By Hanlon, on February 12th, 2010 at 08:56 PM
 I’m going to do something here that may shock and appall my normal readers: I’m going to address the right without a hint of scorn. Some time ago I swore off writing about Wailin’ Palin, but I feel like my hand has been forced with her steady rise in national prominence after the election. So without further ado…
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Okay guys, I just want you to know, that in this one instance, I am genuinely on your side. Not in a kind of snarky backhanded-compliment, “pretend to be on your side so I can subtly dig at you” way. I really do mean it that I am 100% behind the conservatives with everything I’m about to say.
Let me make this plain: You have to drop Sarah Palin. She is a stain on politics and your movement.
I’m not saying this because I have some beef with her political leanings and think her ideals are bad for the country. I’m a liberal, she’s a right-winger, it should go without saying that I don’t think her conservative stances are good for the country. That’s fine, though, because I think that about most of your platforms and you think that about mine. The problem is that she is a babbling moron, and you are far better than holding someone like her up on a pedestal.
Read More ->
By Hanlon, on February 3rd, 2010 at 07:14 PM
Seriously. This is just scary. A few highlights:
- 34% believe birth control is abortion.
- 73% say gays shouldn’t be allowed to teach in schools.
- 36% believe Obama wasn’t born in the US.
- 31% believe Obama is a racist who hates white people.
- 77% believe the book of Genesis should be taught in science class.
I’m going to start referring to it not as liberals and conservatives, but progressives and regressives.
By Hanlon, on January 10th, 2010 at 02:16 PM
 Hey, even a stopped watch is right twice a day.
Joementum may be, by and large, a shill who uses his position as foil to the Democratic Party to his advantage whenever possible, but somewhere deep in his heart he at least feels as though he’s a liberal, so it’s not too surprising that he took exception to buddy John McCain’s claim towards Obama’s intentions as president.
“You know every now and then John McCain and I disagree sometimes, and that’s one of the cases,” Lieberman said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “So I don’t agree [that Obama is "leading an extreme left-wing crusade to bankrupt America."]. I think the president understands the importance of bringing our government back into balance. Look he came in, in a most difficult economic time, inheriting a national debt that had doubled in the preceding eight years. I think you are going to hear from the president in the State of a Union, maybe earlier, about some tough medicine for our economy. We need it and I hope that there will be bipartisan support in Congress for doing that.”
So, yeah. Kudos to Joe Lieberman for doing something terribly unpopular with his new friends.
However, I have to vent a little with McCain’s claim in the first place, for the simple reason that it’s both maddeningly common amongst critics from the right and unbelievably incorrect.
Barack Obama did not run on a platform of liberal overhaul. Oh sure, he wanted out of Iraq, paid lip service to repealing DADT and such, but on a spectrum of political pH, Obama always sat somewhere just to the left of center. His economic positions are modest, geared more towards rectifying the unbelievably wrong-headed conservative policies that Bush endorsed, his actions on domestic security haven’t changed in any significant way save for increasing measures in the wake of the Yemen non-event. He reneged on his promised to the GLBT community, and there was hardly a fight for universal health care.
Now I’m not saying this as a criticism of Obama, per se, just pointing out that he is hardly a left-wing radical, nor are his friends in the party. They’re certainly to the left of his critics, but to call him a socialist liberal just just plain wrong.
But that’s actually part of the strategy. Bleat hard enough that center-left Obama is a communist wackadoodle and that creates the impression that everyone to the left of him is just plain out of their minds. Nevermind that in some cases pluralities, if not majorities, of Americans are taking a stance to the left of Obama (gay rights, Iraq, spying, marijuana), it’s a strategy of marginalizing.
What’s most infuriating is that it works. Democrats shy away from actual reform because it would mean endorsing a policy that’s even more liberal than the meager actions the right is currently calling “radical socialist”. Democrats, lacking spines and/or gonads, start to adopt the “common wisdom” that such things are just “not mainstream”.
And people wonder why registered Democrats aren’t big on voting in 2010. I’m almost tempted to join them, just so the party understands that if they don’t do anything useful, I’m not going to fight to put them in office.
