Annie Eat Your Gun

Today's column for the Daily Banter is a doozy, I have to admit. I thought about just going off, but the little gremlin pulling the levers in the analytical portion of my brain won out and I decided to try to be at least slightly articulate.

And so, we have something that takes aim at Ann Coulter and her tweet calling President Obama a "retard."

Here's the opening shot:

"Years ago, when I worked for NBC, there was an upper-level manager who gave me a great piece of advice when it came to dealing with people. I was a likable enough guy overall but had a reputation for occasionally throwing the switch that would thrust me into hot-head mode at warp speed, particularly when the pressure was really on. His thoughts on this little phenomenon stay with me to this day: 'The more influence you have, the smaller the weapon you have to swing to get what you want.' The point is that when you’re low on the food chain, you sometimes have to be bellicose and use a sledgehammer to make yourself heard, but when you’ve already got respect, a title, an audience, whatever, all you really need is a scalpel. You can afford to operate with precision. The flip side of this is that when you’ve risen to the point where your words and actions actually have impact, there’s a hell of a lot less you can get away with."

Case in point: Ann Coulter.

Read the Rest Here

I almost never say this, but if you'd all be so kind as to circulate, I'd greatly appreciate it. There's a cookie in it for you.

Winning the Race

Jon Stewart and the Best F#%!ing Roundtable dissect Ann Coulter's comment that conservative blacks are better than liberal blacks -- and take the debate to its logical conclusion.

For the record, when Coulter uses the term "our blacks," she means it literally -- as in the ones she and Sean Hannity actually bought at an auction and now own.

The Daily Show
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Tuesday is Recycling Day

"An Equal and Opposite Reaction" (Originally Published, 8.15.08 and Related to the Above Column)

Maybe I've been wrong all this time.

While a lot of the usual suspects on the left seemed to embrace victimhood at the hands of the Coulters, Limbaughs and Savages of the world, I always kind of dismissed the bellicose mouthpieces of the far-right as little more than Vaudevillian boobs. I looked at them as the media's equivalent of carnival barkers -- cut-rate provocateurs spouting amplified, affectedly shocking nonsense aimed at whipping their audience into a feeding frenzy while enticing new recruits into the tent by playing on their fears of liberal-agenda infestation. Sure, they were obnoxious as hell and probably deserved most of the blame for the complete erosion of civilized political discourse in this country, but in the end they were basically harmless; they'd simply stumbled upon a template for a brand of shtick sure to make them rich and it happened to involve, ironically, exploiting the lily-livered gullibility of Red State America better than anything their sworn enemies could've come up with. The best way to deal with their crap? Ignore it -- because anything else just emboldens the bullies and makes them not only increase the antagonism but laugh in your face for either not being able to "take a joke" or for failing to recognize just how powerless you are against them. Besides, I had always assumed that although plenty of people found these pompous loudmouths entertaining and bought wholly into the sentiment behind the saber-rattling, no one took them that seriously -- did they?

Somewhere along the line, I guess I forgot just who we were talking about here -- just what kind of people would listen intently to someone like Rush Limbaugh day after day and what they might be capable of. This is admittedly a huge oversight on the part of someone who considers himself an avowed misanthrope; I'll try not to make the same mistake again.

The question, though, is this: Would some on the American far-right -- who've had it psychically drilled into them that liberals are to blame for all their ills -- be capable of murder?

What started as a mere whisper has turned into an unrelenting drone throughout the blogosphere after the shooting death of Bill Gwatney, the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party. Gwatney was gunned down in his office at the Arkansas Democrats' HQ in Little Rock Wednesday by a man who had just been fired from his job at Target. Police say that after shooting Gwatney, 50-year-old Tim Dale Johnson led them on a high-speed chase for 30 miles; it ended with cops shooting and killing him. Although investigators are still trying to officially connect Bill Gwatney to the man who walked into a busy office and seemed to kill him in cold blood for no apparent reason, some are suggesting that the reason, in fact, is as obvious as it is disturbing -- that Johnson, a troubled loner, blamed liberal-leaning governmental politics for the loss of his job and exacted his revenge on the biggest target among Arkansas Democrats. They point to an arsenal of weapons found in Johnson's home after the shooting -- inarguably standard issue for right-wing psychopaths -- and, more disconcertingly, the fact that Wednesday's attack comes so soon after a deadly shooting inside a Tennessee church in which a gunman claimed to be out to kill the liberals who were supposedly controlling the country and preventing him from getting a job.

