Richard Cohen gets a taste of what it is like to cross the Eschaton knuckle-dragger crew:
Two weeks ago I wrote about Al Gore’s new movie on global warming. I liked the film. In response, I instantly got more than 1,000 e-mails, most of them praising Gore, some calling him the usual names and some concluding there was no such thing as global warming, if only because Gore said there was. I put the messages aside for a slow day, when I would answer them. Then I wrote about Stephen Colbert and his unfunny performance at the White House correspondents’ dinner.
Kapow! Within a day, I got more than 2,000 e-mails. A day later, I got 1,000 more. By the fourth day, the number had reached 3,499 — a figure that does not include the usual offers of nubile Russian women or loot from African dictators. The Colbert messages began with Patrick Manley (“You wouldn’t know funny if it slapped you in the face”) and ended with Ron (“Colbert ROCKS, you MURDER”) who was so proud of his thought that he copied countless others. Ron, you’re a genius.
***The hatred is back. I know it’s only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations. I can appreciate some of it. Institution after institution failed America — the presidency, Congress and the press. They all endorsed a war to rid Iraq of what it did not have. Now, though, that gullibility is being matched by war critics who are so hyped on their own sanctimony that they will obliterate distinctions, punishing their friends for apostasy and, by so doing, aiding their enemies. If that’s going to be the case, then Iraq is a war its critics will lose twice — once because they couldn’t stop it and once more at the polls.
The reactions were immediate and predictable:
Richard Cohen got 2,000 mean e-mails and this signals the end of the Democratic party. I’ll leave you to figure out why that should follow. In case Cohen hasn’t noticed nobody on the fucking planet likes squishy faux liberal courtiers. There’s no political downside to hating Richard Cohen.
There is, apparently, no ‘political downside’ to being an asshole, so many on the left and the right will continue to urge people to behave like one. Something upsets you- get ten thousand people to fire off vulgar e-mails. Really- it convinces people your position is right. [/sarcasm]
At any rate, there is a certain segment of the online left (and right, for that matter) who think that the key to electoral victory is to keep a certain segment of the population in a frothing rage. Any perceived slight must immediately be met with an email campaign and a ‘Wanker of the day” post that can be linked by the entire “spittle-flecked monitor” wing of the Democratic party, and that will ensure that the evil NEOCONS are kicked out of office in November.
And within an hour of posting this, I will have several people calling me an asshole for not realizing that the country is going to hell and that THEY HAVE EVERY RIGHT TO BE MAD AS HELL!
Doug
I might be mistaking correlation for causation, but I think it bears noting that frothing, raging jerks have been winning elections since 1994. Because, as we are told, “at least they stand for something.” Being nuanced has gotten the Democrats their lunch handed to them.
tBone
Which is exactly why you posted it.
What, no Cindy Sheehan news today?
Davebo
Ahh Poor Richard.
I’m sure he can take some solace from Michelle Maulkin.
Nasty emails… whoopie!
The only thing more pathetic than allegedly professional writers complaining about the email they get is Jeff Goldstien in the closet with his dog.
This is what we waited over a week for? Geez, it’s obviously a slow Cindy Sheehan day.
Doug
But probably more to the point in this case is that the Republicans have been far more effective in “working the refs” in the past decade. The left-wing digital lynch mob is one way of trying to level the playing field. The country would no doubt be better off if both sides cut it out. But only if *both* sides cut it out.
Davebo
tbone beat me to it.
SomeCallMeTim
1. If you can show me one staunch Republican who has been convinced by the sheer ineptitude of the current Administration to vote for Democrats, I’ll find more convincing your implicit argument that we should be trying to politely convince people on the other side to vote our way.
2. Being dicks hasn’t hurt the Republicans at all. Rush Limbaugh remains a huge figure in the Republican Party. So do the crazed theocrats. Regenery (publisher of Unfit for Command, Men in Black, etc.) is a money-making machine. Nothing succeeds like success. Of course some Democrats are going to ape the Republicans. We want to be successful, too. Welcome to America, John.
Faux News
I thought Clarence Thomas had the copyright for “Digital Lynching” and/or “Digital Lynch Mob”. Kind of like “Let’s Roll” by the grieving widow Mrs. Beamer.
I’m sure RedState.com is all over this. I think I will go see what the Kool Aid drinkers are up to over there.