By Hanlon, on November 16th, 2009 at 01:34 PM
 I think, on some level, we all have a similar presumption about the current wave of right-wing protesters. We see them as hypocrites, either willful or not. We see them as people who sat through eight years of Bush terrorizing, economic obliteration, and war crimes and now that a Democrat is in office suddenly they give a shit about things like executive overreach and fiscal responsibility.
Brad Friedman over at the Guardian has another perspective. It’s not that they saw and ignored Bush’s transgressions, they just didn’t know about them.
By contrast, Fox presents an alternative reality where Republican hypocrisy, scandals and abuses of power are either spun into something they are not or, more frequently, simply not mentioned at all. As such, the depths of the historically unprecedented failure that was George Bush’s presidency remain virtually unknown to Fox viewers. In the bargain, as the young Obama administration moves forward, attempting to deal with countless disasters they’ve inherited, issue after issue now comes as a complete surprise to the majority of Fox’s audience.
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The list goes on and on, but the frothing teabaggers protest as if the last eight years never happened. Rather, these poor saps were presented with a phony version of reality produced with Hollywood-style special effects and distractions (missing blonds, steroids in baseball, terrorists around every corner, non-existent voter fraud). Now these confused souls roam the streets, town halls and email lists as clueless zombies, unaware of who and what they are fighting for (government-supported corporatocracy) or against (their own self-interest).
We’ve all been hit with a moment where, after combing through more ideologically tilted news outlets, we’re caught in the headlights by a pretty dang important story that didn’t get mentioned anywhere you were looking. Now, most of us have some diversity in where we get the news, and so such stories are cases of “falling through the cracks” that don’t happen all that often.
Imagine, though, living as someone who gets all of their news from FOX and right-wing talk radio. Literally, all of it. The way you’ve heard, Bush was a steadfast and courageous man of God whose presidency was plagued with evil liberals attempting to destroy his good works. The war was always justified, and always successful, thanks to the brave Republicans fighting off Democrats who tried to ruin it. The economy was doing great under Bush until the Democrats started screwing it up, and the bailouts and such were all Obama’s ideas.
This is why these people are willing to follow Glenn Beck unquestioningly, despite his tenure on CNN as a republican cheerleader who wholly endorsed just about everything he’s now calling a threat to the United States’ soul: they never watched him on CNN. Having never branched beyond the FOX/Limbaugh sphere, they’re unaware of anything that may have happened out there, be it news items or massive cognitive dissonance in their heroes.
Consider the O’Reilly strategy of dealing with criticism: cite nothing and attack viciously. This gives the appearance of covering “the other side” without ever making his poor, fragile viewers actually have to see it. So sure, Factor viewers are aware OF some sort of row between himself and Olbermann over something, but not having seen any of it, they’re left taking Bill-O’s word that the spat was because O’Reilly said something Keith didn’t like and so KO threw an ideology-based fit.
Welcome to the right-wing media mold. Spin everything, deflect criticism, ignore stories that muck with your narrative. Is it any wonder that people are up in arms?
By Hanlon, on November 9th, 2009 at 02:46 PM
 As an equal opportunity armchair quarterback, I’m more than happy to explain why each party has a problem with its base. Lately, though, I dare say the Republican Party has a far, far more severe problem with its base than do the Democrats with theirs.
Most of you probably recall my October-fast, and so realize that it must be something pretty outrageous to have me turning my attention toward the rabid, frothing conservative Teabagger base. It is.
Elie Weisel is a Holocaust survivor turned Nobel laureate who committed the unpardonable sin of… criticizing the Teabaggers who held up a picture of the Holocaust in an attempt to exploit that pain and criticize Democrats’ health care plan. The response is downright horrifying. Head to the original Politico story for more comments.
Rothschilds nothing! Everyone knows that Obama is George Soros sock puppet. Wasn’t Soros Jewish once upon a time? May the Schwartz be with you.
The jews need to clam up and accept the fact that they are in a Chritian country.
This hollowcost thing is totally overblown by the jewish.
Elie Weisel is disgusting PR-seeking profiteering demagogue who has made a fortune off playing on the world’s guilt trips about the what happened to the Jews during WW2.
