this question really fast. Did Clinton lie about sex? Or were we just mistaken about what Bush’s definition of “is” was?
freelancer
@Joshua:
I remember a similar amount of bitching when the voice-actors on the Simpsons held out for better pay.
“These actors make tons of money. They should just shut up and be grateful.”
“The Simpsons is Fox’s flagship Sunday Show. It attracts BILLIONS of dollars in ad revenue. The fact that the people responsible for the show and its continuing creativity aren’t also benefitting from its huge financial gains is fucked up.”
*****
Put another way, is there anything in the world that can’t be explained by The Wire?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyg_v7Vxo4A
“D’ANGELO: And the nigga that invented them things still working in the basement for a regular wage thinking of a way to make the fries taste better or some shit like that. Believe”
General Winfield Stuck
@Right Wing Extreme:
I just love these guys. They have a brand new Clown Car that runs on Hi Po loi pox on all their houses. Up until 2006, it was Bush the Great, but he lost them control of government, and now the failthful troll the ethers for salvation thru selective amnesia. You carry on RWE, maybe the next Ronnie Raygun slipped thru our curtain of mass wingnut abortion to nip that seed in the bud.
Brachiator
@Joshua:
Sports fans are authoritarian, which appears to side with owners. Fans just want to see players compete. And they would greatly prefer it if their favorite players never change teams (here some fans just can’t deal with free agency).
Fans also have some internal calculator by which they measure player salaries. Usually, they can understand that players make huge gobs of money, but their internal calculator got upset when A-Rod was getting more than some fans thought “necessary” after his big contract.
On the other hand, fans want owners to spend whatever is necessary to keep a player they like and assume that no owner ever has any money problems.
Fans also have a totally unrealistic understanding of the relative worth of owners and athletes. Whenever I tell people that there are no athletes among Forbes 400 Richest Americans, they don’t believe me, or think that only a few dollars separates the richest athlete and someone whose net worth is pushing a billion dollars. And the minimum buy-in for the last Forbes 400 was $1.3 billion.
Right Wing Extreme
@ Xenos
You are right about contempt. We do not have to agree to get things done, and contempt is the road to tyranny. One side wants something, the other won’t budge, so the side with the desire forces the issue and gets what they want. Wait a few years and the same thing happens by the other group. I guess what I am saying it, apology accepted and offer my own for the nibble nonsense.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@Right Wing Extreme: Quit feeding this worthless troll. Taking a look at his web site, we see Nazi symbols and fascist artwork associated with Obama, but we’re also told “they really are communists”. In sum: just more brainless wingnut fuckery.
rs
@Right Wing Extreme:@Right Wing Extreme: Those with class generally don’t describe themselves as having it, particularly after walking into a room and broadcasting your hatred for everyone else in it.
srv
@Zifnab:
May Bob Bullock burn in hell.
General Winfield Stuck
@Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon):
I noticed that too.
theblackcommenter
I have no idea who this “Right Wing Extreme” person is… but you guys are out to lunch if you think that it is conservatives who are enslaved in some way to corporate overlords.
oliver's neck
So, who keeps dropping all the troll bait? Wyatt? Seriously, we’re trying to impress girls here!
Midnight Marauder
@Right Wing Extreme:
“if you didn’t spend 8 years kissing the ass of a president”
I didn’t. I am originally from TX and I thought that overall Bush was a much better governor than a president.
HAHAHAHAHAHA. Wow…wow. That is either some brilliant performance art or intellectually dishonest to no end. And I say that as someone born and raised in Texas.
This is the thing people always forget about Bush. Every shitty thing he did to the United States over the past 8 years, he was doing in Texas for 6 years prior to that. Think of how fucked America is right now (and I wish I could find a link to that study that just came out using the census to show that by every measurable objective, Bush’s economic legacy is an epic failure. There was no growth whatsoever. It’s basically a lost decade) and remember that Texas is at the very least 6 years ahead in terms of Epic Failure.