Signed,
Tofu Hot Dog
Brian
I am glad you linked this story. True, the Right has its version of the Kossacks. LGF, for instance. But the ratio of moonbat to wingnut sites is about 10:1. The Left is so riddled with rage that it’s difficult to imagine how that can be turned into political capital that wins elections. I guess we’ll see in a few months, but the results don’t look good for sane Democrats, who only get vilified by their Angry Left for straying off the message of hate.
I loved this from Cohen’s piece:
That is a perfect description of certain commenters on this very site. And when I have the temerity to point it out, I get more of the same. Angry Left, indeed.
Jill
Well, let’s take John’s advice and instead of getting mad it’s time we get even! Right, John?
I say let’s impeach the president and we’ll call it even!
Krista
Good point. The only difficulty with wanting to tune out the nutbar fringes of both sides, is that it’s all so subjective. Who decides what constitues the nutbar fringe of the right? Is Pat Roberts on the nutbar fringe, or are his attitudes shared by more people than we’d realize? Is Howard Dean on the nutbar fringe? Depends on who you talk to, really. Unfortunately, political discourse is now ruled by whoever has the snappiest sound bite, and it winds up resembling nothing so much as a nap-deprived preschool. And I’m sure it’s been like this ever since politics existed.
Brian
Well, why don’t you give us an update on this. How are the Kool-Aid drinkers treating this story? Well? WELL??
So much for your assumptions.
Rob
from Kos; a better thought out response:
Brian
So, that’s what the anger’s about? Getting even over Clinton? The 2000 election?
Whatever. Won’t happen. Get some professional help.
Ancient Purple
Question: How come Cohen never actually rebutts any criticism of his claim that Colbert was unfunny?
Or was asking that question just me being angry?
Perry Como
The Left tends to be more tech savvy. The Right has a ratio of about 100:1 with wingnuts in radio.
I’d say it would be nice to see both sides stop it, but then my shares in Orville Redenbacher would drop.
Faux News
Is this where you tell me to “suck a donkey’s penis” like you usually say to “Lihbruls”?
By the way, great post on RedState.com today on why Jimmy Carter SHOULD have been impeached! Tomorrow it will be on why FDR should have been impeached.
Feel free to join them Brian and imbibe with the KCN Kool Aid.
Reminder: You are no scs and never will be…
Jason Robertson
All this started in the 1990’s with the GOP’s frothing rage toward Slick Willie. The left is only following that winning example.
Marcus Wellby
At any rate, there is a certain segment of the online left (and right, for that matter) who think that the key to electoral victory is to keep a certain segment of the population in a frothing rage.
Something you would never ever hear on the wonderful world of talk radio.
I’d wager that most sports writters get more hate mail in one day than Cohen will in his entire career. This baby needs to grow some thicker skin or get a new line of work.
VidaLoca
Cohen’s problem is that he writes BS like this
that seeks, through its passive-voice construction, to avoid facing the fact that as part of “the press” he bears some personal responsibility for the press’ refusal to do its job in critiquing, overseeing, investigating and exposing the most disastrous political regime in the country’s history. Instread he’s wailing that Colbert isn’t funny. No — Colbert bitch-slapped Cohen, and Cohen’s in denial. “Institution after institution failed America” — give me a break.
Memo to Cohen: re your email. You’re getting exactly the respect you deserve.
The Other Steve
What’d Richard Cohen say to bring on the deluge?
I’ll point to another example of right-wing idiocy, and I’ve emailed this guy before…
John Dickerson
Now what outraged me about his article? It wasn’t actually the opinion, I thought that was pretty braindead. Nor was it the unflattering picture, as I thought that was pretty juvenile. Naw, it was the misrepresentation of facts.
My understanding of what Pelosi has said, is that they intend on granting the Medicare department the authority to negotiate bulk discounts.
This is rolling back parts?
Everybody get’s their own opinion. But you don’t get your own facts. I don’t even know if it’s a worthwhile measure. But Dickerson doesn’t even discuss that. No, he mischaracterizes it like a 5 year old debate school flunkie.
Jill
Cohen, et al, are pissed b/c with email every reader has an easy way to give instant input to columnists and reporters. Gone are the days of writing, stamping and mailing a letter to the editor.
Brian, thanks for the concern…
The Other Steve
I gotta agree. If Cohen is going to get paid money to spew his bullshit on the Op-Ed page, he ought to get a thicker skin when people spew bullshit back at him.
tBone
You’re right, Brian. Your post asking Tim how Kos’ ass smelled demonstrated how reasonable you are compared to the howling moonbats on this site.