Weisel is getting too touchy in his old age. Too bad, I remember when he deserved respect, not pity.
This comment is pretty awesome.
Perhaps Weisel should take Obama’s advice. Lets wait for the facts. For all we know it was liberal democrat holding that sign.
I’d like to remind everyone that these people are defending the use of a picture of the stacked bodies at Dachau for a disagreement on health care reform, and turning their ire toward a man who was actually in a concentration camp. I’m almost expecting to see someone with a sign that says, “I’d rather die of cancer than live under socialism”, and after a man dying of cancer says that’’s tasteless, the base tells him he should have his corpse buried in France. These are people who would correct Jesus Christ on what the Bible says.
These are your friends, GOP. Those are the Teabaggers, the “real Americans” who are supposedly giving voice to the “concerns” America has with liberal policies. We often talk about the spineless Democrats, but the Republicans have become far worse. While the Democrats are afraid to embrace the ideals of their base, the Republicans are downright terrified to rebuke theirs.
You’d think any decent human being would agree that using an actual photograph of corpses in the Holocaust would be beyond the pale, but the GOP is so scared of losing what little support they have that they won’t do it. Ironically, this is the very reason national support for the Republican party is collapsing. While the Democrats’ problem with their base is related to their seeming abandonment of the base, the Republicans have the opposite problem.
Of course, this all adds up to a Washington that’s sitting far to the right of the people they’re supposedly representing, but that’s another rant for another time.
By Hanlon, on November 5th, 2009 at 12:46 AM
 So by now we’ve all heard about the rather historic election in New York’s 23rd district. The special election resulted in the first Democrat winning the seat in a generation which, while on the surface seems to be evidence of a big rise in support for Democrats, is actually a big story about the split in the GOP.
It wasn’t that Owens beat a Republican, it’s that he beat the Conservative (capital C) candidate of Doug Hoffman, while the Republican’s actual candidate dropped out early. Further still, the right-wing media dove upon Hoffman as the torchbearer, with FOX’s various talking heads and the radio squealers all likening him to Mr Smith heading to Washington, that he’d show the nation that the right-wing, Teabagging base is for real.
This is, of course, suicidal for the party. To attempt to purge the moderates and push for a far-right only GOP would leave the party fractured down the middle and all but guarantee Democratic supremacy from now until doomsday. Turn more races into three-way jaunts among a Democrat, a Republican, and a Conservative and you aren’t going to see too many R’s or C’s on the roster come 2011.
I could have predicted this, but already some are trying to say that the Democrats are guilty of this as well, using the only two examples possible: Lieberman and left-wing frustration with Obama.
Remember the enthusiasm, indeed smugness, that the left blogosphere and netroots exhibited when they helped defeat incumbent Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary in September 2006 because he was a supporter of the Iraq war?
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Indeed, many on the left are now openly talking about abandoning support of Obama unless he withdraws completely from Afghanistan and Iraq by a date certain.
The differences here are pretty stark. In Lieberman’s case, it wasn’t his war support. It was that he spent the years prior calling his own party weak and basically being a thorn in the donkey’s side. Simply supporting the war was far from Holy Joe’s only sin, and it wasn’t even like he was alone in that regard. It was that Lieberman went out of his way to trash his own party. As for Obama, the problem there is that Obama said he would get us out of Iraq, close Gitmo, and repeal DADT. Holding an elected official to his promises is far from cries for party purity.
By contrast, Specter was ousted solely for his support of Obama’s stimulus package. Olympia Snowe is getting pushed out for her occasional support of Democratic legislation, and Hoffman’s rise was against a seeming moderate. This is a crusade against the impure, and is rooted in forcing any non-basers out. If the GOP wants that, good on ‘em. It just means obliteration for the party.
A side note for Lieberman: if you look at the results of the 2006 Senate election in CT, the split was 49-39 Lieberman over Lamont, with a paltry 9% of voters siding with the Republican. Now unless you think Connecticut is 91% Democrat, you then realize that it means Lieberman’s victory came largely on the backs of Republicans who abandoned their candidate in order to make sure that the lefter of two evils didn’t win. This stands in sharp relief against atraditionally Republican election that saw the split between a Dem and the new Conservative candidate.