Is it irresponsible to question whether the two crimes are related? No. It's sort of a no-brainer to make the connection, as the shootings do seem similar and, like the police, most intellectually curious members of the public don't like coincidences. But are the crimes related? That remains to be seen; for now, absolutely not.

Which isn't stopping a vocal segment of the left from already jumping to the conclusion that these attacks on individuals whose politics take a liberal slant represent the inevitable next phase of a conservative "eliminationist" fantasy.

It's an agenda which has, admittedly, been proclaimed and perpetuated -- whether in jest or not -- by people like Limbaugh, Coulter and Savage for some time. These three and others like them have honed their talk of zero-tolerance for the people across the aisle to a knife's edge. For years, they've blanketed the airwaves, bookshelves and internet with ultra-nationalist agitprop which asserts that those who don't think like them are not simply to be argued with and voted down, they must be utterly crushed underfoot by any means necessary -- even if it involves, as Coulter once said, taking a baseball bat to them -- because they are nothing less than the enemy of the United States of America. In the words, if not actually the minds, of these seemingly fascist demagogues, liberals are as dangerous and absolute a threat to our way of life as the terrorists they supposedly coddle.

And there's no doubt that whatever their actual intentions may be -- no matter how much of it is just theater -- people are listening to the rhetoric and absorbing it. But are a few of those people now acting on it, and do the ones allegedly inciting the indignation through their bluster and bombast bear any responsibility for what it may be metastasizing into?

For almost a century, the litmus test for the lengths to which so-called free speech can legally be taken has come from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously ruled that "falsely shouting fire in a theater" was beyond protection; it's almost always been illegal to use a public forum to incite panic, violence or imminent lawless action. By that standard, there's just no way that any pundit at any time has crossed the line and broken the law. But legal doesn't always mean ethical, particularly not when you're refusing to take into consideration the fact that a substantial portion of your audience is made up of edgy, easily malleable "oppressed" white guys -- many of whom are now unemployed and looking for someone to blame for it. Although it's never a good idea to allow the potential misbehavior of the lowest common denominator to curb the right to free speech, it's equally inadvisable, not to mention irresponsible, to act as though you're operating in a vacuum -- as if what you say can't possibly have a negative impact, despite its incendiary nature. This was what made it such a pathetically insincere cop-out years ago when some lunatic from the Army of God would gun down an abortion doctor, leading Operation Rescue's Randall Terry to immediately get in front of a camera to offer an anemic and thoroughly horseshit disclaimer that he didn't advocate violence against abortion doctors. Terry set the wheels in motion and let nature take its course; today, the same thing could very easily be happening on an infinitely larger scale.

Once again, whether they mean it to or not, the invective of clowns like Limbaugh does have an impact. Listen long enough to right-wing propaganda and your eyes eventually glaze over, your brain shuts down and you begin to subscribe completely to the alternate reality that it's constructed out of thin air: an America where your new non-white neighbors are terrorists, immigrants are stealing your job, homosexuals want to lure your children into a life of sodomy, and treasonous liberals are plotting against you and your god at every turn. Believe this paranoid fantasy completely and who knows what you'll be capable of doing to defend your way of life.

It's no secret that the natural consequence of the fracturing of media -- of everyone having a voice and being able to put his or her opinions into writing and proffer them over the airwaves and internet -- is that there is no truth anymore. We have no common ground to anchor any argument. The left and right in this country live in completely separate worlds, each with its own set of facts. When we debate, we may as well be speaking foreign languages, so entirely have we allowed a single agreed-upon reality to become muddled by dishonesty on both sides. Rush Limbaugh lies his porcine ass off regularly and no one ever calls him on it; the ones who do are just dismissed by his acolytes as delusional or secretly trying to further the leftist agenda. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal launder George Bush's every sin until he comes out on the other end of the news cycle smelling fresh and clean.

And their listeners, viewers and readers believe every word of it. Their version of the truth, right or wrong, is why a man would shoot up a church in Tennessee, intransigent in the conviction that liberals are in control of the nation (when our president and half of our lawmakers are Republican) and that they've decimated the economy and taken away his job (when it could easily be argued Bush's policies, in fact, bear most if not all of the blame for the current dismal state of things).

For so long, the fire-and-brimstone of political division has been preached from every keyboard and microphone across our land; it was always just a matter of time before anger turned to action. All that rage had to go somewhere.

Maybe it just did.

"You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried"

I just brought up a quick point in one of the comment sections that I think might deserve to be part of a larger discussion here on the main page.