Brian
Rob,
You think that this is a well-thought-out response from Kos:
How exactly does a writer of Cohen’s caliber respond to this:
Or this:
That is about as substantive as the “thoughts” get. And it’s ALL OVER THE INTERNET. Why should he respond to it favorably? All the guy did originally was criticize Colbert. He’s a fucking comedian!! But it was as though Cohen was critical of an Angry Left God-figure, and therefore was blasphemous of him to do so, so he had to be treated like the Danish cartoonists.
The Angry Left is more similar to the Islamic radicals than they are to any sane American political opposition trying to gain political clout through a genuine exchange of ideas. What ideas or thoughts do you offer?
Brian
That’s all you’ve got on me, and you know it. That’s why you bring it up every time you post to me, that very same example. Take your ball and go home now.
neil
Anyone who would call this a ‘Digital Lynch Mob’ is obviously too thin-skinned to make it in the newspaper business. Please, don’t you realize that Richard Cohen is the only man in America qualified to express his political opinions? That’s why they pay him the big bucks, people.
And where did you get the idea that you could email the author with your reactions? Just because they provide you with his email address? That’s the equivalent of throwing a rock at somebody’s head, you disgusting radical. There is simply no distinction to be made between reacting to a column and physically assaulting a stranger. None.
Perry Como
The Atrios’ of the Angry Left are like the Zarqawi’s of the Islamists, chopping off the heads of rational debate.
tBone
Other Steve – I don’t always agree with John Dickerson, but I’ve never gotten the impression that he’s particularly right-wing. I don’t see that line you quoted as being all that inaccurate – they plan to “roll back” the parts of the law that don’t allow negotiation with prescription drug companies, aren’t they?
The Other Steve
Didn’t georgia10 write that and not kos?
Cohen’s caliber? Probably with…
I know you are, but what am I?
Where did this come from anyway? It’s not in georgia’s post.
So why are you so ANGRY about this, Brian?
ImJohnGalt
Great, so Cohen has 3000 hate-filled e-mails, and the most corrosive he can find to exemplify the fever-swamp is “You wouldn’t know funny if it slapped you in the face?”
Christ, that’s an opinion, not vitriol.
But keep telling yourself that just because a journalist didn’t have a fainting couch and spilled his latte when he fell that this tolls the death of the Democratic party.
Seriously, doesn’t anyone see any irony in the fact that he’s writing about e-mails he received to a post that he thought was relatively innocuous? Aren’t the e-mails no big thing either? What a wanker. Guess he must’ve had writer’s block or something. Clearly there’s nothing more important to write about. [koff]Hayden/Goss/Twatergate[koff]
neil
When I guilelessly clicked on the name, I would get a bucket of raw, untreated and disease-laden verbal sewage right in the face
Perhaps someone should throw a real bucket of untreated disease-laden sewage in Cohen’s face so he would learn the difference.
Matthew J. Stinson
Being out of the country means I miss a few things. When, for instance, did the left decide it hated The Washington Post as much as the right hates The New York Times? Is this loathing of the Post a necessary part of the fringe left’s attempt to mold itself into a mirror-image of the fringe right?
If the left is gonna copy the right’s ideas they might, y’know, at least try copying ideas that are good for the country instead of regurgitating the tactics that have left the American body politic diseased and deranged.
John, you asshole, this sad state of affairs is clearly all your fault for not posting more.
Brian
You’re the one who said he was heading over to see what the RedStaters are doing today on this story. Well, how did it go? I really wanted an update.
There’s not one? Oh well. I guess that Jimmy Carter post will have to suffice as a rage-generator.
More rationalizations for sociopathic politital behavior. More apologies for hate (from the “Repub’s are the party of hate” crowd). More twisted logic to support some warped sense of free speech. What a clueless bunch you are.
tBone
Sorry, I’m too lazy to go back and cull the rest of your greatest hits. If you want a new example, take some time off from compiling your ppGaz list and put together one of your own material.
Brian
TOS,
Commenter Rob posted that georgia10’s post was from Kos, so yes, it was from Kos. You’re splitting hairs.
And the other comment “Colbert ROCKS….” was from the WaPo pice which you obviously haven’t bothered to read, thereby demonstrating another sad aspect of the Left: their willingness to opine like experts on thisngs they know absolutely nothing about, and have not the urge to know about. Hate used in the place of genuine thought.