By Hanlon, on September 29th, 2009 at 12:07 PM
 Over the past nine months, the United States has seen an alarming collapse in the civility of our discourse. I’m not going to claim that the left was particularly civil in the Bush opposition, especially during the more contentious periods, but what we’re seeing now is a whole new animal.
So far, what we know is that president Obama is at least one of the following: a Nazi, a Communist, a Muslim, a Kenyan citizen, the Antichrist. We’ve watched as teabaggers flash signs comparing Democrats to the Third Reich and normally “serious” pundits make similar allusions between health care reform and the Khmer Rouge.
Both the right and the left recognize this problem for what it is. As these people have dominated the airwaves, the ability to truly discuss, well, anything has been swept aside in favor of alarmism and hysteria. We can’t talk about the costs of a health care bill because people swarm town hall meetings talking about euthanasia and eugenics. We can’t talk about war because Obama’s actually a Muslim from Kenya that’s working with Al Qaeda. Democrats are busy trying to argue down the nutjobs and Republicans can’t get a legitimate discussion started because of them.
How to deal with the problem has puzzled us for a while now. These people won’t listen to rational thought, we know this much. The “death panel” people won’t accept the notion that there aren’t any death panels. The Bachmanns are going to say the Census will lead to internment camps run by FEMA and setup by ACORN. At the same time, dropping to their level will neither solve anything nor help anyone.
So, I propose an alternate solution: Ignore them. For one month.
For all of October, do not dignify the crazies with so much as your attention, let alone a response. If we’re calling this fringe a growing inferno, deprive it of oxygen and eventually it will die. Any time an article shows up in your feed that says something about a someone calling Obama the next Hitler or squawking about ACORN and death panels, ignore it. Don’t read it, don’t let it bother you at all. If you see it on the news, change the channel. For you Daily Show and Olbermann junkies, this means ignoring some of their stuff as well. No Worst Persons, no segments about Glenn Beck. I’m serious.
This also means if you have a blog of your own, and you’d like to participate, for a solid month you don’t write any articles focusing on the “easy targets” of wingnut loonies. I’m not going to pretend that my reach extends to the “real media”, but it would be phenomenal to see this land on broadcast airwaves. Not just for my own ego, but because it would be a step in the right direction. One we need.
A note: this is not a call for insulation. Quite the opposite, in fact. It means that instead of letting your exposure to the “other side” being a WorldNetDaily article about Obama’s birth certificate, it’s an article by Pat Buchanan about Iran. Instead of a post on FreeRepublic and reading the comments calling Obama a monkey, it’s a George Will article about presidential caving. Instead of Chuck Norris and tea-stained flags, try Will Winkenwerder discussing alternate health care options.
On my side, that means that until November 1st, at least, there won’t be any videos of crazies with horrible signs, no quotes of the day calling attention to inflammatory name-calling, no rants about someone else’s rants.
I admit that ignoring the shouters is neither easy nor particularly enjoyable. There’s a primal part of our brains that wants to not only engage them directly, but defeat them. We feel like people who are being “jerks” should have comeuppance of some kind, and just letting them go off and yell without any “repercussions” means they’re “getting away with it”. We feel like they should be dealt with in one way or another.
But really, what does it do for us? To read comments on a board that makes us angry, to watch an Ann Coulter video, or listen to something from MediaMatters where a guy says that the New Jersey kids singing about Obama are like 1930’s Germany does nothing but tax our mind and get us angry. It’s unnecessary stress that doesn’t lead toward any kind of true solution. Outrage is a short-term high, with a bad hangover.
It also takes some strength to engage those who disagree with you instead of focusing on the nutjobs. It means you may have to read a well-thought and eloquent article that has the potential to make you re-think where you stand on a given issue, instead of reading a pro-universal health care article and then looking at a picture of a “bury Obamacare with Kennedy” sign. That’s important, too.
But that’s exactly what we have to do. Giving the fringe attention is precisely what’s gotten us to the point of murdered Census workers and Swastika signs. So, hopefully, this meager plea for civility will spread, and we’ll all be better off for it. Left and right.