Not to mention that Governor Good Hair was Bush’s right hand man during all that time, so that’s a double-whammy for the great Republic. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
The only thing deep in the heart of Texas is a fucking moron.
Steeplejack
@Leelee for Obama:
The home school movement gave birth to George Mason University [. . .]
I don’t think you are right about that. George Mason was founded in 1957 and is a public (state-run) university in Virginia. (Reference here.)
Could you be thinking of another school? [cough] Liberty! [cough]
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@theblackcommenter: Blackcommenter thinks Say-ruh is teh awesome intellectual.
Right Wing Extreme
@rs
Fair enough if not always true. Hate and contempt are not always interchangeable. I, perhaps, should have been more clear. I have contempt for kool-aid drinkers, whether it is blue or red. I do not come here only to stir the pot. I have even agreed with JC once or twice. I come to see what the other side thinks, and occasionally throw in my two cents. i think for myself, and agreeing with one side or the other does not make me da disciple. I generally do not agree with libs, and I really do not like the current administration. I think they have shown a very disturbing parity with both standard communism as well as national socialism. As for the Nazi and fascist symbols in relation to the current president, that is far from all that is on my site. Additionally it shows Montysano’s fixation. It was tongue in cheek. It may have been in poor taste, though I do not think so, but it was meant as parody. Read the whole site rather than focusing on one thing.
Leelee for Obama
@Steeplejack: No, I’m pretty sure, but I’ll check. Is there a Patrick Henry University? This school was named after someone famously home-schooled-and the gist was that they cater to the home-schooled. I have to check Wiki. Thanks for the info.
Leelee for Obama
@Leelee for Obama: It’s Patrick Henry College. Thanks, I hate when I remember the wrong thing. Age’ll do that to ya!
General Winfield Stuck
@Right Wing Extreme:
Right. You’re just a sweet non partisan guy who thinks Obama is a Communist. Clue, you will want to lose the smarmy “I’m Ok, your OK passive aggressive horseshit. It won’t fly here, not for long.
You want to know what we think. Well, speaking for moi, I think you morons have fucked this country nine ways to Sunday, and I think I don’t care what you think anymore.
I also think you have no ideas and only intend to fear monger and lie and disrupt till somebody gets hurt. Or until you bring down our current president. Which is Ok. being a free country and all. But don’t piss down my back and tell me your sincere and leave a link to a full blown wingnut blog, that makes you out to be a liar. Just some advice.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@Right Wing Extreme:
“Tongue in cheek” suggests a lighter, more amiable approach to an argument. Swastikas =/= tongue in cheek.
freelancer
Wingers keep using the word “parody” to smokescreen eliminationist language, like when Coulter jokes about bombing the NYTimes building or poisoning Justice Steven’s desert.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk
a la
Gawd I wish Obama really was creating concentration camps for all the conservatives in the country. FEMA and Acorn could team up to gas all those right wing pricks. HAHAHA, I’m just JOKING.
HumorFAIL.
LD50
And yet the only ones you attack are the blue ones. Funny, that.
Evidently you were homeschooled, or you’d realize that the Nazis and Communists hated each others guts. Fought a whole war and killed millions of each other.
Anyway, until you can show me that Obama is setting up death camps or collectivizing all agriculture, you’re just another wingnut idiot spouting cliches.
Enjoy your powerlessness for the next 8 years, you’ve richly deserved it.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Right Wing Extreme:
I’ll grant he didn’t fuck things up too badly as Governor, but that has more to do with the weak nature of the Texas executive and the guiding hand of Bob Bullock than anything else.
LD50
You see, when Right Wing Extreme calls Obama a Commie Nazi, he does it in a very subtle, nuanced way.
Keith G
@Sly: You right and our two obsevations blend well together.
Here the concept of an aristocracy was malleable and not ridged. As I pointed out, in Europe, the peasants had to in many instances band together to assert their interests – sometimes violently.
