Along with issues like Abu Ghraib, Electronic Voting, Voter suppression, and media bias, I have written at length here and elsewhere about the revolting behavior of Freepers and other right-wingers who consider the personal tragedies of liberals or perceived liberals a joke.

Under the circumstances, for me to keep silent about seeing identical behavior from people at liberal or leftist websites would be hypocrisy. I’m not going to countenance garbage from this side that I have declared inexcusable when it comes from the other.

If this upsets some people here, that's a pity.

“is there a Tony Snow’s tumor appreciation thread? I hope his tumor makes a full recovery from that bad case of Tony it’s got.”
-- From a DU thread on Tony Snow’s apparent relapse

It’s one thing to blurt out something hateful on the spur of the moment -- to say “good” after hearing news of some personal tragedy striking a public figure you despise.

It’s another thing to sit down and write something celebrating such a tragedy, proofread it, and then hit the send button so that it’s posted on a public forum.

And it’s quite another thing to embrace hatred in this manner, and attack anyone who refuses to join in.

“I see you’re a fellow I can talk plainly to, Jaggar,” Waffing said in a deep, bluff voice. “A man much like myself. I like what you’re doing. As I’ve said many times myself, the only way to treat enemies of genetic purity is to smash their skulls.”
From The Iron Dream, by Norman Spinrad

Linda Vester: You say you'd rather not talk to liberals at all?


Ann Coulter: I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days.
From FOX News Channel, DaySide with Linda Vester, 10/6/04

So we've been talking about police protection during the upcoming convention when all those stinky protesters are coming… You know, I'll tell you what works on a crowd like this -- a machine gun, that always works very well...You must have order, you cannot have a civilized society without order and if that means cracking a few skulls, so be it. A good ole boy network is what you need and hand out some ax handles.
Chris Baker KTLK radio morning show, 4/4/08

The war on language continues. Today the word of the week is “racism.” I popped off an essay on racism over the weekend. It wasn’t anything I considered especially insightful or ground-breaking, just a reminder that racism is primarily defined as:

“A belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.”

I pointed out that it doesn’t matter how sincerely you believe it, or how convinced you are that your belief is backed up by personal experience or science. It doesn’t matter how good your diction is, how much you liked the movie Mississippi Burning, or how assiduously you avoid using the “N” word or wearing white hoods or brown shirts. If you believe the above, even if you defend it by offering cites from The Bell Curve with a Boston accent, you are a racist.

Racism: A belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.

One of the best public service ads on racism that I’ve ever seen aired some time in the 1970s. It showed a man, white, well groomed and in a business suit, explaining with a plausible smile and the diction of a college graduate how really, he’s not prejudiced, but well, you know, people are just different. I can’t remember the exact script, but as I recall the smiling man said something to the effect that it’s not that he objected to them moving into the neighborhood or working in his office. But come on, let’s face it, differences in education can mean differences in behavior, and often these people just don’t understand what’s required…

President Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a Congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence Agency’s latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques. New York Times, 3/9/08

President Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed torture.

Ten words. Ten straightforward words as opposed to the thirty-eight in the above opening sentence to the New York Times story. There’s a reason why the Times uses triple the verbiage required. Journalists today are doing their best to edge around a truth too ugly for our media to confront directly. The writing must instead be carefully unfocussed so that it’s not about torture but about Bush’s “legacy,” about “strong executive power,” nice, bloodless terms that help stretch the sentence out and further dilute its actual meaning.

The Don Siegelman case recently publicized on 60 Minutes marks yet another nasty convergence between reality and the “You’re-with-us-or-you’re-against-us” rhetoric driving the American right these days. For anyone who somehow managed to miss the story, which aired on February 24th, Don Siegelman was the Democratic ex-governor of Alabama. He is currently serving a prison term for what looks like a politically motivated frame-up. His greatest “crime” was apparently being a powerful and popular Democrat.