By Hanlon, on September 27th, 2009 at 04:42 PM
 It probably won’t surprise anyone for me to say that American conservatism is a wholly different animal from how the rest of the world understands the term, but now the difference is coming to a head as conservative leaders worldwide are “treated” to James Inhofe (R-jackass) showing what American conservatism is like vis a vis global warming.
No doubt Inhofe’s appearance will embarrass the Obama administration and irritate environmentalists, just as the eccentric Oklahoman intends. But nobody will be more frustrated and perplexed than the European conservatives who are hosting the conference in Denmark and whose governments in Germany, Sweden and France have made the most sustained progress toward the energy and carbon reduction goals set out in the original Kyoto agreement. Those leaders cannot understand why their ideological comrades in the United States refuse to acknowledge the gravity of the problem — and insist that “conservatism” is synonymous with freedom to pollute and ruin.
A student of political science likely sees difficulty with using “liberal” and “conservative” in United States politics. Our “conservative” movement encompasses staunch Bible thumpers and flag-waving PATRIOT Act lovers, things which no conservative in the traditional sense would ever employ. Simultaneously, we have a liberal wing that spent the better part of a decade crying foul because of government expansion, a decidedly conservative ideal.
What we have in the USA is a right wing that’s united by really only one notion: “we” are never at fault, and “you” must be stopped from ruining my good time.
As I said in my little thought, they deny global warming because it means taking responsibility and fixing the problem would inconvenience them personally. Their response to terrorism is to suggest that US foreign policy had absolutely no hand in it, and the PATRIOT Act doesn’t involve any personal inconveniences “unless you’s a terrist”. The problem with Social Security and universal health care isn’t just the spike in taxes, but they hate the notion of people getting things without “working for them”.
American neoconservatism is tragically mean-spirited. Lock up the Muslims, block gays from marrying, don’t give people health care, spy on everyone, torture if we’re scared, and if you don’t believe in Jesus you aren’t allowed at the table. It’s not the traditional sense of “small government, fiscal responsibility” that it should be, and one that could lead to many intelligent debates. To be sure, two senators could spend hours talking budgetary effects of various health care plans and likely lead to a good end.
Instead, we have reactionaries with personal agendas. Christian lunatics that want the Decalogue stamped on the White House, racists and xenophobes that don’t want Mexicans overrunning the country, other racists and xenophobes that call 911 if a brown guy with a beard gets on an airplane, anti-gay bigots that would rather a child grow up in an orphanage than have two dads, fat cats that want their taxes lowered no matter who else gets hurt. It’s all gut-thought, and it’s why our American right is seen as such an oddity worldwide.
By Hanlon, on September 24th, 2009 at 04:48 PM
James Inhofe travels to the UN Climate Change Conference… to tell the whole freakin’ world that the US won’t pass any bills on climate change.
“Now, I want to make sure that those attending the Copenhagen conference know what is really happening in the United States Senate,” said Inhofe. “Some people, like Senator Barbara Boxer, will tell the conference, with Waxman-Markey having passed in the House, that they can anticipate that some kind of bill will pass EPW.”
After saying President Obama has a hatred of “white culture”, Glenn Beck waffles on what “white culture” is.
DoJ official finds it “surreal” to have to respond to Senator Franken reading him the Fourth Amendment.
Kris looked flustered and mumbled that “this is surreal,” apparently referring to having to respond to Franken’s question. “I would defer to the other branch of government,” he said, referring to the courts, prompting Franken to interject: “I know what that is.”
Also, Chuck Norris is a complete douchebag.
As 9/12 concluded, we all heard many ways to keep this revolutionary movement going. But I was sitting back thinking there’s one way we can take a daily stand and declare that as for me and my house, we will serve God and the republic as the Founders did.
If that describes you, then I suggest you fly some revolutionary flag in lieu of your 50-star flag over the next year. Post the 13-star Betsy Ross flag, Navy Jack or Gadsden flag (“Don’t Tread on Me”) or any representation that tells the story of Old Glory and makes a stand for our Founders’ vision of America.
By Hanlon, on September 23rd, 2009 at 08:13 PM
Provided he doesn’t have an oddly good sleight-of-hand skill going.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9nVpO1Dvfk[/youtube]
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