The Other Steve
If he’s spewing the right-wing talking points, he’s a right-wing shill. Maybe he’s too much in DC, I don’t really care.
The last time I sent him a letter was when he claimed that the only credible people criticizing Bush were Republicans. everybody else was a Bush Hater.
The term ‘rolling back’ has a negative connontation. What Pelosi says they want to do is strengthening the program. He used ‘rolling back’ purposefully because it sounds negative.
I learned this from my Republican friends complaining about left wing bias.
I used to be of the opinion that the bias was primarily pro-status quo. Regardless, it serves my purposes to claim they are right-wing shills, so that is what i’m going to do.
Brian
This’ll be a short thread, I can see. You can only defend the indefensible so much, and a few dozen responses pretty much uses up what little steam you have. Better to reserve it for things you can REALLY get angry about, which is just about anything, as you have shown.
The Other Steve
This post? That’s clearly georgia10. Where are you getting this Kos stuff?
Because I don’t give a shit what Cohen has to say, never read his columns… Never sent him an email, and make a comment that maybe he ought to get a thicker skin…
Somehow this displays the sad state of affairs of the Left.
Talk about moonbatville…
The Other Steve
Shorter Brian:
Honestly, I have no defense for whining. So I’m leaving to drink myself into a stupor so I don’t have to remember that I voted for Bush and am deeply sorry of that.
While you are drowning in your sorrows, Brian, why don’t you read this wingnut commentators take.
neil
Richard Cohen himself would never insult those who he disagrees with:
— Richard Cohen, February 6, 2003
Cohen will always rise to defend decorum in political arguments:
—Richard Cohen, February 25, 2003
Ok, Ok, but surely Cohen isn’t a …. hypocrite?
— Richard Cohen, February 3, 2005
ImJohnGalt
I’m not sure that’s true, Brian. We’ve had really long threads here in which you have defended the actions of the current administration, which are pretty much textbook definitions of the word indefensible.
Sojourner
Send your thanks to Atwater (may he not rest in peace), Gingrich, and Rove. Their divisive strategy for winning elections has brought us to this sorry state of affairs.
ImJohnGalt
And by the way, where are the grammar-nazis? The title of this post offends me. “Digitial”?
Oh, and always nice to juxtapose a post about so-called lefty whining with a “lynch mob”. You damned republicans are so much better at framing the issues to appeal to your base.
Jill
Angry emails are sooo very indefensible, maybe even more indefensible than the current administration, right Brian?
Otto Man
You misspelled “the Right” as “the Left” for some reason. Other than that, well said.
I did read Cohen’s two pieces on L’Affair Colbert, and I like how both times he’s managed to avoid the substance of the comedian’s critique and instead focused on the style. Colbert was rude, and now the emailers were rude. And now poor Richard has his hanky clutched tearfully to his eyelashes.
He never addresses the substance of Colbert’s criticisms — much like all the other apologists on the right — because he simply can’t. It’s easy to say that Colbert “crossed a line” with his roast when you ignore all the lines Bush has crossed. Bush’s jokes about no WMDs in Iraq was hysterical, right? And turning this country into a theocratic dictatorship is even better yet.
Stop it. Please. He’s killing us here.
Steve
I don’t really think so. The Democrats often talk in terms of rolling back the offensive parts of Republican legislation. To take an obvious example, the Democrats don’t want to raise taxes; they just want to roll back some of the Republican tax cuts.
It’s a positive frame; instead of implying “the Republicans passed a good law, and we are going to build on it,” they say “the Republicans passed a bad law, and we are going to undo it.” I think you’re drawing the wrong assumption here.
tBone
The program has been such a clusterfuck that I don’t think the average person would attach any negative connotations to parts of it being “rolled back” rather than “straightened out.”
Dickerson does have that annoying habit of confusing “balance” with “giving equal weight to truth and bullshit talking points,” I’ll give you that.
Otto Man
Really? The president sure does a great job of it.
“Harriet Miers is the most qualified person for the Supreme Court.”
“You’re doin’ a heckuva job, Brownie.”
“I’m the decider! And I’ll decide if Donald Rumsfeld should stay or go!”
“What mistakes have I made? I can’t think of any.”
Sherard
Yeah. And the most interesting thing is that one of them posts on this blog more often than you do. Ironic, that.
Andrei
This post might have been more credible had you left out the paranthentical. As such, it’s just par for the course it would seem.