This morning, Ann Coulter made an appearance on that bastion of estrogen-laden inanity, The View. From what I've been reading, a lot of people were apparently looking forward to what they figured would surely be the inevitable clash between Coulter and the Whoopi-Joy-Babs triumvirate. The fact is this, though: Coulter, just by being asked to appear on The View, won before she even stepped in front of the camera.

I may think Ann Coulter's completely full of shit, but I have to give her a lot of credit for one thing that she does very, very well: She exposes the bald-faced hypocrisy of the mainstream media.

She does it simply by virtue of her presence on shows like The View, or Today, or Good Morning America -- shows she slams constantly in the pages of her ridiculous books and yet still manages to secure invitations to. Ann Coulter knows that, as ratings-bait, she's simply too enticing for these shows to pass up. She knows that a contentious confrontation with her makes for great TV, which will translate into great numbers and therefore great revenue for whichever network she appears on.

Ann Coulter knows that for all the supposedly high standards the mainstream media collectively boast of upholding, any TV producer will gladly throw his or her ethics and better judgment under the bus for a carrot as tempting as the one she offers. By this measure, Coulter doesn't need to "win" the argument in the traditional sense when she faces down people like Whoopi Goldberg.

All she has to do is show up, and she's already won. No matter how entirely her adversary or interviewer may eviscerate and expose her on national television, that person lost the minute Coulter walked into the studio.

(Sigh)

I should've known that the sudden growth of a spine and a brain was too much to ask for.

The Today show has rescheduled its (previously canceled) Ann Coulter interview for tomorrow morning.

Jesus, you guys are idiots.

Happy Thanksgiving

The real question is: Who broke her jaw?

The Huffington Post: Page Six: Ann Coulter's Jaw Wired Shut/11.25.08

Your Indignation Has Been Duly Noted, Now Sit Down and Shut Up

Did you give a lot of thought to Sarah Palin when you woke up this morning?

Yeah, neither did I.

When I wrote my piece from earlier today, expressing my feelings about what happened across the United States last night and its transformational power for both our country and the world, I didn't think -- even for a minute -- about wasting any copy slamming the lunatic fringe on the right. I was feeling far too good and didn't want to sully any of it by doing a lot of thinking about how the Fox News Channels, Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters of the world were reacting to the brutal smackdown they'd just gotten at the hands of a pissed off, fed up America.

Besides, wouldn't the biggest insult to the formerly deafening bullies on the right be to deny them the attention they've reveled in for eight long years? I figure sociopathic media whores like O'Reilly can handle just about anything except suddenly having their views marginalized, disregarded or flat-out ignored.

But while I tried to suppress the desire for a little good natured, knife-twisting schadenfreude, the folks at the Huffington Post were quick to remind me just what kind of despicable assholes we were talking about here and how often they've delighted in the disenfranchisement of those who don't think like them.

So I took a look at some of the reaction from the far right blogosphere and other assorted mouthpieces that HuffPost has compiled.

Needless to say, the God, guns, and guts crowd is, for the most part, handling the election of Barack Obama with the kind of dignity and grace you'd expect.

Here's what Caption This! has to say:

"If only one good thing has come from this election, it's that it is crystal clear who the enemy is. We don't have to compromise any more. We're liberated from having to back mushy moderates just because if the alternative gets power, it would be worse. Well, now the worse alternative is in power, and we have nothing to lose. The things that really matter are our faith and our families. And not even Chairman O can take those away from us. Take hope. Take Christ. Take faith. Much like Frank Stallone, we are down, but we are far from over!"

Or how about this terrifying little nugget from paranoid gun-fucker "Uncle Jimbo" over at the lunatic quasar known ominously as Blackfive:

"America's sheep have spoken and elevated one of their own to the Presidency. Uber Sheep (no offense UP) Obama will now lead the flock from the front. The United States of Socialist America has been established... The CHANGE Obama and his legions of adorers want to enact is unprcedented [sic] in US history and the country they want to make would be unrecognizable to the Founders. I refuse to submit. I refuse to HOPE or CHANGE. I refuse to surrender... 1-20-09, the day we begin the fight to stop the left from telling the rest of us how to live our lives and pussifying American society. I went with Chuck Z today to his favorite local gun shop and where last week there were dozens of AK and variants for sale, today there were half as many and a line to buy. "

Then there are the tinfoil hats who put together Moonbattery:

"Congratulations, moonbats. You finally have your revenge for being forced to look at all those flags after 9/11. This is a day of celebration for everyone hostile to America and the principles of individual liberty for which it stands. Enjoy it while you can. There are people lowdown enough to know in advance who and what was elected yesterday, and to have voted for the Moonbat Messiah anyway. What they have done to this country is beyond forgiveness. But an ultra-radical leftist like Obama could not be elected in a center-right country, or even a center-left country, without a great deal of deception. Thanks to a radicalized liberal media willing to sacrifice its own long-term credibility to put a leftist in power, Obama was never publicly vetted. Moderates did not vote for a real person, but for a two-dimensional phantom temporarily conjured into being by hype."