There’s been a good bit of emoting from the Alabama GOP in response. Before the 60 Minutes segment even broadcast they sent out a press release that was almost British in its dignified anger, bristling with Peter Cushing-ish words like “perfidy,” “ludicrous charges,” and “grotesque imaginings” and describing the segment as a “hatchet job.” Afterwards, the Alabama GOP demanded a retraction. "Only the most committed anti-Rove/Bush activist could swallow such a tale," wrote party chairman Rep. Mike Hubbard.

…that buck-toothed witch Satan, Hillary Clinton… No, she is a -- she is a -- Oh, God! She is evil…Bill Clinton and his fat ugly wife, Satan….” (Don Imus, writhing his way through a hategasm on Imus in the Morning, 5/24/06)

The word “misogyny” frequently induces eye-rolls and resigned sighs from men, especially when they come up in the context of a political campaign and a woman candidate. Utter the “M” word while talking about the kind of coverage Hillary Clinton has endured in the course of her campaign, and some men, liberal and conservative, will wearily shake their heads.

… and then imagine he [Obama] loses. I seriously think certain segments of American political life will become completely unhinged. I can imagine the fear of this social unraveling actually aiding Obama enormously in 2008. Jonah Goldberg, The Corner, 1/4/08

… For the record, I'm not talking about black people at all. I'm talking about conspiracy-minded, paranoid, nearest-weapon-to-hand debating, financially secure white bloggers and other members of the lefty-blogosphere like, you know, Glenn Greenwald.The MoveOn-"don't taze me bro" crowd is still convinced the election was stolen from John Kerry. If Obama loses, people like Greenwald and Ezra Klein will hurl their Ikea throw-pillows with unbridled rage. Jonah Goldberg, The Corner, 1/6/08

I guess it was too much to ask that David Oshinsky begin his New York Times review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism without the usual eye-rolling reference to 60s-era liberals referring to any and all opponents as “fascists.”

It isn’t actually illegal for an article that contains the word “fascist” to begin in some other manner, though many writers seem to think it is. The piece could have started, for instance, with a dictionary definition of “fascism.” Or Dr. Oshinsky could have provided some context by offering, as a history professor, an overview of the word’s background and usage that conjures up something more than the image of a hippie in a poncho and headband shrieking “Off the pigs!”

In Stella Gibbons’ 1932 comic novel, Cold Comfort Farm, there’s a moment when the story’s heroine, Flora, learns about a male acquaintance who is working on a book that posits Bramwell Bronte as the actual author of Wuthering Heights:

“Ha! a life of Bramwell Bronte,” thought Flora. “I might have known it. There has been increasing discontent among the male intellectuals for some time at the thought that a woman wrote Wuthering Heights. I thought one of them would produce something of this kind sooner or later.”

A similar sense of resignation settles over me every time I hear about Jonah Goldberg’s upcoming book, Liberal Fascism. To paraphrase Flora Poste, there has been increasing discontent among conservatives for some time at the thought that Hitler was a right-winger. I thought one of them would produce something of this kind sooner or later, and now, inevitably, someone has. Godwin’s Law, that modern debating affectation which presumes that the best way to venerate the millions of victims of the Holocaust is to ignore exactly how the numbers got to the millions in the first place, has at last borne fruit.

Recently I paid a visit to the city where I was born, New Orleans, my first since Katrina. Other members of my family have expressed their feelings about the city through photography. I'm not good at taking pictures, so instead, I wrote this.

Poetry is not something that prose writers really have much business attempting unless they are Shakespeare or Edgar Allen Poe, or Thomas Hardy. Still, nothing else seemed right.

In New Orleans the old spirits still walk
Madame Lalaurie, waving her crusted whip,
And chasing a black girl,
The white-faced soldiers in blue,
Gibbering from their window,

A few years ago, sitting in my San Francisco apartment, I watched a documentary that within the first half hour had me reduced to a sad-eyed puddle of nostalgia. Most of it was shot in Louisiana and Mississippi and as I watched outdoor shots of that flat green, almost jungle-like landscape with its levees and bayous, as I listened to the soft accents of the people being interviewed, I found myself yearning to go back. God, how I missed those velvet summer nights, the spicy food, the way people talked… Why, oh why had I ever left?