Zifnab
Again, I don’t see what’s so horrible about a rallied up Democratic base. When Howard Dean was elected DNC chairman, Rush Limbaugh bemoaned the beginning of the end for the Democratic Party. When DeLay got indited, he tried to use the attack on him to rally Texas against those partisan Democrats. When Feingold proposed censoring the President, Republicans thought they could fire up the base by crying “Impeachment” and “The Criminalization of Politics”.
Every time the Republicans have been tragically wrong. So when a partisan whiner like Cohen starts crying over how the Democrats are diggin their own graves by speaking out and giving a damn, I think we should do what we’ve been doing for the past 3 years and not listen to him. The left has tried to be unified, they’ve belayed their concerns, sat down and shut up and let the noble Republicans run the country with their bullshit rhetoric and hate speech. Now people are pissed off, and that’s a good thing.
Sherard
Wow, great approach guys. Cohen is “too think-skinned”. Frothing lefty rage ? Move along, nothing to see here.
Gotcha.
My favorite comment so far, though, has to be the one where frothing rage = winning elections. Strange, but I’m pretty sure the anti-war frothing lunatics were opposed to Bush in 2004 and lost big time. If the moonbats that inhabit these comments think otherwise, I find that pretty amusing as the results are likely to be duplicated until the frothing rage is replaced by something approaching reason. Then again, they do like to label themselves, ironically, the “reality” based community. Good one.
Punchy
More like spelling-nazis. Anyways, here’s what I never could figure out. Some blog, right or left, will instruct its minions to email the crap out of some journalist, newspaper, etc.. And so they send 5, 10, 15K emails. Do they REALLY think those emails are getting read? What’s the point? No one’s reading more than 2 or 3 before deleting the whole inbox, right?
The Other Steve
Point taken. He’s still an asshole, though.
Sherard
Zifnab, just classic, I say. CLASSIC.
I’m assuming, “wrong” in your opinion. Otherwise, you could point to actual results where Democrats “beat” Republicans.
Oh, NOW they are pissed. Right. And in in 2004, they were all just okee dokee with Bush I guess. The pissed off frothing rage didn’t work in 2004 and it is not going to work any more this year or in 2008. Now, certainly, there are others that “disapprove”, but they are the ones whose approval is transitory, and can be swayed one way or the other. Those people are not frothing with rage and I have a tip for you, you are winning them over with YOUR frothing rage. But, keep on with the rage if you think that works. By all means.
les
Why doesn’t anyone, including Cohen, address the following, which seems to me to be the heart of the deal:
Or are we supposed to believe, with Cohen and (apprently) John, that every e-mail was like the two horible examples of “sewage” we’re given? Not a single message raised any reasonable point worth a response? Or is it just too hard?
Sojourner
OMG. I can’t believe that anyone on the whacko right would seriously challenge the left’s reality-based designation considering the left has been consistently correct about this administration and its incompetence.
Give it up, babe!
The Other Steve
An “incumbent” won by the narrowest of margins in like forever is a “big time” win?
Your definition of success and failure is odd. No wonder your President’s approval is at 31% and nobody likes you.
The Other Steve
Sherard,
I sense anger. Why are you so angry?
Didn’t Bush win in 2004? Why are you so concerned with what the moonbat lefties have to say?
neil
les, he does admit that he didn’t read all the messages. But he’s also fairly clear on the point that no mere reader is capable of making a good argument to him.
The Other Steve
Wasn’t Bush’s win a validation of the love for your Fearless Leader? I don’t understand. Why are you so all concerned with what a bunch of Bush Haters have to say?
ppGaz
In 18 months, the basic mantra of the right shifted from “We won, get over it” to “You lefties are so angry.”
Has the right actually got anything more than the taunts you’d hear at the local high school boys’ bathroom?
The government of this country is in shambles, and the 25-year Republican hegemony is in danger of becoming a six-year clusterfuck, and this is the best you can do?
The reason why I implore John and Tim to do something about this absurdly embarassing Darrell-Brian-Par material is that it’s the right that is being embarassed here. The right has no useful representation any more in this layer of blogovillia.
It’s all “You just hate Bush” and “You have no new ideas” and these repeated, useless taunts.
Well, here’s an idea: When your government is in the toilet, fire it and get a new government. That’s the main purpose of HAVING a constitutional process for changing governments, isn’t it? To provide the people with the means to peacefully overthrow the dunderheads.
So, let’s overthrow them. If there’s a Cole or a Brian or a Darrell over there doing the schoolboy taunt thing, then to hell with them. We’re playing with live ammo here.