And of course let's not forget the special brand of drug-induced stupid that we've come to expect from Rush Limbaugh's radio show (remember that this is the most "mainstream" opinion of the bunch):

"Now, for all of those of you out there, not in this audience, but the faint of heart on our side, who want to go through this rigmarole game of appeasement and conciliation, congratulations, work nice. McCain last night... The reason I asked you if he got booed last night, was because I was booing. When he came out and said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, my friends, my friends, I want us to come together tonight in unity with Senator and President-Elect Obama.' I do not want unity with President-Elect Obama! Ladies and gentlemen, let me count the numbers here. What do we have? By the time all this is all over, 57 million Americans will have voted "no" on this stuff! I, for one, do not think it wise to abandon 57 million Americans who want no part of an Obama agenda, and I for one will not abandon 57 million Americans who want no part of it. Unity with Obama? Can you spell defeat?"

I get that these clowns still have a voice, and that there are still plenty of people who will listen to it -- particularly now that their worst conspiracist fears about the direction this country is heading in have been stoked and they can indulge in masculine fantasies of being oppressed freedom fighters ready to make the Founding Fathers proud with their righteous last stand.

But it's nice -- really, really, nice -- that at least for the moment they're nothing but a lot of talk.

Talk that the world's joyous celebration is easily drowning out.

An Equal and Opposite Reaction

Maybe I've been wrong all this time.

While a lot of the usual suspects on the left seemed to embrace victimhood at the hands of the Coulters, Limbaughs and Savages of the world, I always kind of dismissed the bellicose mouthpieces of the far-right as little more than Vaudevillian boobs. I looked at them as the media's equivalent of carnival barkers -- cut-rate provocateurs spouting amplified, affectedly shocking nonsense aimed at whipping their audience into a feeding frenzy while enticing new recruits into the tent by playing on their fears of liberal-agenda infestation. Sure, they were obnoxious as hell and probably deserved most of the blame for the complete erosion of civilized political discourse in this country, but in the end they were basically harmless; they'd simply stumbled upon a template for a brand of shtick sure to make them rich and it happened to involve, ironically, exploiting the lily-livered gullibility of Red State America better than anything their sworn enemies could've come up with. The best way to deal with their crap? Ignore it -- because anything else just emboldens the bullies and makes them not only increase the antagonism but laugh in your face for either not being able to "take a joke" or for failing to recognize just how powerless you are against them. Besides, I had always assumed that although plenty of people found these pompous loudmouths entertaining and bought wholly into the sentiment behind the saber-rattling, no one took them that seriously -- did they?

Somewhere along the line, I guess I forgot just who we were talking about here -- just what kind of people would listen intently to someone like Rush Limbaugh day after day and what they might be capable of. This is admittedly a huge oversight on the part of someone who considers himself an avowed misanthrope; I'll try not to make the same mistake again.

The question, though, is this: Would some on the American far-right -- who've had it psychically drilled into them that liberals are to blame for all their ills -- be capable of murder?

What started as a mere whisper has turned into an unrelenting drone throughout the blogosphere after the shooting death of Bill Gwatney, the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party. Gwatney was gunned down in his office at the Arkansas Democrats' HQ in Little Rock Wednesday by a man who had just been fired from his job at Target. Police say that after shooting Gwatney, 50-year-old Tim Dale Johnson led them on a high-speed chase for 30 miles; it ended with cops shooting and killing him. Although investigators are still trying to officially connect Bill Gwatney to the man who walked into a busy office and seemed to kill him in cold blood for no apparent reason, some are suggesting that the reason, in fact, is as obvious as it is disturbing -- that Johnson, a troubled loner, blamed liberal-leaning governmental politics for the loss of his job and exacted his revenge on the biggest target among Arkansas Democrats. They point to an arsenal of weapons found in Johnson's home after the shooting -- inarguably standard issue for right-wing psychopaths -- and, more disconcertingly, the fact that Wednesday's attack comes so soon after a deadly shooting inside a Tennessee church in which a gunman claimed to be out to kill the liberals who were supposedly controlling the country and preventing him from getting a job.