And then, in the course of an interview with a lovely, white-haired southern lady, the subject of the Civil Rights era came up, specifically the case of three young Civil Rights workers who had been murdered by the Klan in Mississippi back in 1964. This lady’s delicate nostrils quivered with revulsion, her small mouth hardened, her eyes grew slightly dreamy and cold and she said that when certain people come south just to make trouble, just to stir the black people up, well, bad things can happen to them. It was unfortunate really, but they brought it on themselves…

I was working at my desk last week when I heard CNN’s Rick Sanchez announce to Kyra Phillips, “I’ll tell you what’s interesting about talking to Ann Coulter.”

Naturally this attracted my attention. It didn’t cause me to stop what I was doing and turn around in my chair to watch, but I’m naturally curious about why talking to Ann Coulter would interest anyone. I should think it would be about as interesting as talking to an air horn. So I listened and was rewarded with the following:

One of the lessons I’ve learned online since 9/11 is that the right wing assessment of statements often relies, not so much on the context and actual meaning of the words, but on who is saying them.

For instance, if a right-wing blogger asserts that open criticism of the Iraqi war is treasonous, and that therefore Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, and Democrats in general are a bunch of traitors who deserve to be rounded up, put on trial for treason, and shot, the reaction from other right-wingers is likely to be kudos to the writer for putting it all so succinctly and wittily.

If however, a liberal blogger points out that making open criticism of the Iraqi war treasonous would result in Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, and many, many Democrats, including the liberal and the liberal’s family, being hauled off for execution, many of those same right-wingers will scornfully denounce liberal “paranoia.”

It’s become quite fashionable in certain circles to inveigh against well…you know…them.

I mean those hook-nosed, black-haired, filthy-rich, conniving nonChristians with the funny dietary laws who are conspiring against all that is right in just in our society.

Oh come on, you know…them! The swarthy types who want to take over the world, rape our blonde women, kill our children, and steal our stuff. Those others.

The Moslems.

The language of dehumanization never really changes. There might be some minor adjustments as societies and targets shift, but it’s striking to observe the common threads visible, whether you’re discussing the anti-Semitic writings of Julius Streicher, the racist novels of Thomas Dixon Jr., or Ann Coulter’s latest bigoted screed. The language doesn’t change because the purpose doesn’t change. Its intent is paint a grotesque caricature of THE OTHER that, through sheer repetition, overlays reality in the minds of the audience

Speaking generally, I observe that while liberals delight in deceit, conservatives outgrew that amusement at age 6 and we've moved on to more productive activities.—(Andrew Schlafly, on Conservapedia’s main page discussion page.)
(From Conservapedia’s Main Talk Page)

Back in 1996, Robert Boston’s book on Pat Robertson described the then recent upheavals at Pat Robertson’s Regent University surrounding the dismissal of its Law School Dean, Christian Reconstructionist Herbert W. Titus, and Regent Law School’s struggle for accreditation:

Pinochet was responsible for the death of at least 3,197 of his opponents. (March 19, 2007 edit, 2.17 pm)

Critics hold Pinochet was responsible for the death of at least 3,200 of his opponents. (March 28, 2007 edit, 2:32 pm)

Critics hold Pinochet is said to be responsible for the death of 3,200 of his opponents. (April 12, 2007 edit, 10:03 pm)

"Recent scholarship has established of 159 persons investigated between 1950 and 1952, there is substantial evidence nine had assisted Soviet espionage using evidence from Venona or other sources. Of the remainder, while not being directly complicit in espionage, many were considered security risks."
-- From Conservapedia's entry on Joseph McCarthy

The myth goes as follows: Once upon a time there was a courageous patriot named Joseph McCarthy, who sounded the alarm about Communist infiltration in the United States State Department. Liberals and leftists insisted there was no such thing as Communist espionage, and McCarthy was maligned and ultimately brought down by a liberal journalist and a conniving lawyer. Then, decades after McCarthy’s death … vindication! The 1995 declassification of the Venona Project, which had probed Soviet spying activities during WW II and the Cold War, revealed that there were Soviet Spies in the State Department!