Here is one of many examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasants'_Revolt
As a result, I would assert, some societies in Europe have a higher class consciousness, regardless of ethnicity than exists here. That being said, even among the working class over there, one finds ethnic strife as they are after all humans. IMHO, this has been one of the ingredients in the recipe for a push for greater social fairness in Europe than here and why there are more working class Americans who are able to be corralled into voting against their economic class interests.
DBrown
@Right Wing Extreme: You talk a lot about what you know little. Please tell me the “communist” or NAZI “parity” Obama has shown? The first is impossible since anyone with any education knows that communism has never existed. If you are referencing the old USSR, that was not communist. As for the NAZI’s, only cheney and bush came close to their beloved ideas (torture – including water boarding (an SS torture), and arrest without charge of Americans.) So please,give a few examples of Obama (and don’t try and use the cheney/bush policies that Obama hasn’t been able to change.)
Justin Cognito
@Cyrus: Maybe not on Sunday, but right after Santelli got the ball rolling on the Tea Party stuff, I remember a piece from Glenn Beck about how it was totally wrong that we were giving money to bail people out of failed mortgages — and then he busted Obama for trying to put restrictions on the bank bailout.
Right Wing Extreme
@General Winfield Stuck
Gee I try to be polite because this JC’s site and not my own, and I get called passive aggressive. Never been accused of that before, aggressive yes, but never passive aggressive.My side may have fucked up, severely in some cases, but your side has likely doomed us for all time and has assuredly sold us out to a tin pot dictator with delusions of grandeur. I have many ideas, name a topic and i will provide with a flood of them. I personally think that bringing down the current president is a worthy goal and the only downside is that is will put an idiot of Quayle proportions in the top slot and that insane harpy, Pelosi, closer to her goal of greater power. As for pissing down your back, how about all the time you guys have pissed down mine and not only claimed sincerity, but also that it is, “All for my own good!” i post my site and name because I am not a coward as so many neo-libs who post anonymously on my site are. I try to get along with most people, so I am not a liar, just not a rude kool-aid sucking
freelancer
ironyFAIL, U haz it.
steve s
@Tom Q:
well if you want one of the all-time crap endings in fiction, keep going.
General Winfield Stuck
@Right Wing Extreme:
The collective demands it. Amrite!
And I use my own name too. My momma named me Stuck, but I made General all on me own.
LD50
So as part of this supposed honesty, are you going to share with us all the similarities Obama has with Adolf Hitler? Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t believe you listed any yet.
OBAMBI IS A NATZI STOLINIST! WAKE UP SHEEPLS!!!!!!
Midnight Marauder
@Right Wing Extreme:
My side may have fucked up, severely in some cases, but your side has likely doomed us for all time and has assuredly sold us out to a tin pot dictator with delusions of grandeur.
This is a pretty good reason why most people here don’t respect anything you have to say. Not just you and the things you’ve written here specifically, but the party and ideology you claim to represent. “Sure, we may have been the primary catalyst behind a global economic collapse, but you guys are even worse!” How “the other side” is worse is usually never discussed in detail. Instead, you offer empty, inane comments like “your side sold us out to a tin pot dictator with delusions of grandeur.”
And that’s why no one who is rational, sane, and sensible takes people like you seriously. Surely, you are not talking about President Obama. A dictator? Obama? Do you even know what a dictator is? Have you ever read a fucking history book? Are you so blinded by your ideological loyalties that you really think Obama is a dictator? A comment like that alone is enough to discredit anything else you have to say, because it indicates that whatever comes out of your mouth, it is not going to be grounded in reality.
I have many ideas, name a topic and i will provide with a flood of them.
No. No one wants you to flood this here Bastion of Sanity with your “ideas.” I’m sure they are rather simplistic and laughable in how obviously moronic they are.
I personally think that bringing down the current president is a worthy goal and the only downside is that is will put an idiot of Quayle proportions in the top slot and that insane harpy, Pelosi, closer to her goal of greater power.