Is it irresponsible to question whether the two crimes are related? No. It's sort of a no-brainer to make the connection, as the shootings do seem similar and, like the police, most intellectually curious members of the public don't like coincidences. But are the crimes related? That remains to be seen; for now, absolutely not.

Which isn't stopping a vocal segment of the left from already jumping to the conclusion that these attacks on individuals whose politics take a liberal slant represent the inevitable next phase of a conservative "eliminationist" fantasy.

It's an agenda which has, admittedly, been proclaimed and perpetuated -- whether in jest or not -- by people like Limbaugh, Coulter and Savage for some time. These three and others like them have honed their talk of zero-tolerance for the people across the aisle to a knife's edge. For years, they've blanketed the airwaves, bookshelves and internet with ultra-nationalist agitprop which asserts that those who don't think like them are not simply to be argued with and voted down, they must be utterly crushed underfoot by any means necessary -- even if it involves, as Coulter once said, taking a baseball bat to them -- because they are nothing less than the enemy of the United States of America. In the words, if not actually the minds, of these seemingly fascist demagogues, liberals are as dangerous and absolute a threat to our way of life as the terrorists they supposedly coddle.

And there's no doubt that whatever their actual intentions may be -- no matter how much of it is just theater -- people are listening to the rhetoric and absorbing it. But are a few of those people now acting on it, and do the ones allegedly inciting the indignation through their bluster and bombast bear any responsibility for what it may be metastasizing into?

For almost a century, the litmus test for the lengths to which so-called free speech can legally be taken has come from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously ruled that "falsely shouting fire in a theater" was beyond protection; it's almost always been illegal to use a public forum to incite panic, violence or imminent lawless action. By that standard, there's just no way that any pundit at any time has crossed the line and broken the law. But legal doesn't always mean ethical, particularly not when you're refusing to take into consideration the fact that a substantial portion of your audience is made up of edgy, easily malleable "oppressed" white guys -- many of whom are now unemployed and looking for someone to blame for it. Although it's never a good idea to allow the potential misbehavior of the lowest common denominator to curb the right to free speech, it's equally inadvisable, not to mention irresponsible, to act as though you're operating in a vacuum -- as if what you say can't possibly have a negative impact, despite its incendiary nature. This was what made it such a pathetically insincere cop-out years ago when some lunatic from the Army of God would gun down an abortion doctor, leading Operation Rescue's Randall Terry to immediately get in front of a camera to offer an anemic and thoroughly horseshit disclaimer that he didn't advocate violence against abortion doctors. Terry set the wheels in motion and let nature take its course; today, the same thing could very easily be happening on an infinitely larger scale.

Once again, whether they mean it to or not, the invective of clowns like Limbaugh does have an impact. Listen long enough to right-wing propaganda and your eyes eventually glaze over, your brain shuts down and you begin to subscribe completely to the alternate reality that it's constructed out of thin air: an America where your new non-white neighbors are terrorists, immigrants are stealing your job, homosexuals want to lure your children into a life of sodomy, and treasonous liberals are plotting against you and your god at every turn. Believe this paranoid fantasy completely and who knows what you'll be capable of doing to defend your way of life.

It's no secret that the natural consequence of the fracturing of media -- of everyone having a voice and being able to put his or her opinions into writing and proffer them over the airwaves and internet -- is that there is no truth anymore. We have no common ground to anchor any argument. The left and right in this country live in completely separate worlds, each with its own set of facts. When we debate, we may as well be speaking foreign languages, so entirely have we allowed a single agreed-upon reality to become muddled by dishonesty on both sides. Rush Limbaugh lies his porcine ass off regularly and no one ever calls him on it; the ones who do are just dismissed by his acolytes as delusional or secretly trying to further the leftist agenda. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal launder George Bush's every sin until he comes out on the other end of the news cycle smelling fresh and clean.

And their listeners, viewers and readers believe every word of it. Their version of the truth, right or wrong, is why a man would shoot up a church in Tennessee, intransigent in the conviction that liberals are in control of the nation (when our president and half of our lawmakers are Republican) and that they've decimated the economy and taken away his job (when it could easily be argued Bush's policies, in fact, bear most if not all of the blame for the current dismal state of things).

For so long, the fire-and-brimstone of political division has been preached from every keyboard and microphone across our land; it was always just a matter of time before anger turned to action. All that rage had to go somewhere.

Maybe it just did.