Now how exactly could Hitler, a man who was a strong supporter of social welfare programs, gun control, animal rights, government funding for the arts and bans against smoking in public get away with being called a "conservative"?
-- From "Hitler Was a Liberal," Christian Hartsock, March 1, 2006

One of the more surprising myths that has sprung up on the Internet in recent years is the premise that National Socialism was a leftist rather than a right-wing political movement. It’s a form of historical revisionism, rooted in cultural illiteracy, that’s been spreading like a rash through the worldwide web, popping up in comments pages, surfacing in the occasional blogger essay, and triumphantly being presented as an argument on online forums. Following the pattern of many such myths, it seems to be on the verge of breaking into the print media. Jonah Goldberg has a book coming out this December, LIBERAL FASCISM, that apparently offers a similar argument.

“Tell you what though, for free, terriers make lovely fish. I mean I could do that for you straight away. Legs off, fins on, stick a little pipe through the back of its neck so it can breathe, bit of gold paint …” -- Monty Python Pet Shop Sketch, circa 1970

It’s fascinating to observe the ways in which grown, educated people will struggle to make a terrier into a fish. Whether it’s euphemism, omission, repetition, posturing, quote mining, or simply stuffing a gag in a truth-teller’s mouth, it all boils down to the adult version of crossing your fingers behind your back so that, along with convincing the listener that a lie isn’t a lie, you can convince yourself that you aren’t really lying.

It looks as though visiting Conservapedia and clicking the “random” button to see what entertaining weirdness pops up has become a way for many liberals to waste time on the Internet. My personal favorite is a passage I found about “Frank Kafka” which had me looking hopefully but in vain for an entry on that great American filmmaker “Franz Capra.” Another, much briefer entry has the writer correctly listed as “Franz Kafka” but both close with the flatly untrue statement that Kafka “suffered from bouts of insanity” late in life.

(Written the day after the huge MLK Day peace march we had here in San Francisco in 2003)

On the front page of Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco's municipal website, SFgate, is a helicopter shot of Saturday's peace rally. Market Street is black with people, packed so tightly that the sidewalk has vanished and the street itself appears to have widened to the foot of the buildings that line it. It is astonishing. It is glorious. My husband and I were in the thick of that mass, moving slowly down the street towards the rally at the Civic Center. We saw a sign being held high a little ways ahead of us. "THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!" it said, and beneath those words were a line of arrows, pointing straight down at the crowd.

(This was originally posted to a now defunct liberal blog a couple years ago. I think it bears repeating)

There's a phrase I've been hearing a lot lately from some moderates and conservatives when subjects like the 2000 election, the PATRIOT Act, Jose Padilla, or the latest Supreme Court atrocity are brought up. It goes something like this: "I understand your concern/I hear what you are saying/It's good that people like you are around to remind us of the importance of Civil Rights. I, too, am troubled/disturbed/uneasy about some of the actions of the current administration. But really, you are making way too much of this/veering towards hysteria/crying 'wolf.' When the day comes that I feel our rights are in serious danger, I assure you," (and here are the words that keep getting repeated, almost verbatim) "I'll be marching right there alongside you."

A blogger called Spocko recently took on San Francisco’s local right-wing station, KSFO by drawing attention to some of their more – let’s just say “outspoken” – radio personalities. To be precise, Spocko provided advertisers with audio clips of some of their DJ’s riper comments, pointing out to Britesmile, for instance, that they might not want their product being pitched by someone who had just finished talking about tracking an emailer down and “doing something unpleasant to his cojones.” (http://www.glcq.com/sprocko/cojonesbritesmile.mp3)

That was one of the milder examples. Other audio clips that Spocko harvested included Melanie Morgan suggesting that Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, be dug up (she died in 1994 from breast cancer) and “kill(ed) all over again,” (http://www.glcq.com/sprocko/digupcarson.mp3) Brian Sussman telling a caller to prove he’s not Muslim by saying “Allah is a whore,” (http://www.glcq.com/sprocko/bsallahis.mp3) and Melanie Morgan, Ann Coulter, and “Officer Vic” yakking it up over a supposedly hilarious imitation of NYT editor Bill Keller being slowly executed in a defective electric chair. (http://www.glcq.com/sprocko/jokingkellerex.mp3)