Exactly. Your side isn’t interest in working to fix any of the problems that this country is currently drowning in. All you want to do is “bring down the President.” And you really think Pelosi is some sort of usurper, waiting in the wings to show Obama who really runs shit? Ha. I scoff at you.
i post my site and name because I am not a coward as so many neo-libs who post anonymously on my site are. I try to get along with most people, so I am not a liar, just not a rude kool-aid sucking
So now you’re resorting to calling people cowards and “neo-libs”, whatever the fuck that means. It doesn’t matter if you’re the Manliest Man Whoever Was A Man, the vast majority of the things you’ve written here today are so astoundingly false and idiotic, the only compliment I can think to pay you is that your cognitive dissonance are truly in a league of their own.
General Winfield Stuck
@LD50:
Isn’t it wonderful to be alive in the era where parody intersects with the real and we get a Right Wing Extreme.
Something Cosmic must be happening and the shit is going to hit the fan. Or miss it, and we git rescued in the nick of time.
freelancer
@Midnight Marauder:
Thank you for unpacking that. I’m short on time/patience.
The gist of it is, he can’t be both, and to the right he is, because they aren’t big on facts. Obama is a Fascist and a Communist. He is a “tin-pot dictator” but at the same time, events have shown that he avoids ramming his legislative agenda down America’s throat.
If he were a power mad fascist, he would come out tomorrow, say “I’m dissolving America’s private health insurance companies. Tomorrow you will all be covered by Single Payer. To those who oppose me, eat a dick.”
The Delusions of Grandeur comment just slayed me.
LD50
The pattern these days seems to be that among Republicans, ‘dictator’, ‘nazi’, ‘communist’, ‘soçialist’, ‘marxist’, ‘maoist’, ‘fascist’ and even, yes, ‘leninist’ all now mean the SAME THING, namely “any Democrat or liberal”. The same sort of merger seems to have happened with Mao, Hitler, Lenin, Marx, and Stalin — those people are all evidently now just like Obama.
What’s really going on is far simpler — the wingnuts spent 8 years fucking up the country, and they’re now completely bereft of ideas, and incapable of defending their record. So all that’s left to them is to throw as many shock names at Obama as possible, on the premise that if they do it enough, eventually Obama will be forced out of office and magically replaced with Sarah Palin.
It reminds me of the wingnuts who were convinced if McCain had just talked about nothing but Reverend Wright, Ayers, and Acorn for the last 2 months, of course he would have won. This is what happens when members of a political party CAN’T talk about their own record, and are predominantly very ignorant people.
LD50
Indeed. I’m very saddened by the fact that over the next 4-8 years Obama will probably never once tell the GOP to eat a dick.
It’s funny that people like Rightwing Extreme are so convinced that Obama is a powermad leftwing commie extremist (if even heard him called a ‘Black Nationalist’), and yet they seem blissfully unaware that most ‘libs’ I know are immensely frustrated that Obama has tacked as far to the center and conceded as much to the GOP as he has.
I guess when Bush was in power, the wingnuts got practically everything they wanted, so they automatically assume that us commie libs must all be enjoying the same perks now.
freelancer
@LD50:
I know. Sullivan’s been deliberating over this with Coates all day. Is it racism? Could be, might be something else. Is it projection? Could be, might be other things. Meanwhile, his readers are screaming at him.
<b?Yes, they are unhinged because they’re racist!
Yes, they are unhinged because they’re paranoid!
Yes, they are unhinged because they’re projecting!
It’s like anything said Conservatives that was purely dispicable was a joke or a parody, like every time Coulter wishes someone dead, or when Cheney said “So?”.
DBrown
@Right Wing Extreme: I assume by your silence on the issue you looked up what the definition of communism and realized how stupid you are and that you use names like a parrot with no real understanding except that others speak these sounds. Realizing that you are full of it you will avoid that stupid line of thinking here.
Now, lets move on to all the examples that you claim to prove that other than cheney/bush, Obama has somehow copied NAZI ways … I’m waiting.
LD50
@freelancer:
quoth Krusty the Klown: “Every time I say something and you give me that look, that means it’s a joke!”
Steeplejack
@Leelee for Obama:
George Mason definitely does not cater to the home-schooled. It is about as bland as you can get. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
I’m not being a partisan for GMU. But I do live in the area (northern Virginia) and have seen nothing to indicate that it is anything other than an ordinary state university.
Steeplejack
@Leelee for Obama:
George Mason definitely does not cater to the home-schooled. It is about as bland as you can get. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
I’m not being a partisan for GMU. But I do live in the area (northern Virginia) and have seen nothing to indicate that it is anything other than an ordinary state university.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Oops, just got home and read the rest of the thread.
Steeplejack
@freelancer:
Excellent!
Chad N Freude
@Right Wing Extreme:
It’s not clear to me which tin pot dictator with delusions of grandeur you’re referring to, Bush or Cheney.
Seriously though, if Obama is a dictator, he certainly seems to be poor at dictating. It’s my understanding that dictators do not attempt to negotiate with their opponents and they do not compromise on their stated goals. They also use the military to intimidate opponents, and they imprison dissenters. Obama doesn’t score very high on any of these.
Chad N Freude
OMG! First everything was in italics, now everything is in bold. Would the HTML genius who fixed the italics thing please come back and do it again?
Chuck Butcher
@Chad N Freude:
Well you do have to give him some time…
(them devious darkies and all)
BruceFromOhio
Genius!
Did that help?
This concludes another chapter of Rubber And Glue Theatre.
Kevin
Who broke the Bolding?
General Winfield Stuck
Don’t know. But it’s skeery.
stop the bolding
Damn. I’ll try a closing bold tag
Hope it worked.
stop the bolding
Nope
drat.
stop the bolding
I hope someone fixes the bolding cuz reading RWE’s stoopit done in bold makes it extra super stoopit, which is almost too much to for time/space to bear. I fear a wingularity might occur and unfold and invert the universe.
Or whatever such hyper-dense stoopit does when it reaches critical mass.
rs
@Right Wing Extreme: . Your reference to the “neo-libs” harassing you on your website suggests that you are probably the idiot you think you aren’t. Neoliberalism is the economic philosophy espoused by the Friedmans (Milton and Thomas), Alan Greenspan, the IMF, all Republicans (with the single exception of Ron Paul) and DLC Democrats. It’s the economics of corporate globalization and deregulation that is responsible for the debacle were currently experiencing. It’s not a word used to describe 21st century liberals.
You need to do more reading and less writing.
Right Wing Extreme
@ rs
I stand corrected. I went back and looked up neo-liberalism again, and I must say, I like them better, not saying much, then most of the kool-aid drinking namby-pamby leftist I meet. Thank you for the education. Sorry it took so long to respond, but I had work to do and research to pursue. RWE
bob h
Can’t be mad at the healthcare CEOs who earn millions a year by recission of sick people.
Deborah
@Right Wing Extreme:
My side may have fucked up, severely in some cases, but your side has likely doomed us for all time and has assuredly sold us out to a tin pot dictator with delusions of grandeur….I personally think that bringing down the current president is a worthy goal.
If only there were something you could have done before he was installed…Like if we’d had an election, or if citizens over 18 could vote for the president.
I’m increasingly convinced that there are two types of conservatives, those who recognize that we had an election less than a year ago and those who don’t. The latter is providing the current flood of crazy. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to agree to allow them their own reality.
Right Wing Extreme
@ Deborah
Oh I realize there was an election. Hell I will even concede that it was not stolen, probably. That does not mean that the electorate made the right choice. There is a lot of buyers remorse now. Here is an example for you, there are far less Obama bumper stickers than there were even six months ago. I also would like to point out that 52% does not equal a mandate from the people, nor does it mean that The Chosen was was enthroned rather than elected.