Sure, we could collaborate on the best way to proceed from here, in the best of all possible worlds. But that’s the point of decrying the Darrell-Brian-Par thing ….. you can’t collaborate with them. They just want to keep defending the people who go us into this shitpile in the first place.
Uh, sorry …. that ship has sailed. Game over.
Perry Como
Bush had a mandate after the 2004 election.
A MANdate.
Let me reiterate, a Man Date.
Jeff Gannon, clean up on aisle 4.
Steve
I can’t even bring myself to get worked up over this discussion. Just make sure to clip and save this crap for when we have a Democrat in the White House again, please.
neil
Cohen has certainly based a lot of columns on the nasty email he gets.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20996-2004Dec22.html
Punchy
No, that’s Lench Mob, copyrighted by Ice Cube. And if Lunch Mob is copyrighted, since it involves food, I’m betting Limbaugh owns it.
DonkeyKong
Let me understand this. Because Dick Cohen got some testy emails, the american public will rise up to smite the Democrats, liberals and antiwar types.
Un-fucking-believable.
Apparently, a steady diet of crabcakes, chardonney and cocktail chatter can make you insane.
Andrei
Not that it matters, but I meant left off the paranthesis… need coffee still.
ImJohnGalt
neil, the funniest part of that story you linked:
The mind boggles.
Mike in SLO
The angry left is doing what the angry right did in the 90’s. After all, it worked for them.
Ryan S.
I have a feeling that most of those emails came not from true left leaning people, but from the legions of rabid college-aged Stephan Colbert fans. Who would have sent them to anyone who would Anything disparaging about him.
slickdpdx
ppG urging meaningful discussion and decrying taunting is one of the funnier comments i’ve read anywhere today
Al Maviva
Neil says:
Hey, that’d show Cohen how wrong he is about the left being angry, Neil. Guess you win that argument.
Ryan S.
would SAY Anything …. is what i meant
Al Maviva
Oh, I’ll save y’all some time and just auto-pen Meta-responses to my comment to Neil for everybody from this point on:
Andru: Liar, Liar, Logical fallacies on fire!
Deep Purple: But you still haven’t answered my question about the Bush family being behind the designated hitter rule, and the infiltration of ex-Nazis into the National League. You lose.
Slid: Shorter Al Maviva: “I have nothing to say so I make up bullshit about other people’s arguments. Then I make up meta bullshit about other people’s ad hominems. Then I make up meta meta bullshit about other people descent into profanity over my meta bullshit over their ad hominems…”
Curseda: Yet another attempt to defend the indefensible.
The Other Other, Secondary Alternate Steve: Conservatives are basically evil because they all generalize about libruls.
Brain: I tried to be rational, but now I’m just going to blockquote 53 inane things PPGAZ just said, conclusively demonstrating that he is nuts. Because none of you suspected that before.
PPGAZ: &$#%^! Plus, *%^@ Republican (%&# and (^%&@ing %*#@ers!
Tim: Ducks float. What else float. Witches. So if a Republican goes swimming and floats, what is he? A corrupt, warmongering murderous bastard. That’s right! This should be entertaining. I’m cool with it. Here, have a beer.
Jon Kohl: Oh, I get so tired of the incivility, hurtfulness, and the name calling you pack of stupid *$%*&sucking *(%$^4-buckets.
yet another jeff
If the Cohen’s argument was that Colbert wasn’t funny, isn’t “you wouldn’t know funny if it slapped you in the face” an apt reply? Hell, if he found it to be “frothing rage” it further proves that he wouldn’t know funny. That’s classic stuff, it killed in the Catskills.
I don’t know, but I think that if he isn’t laughing when someone says “Colbert ROCKS, you MURDER” or “You wouldn’t know funny if it slapped you in the face.” then he truly doesn’t know funny as it is already slapping him in the face.
“you MURDER”…brilliant and absurdist.
BTW, when exactly did The Right start categorizing everything The Left did as a symptom of rabies?
Andrew
I have to give al credit for two things here:
1) Somehow restraining himself from writing 2000-3000 words on the subject, and
2) succesfully framing the debate to be about the “angry-left.”
The real question is, why the fuck shouldn’t we be angry? I’m angry that the Bush administration has let a city die, killed about 50,000 innocent civilians in Iraq, and run up deficits that my grandkids will be paying off to their Chinese overlords.
If we can’t get angry now, when can we? I, for one, refuse to take in the ass like some sort of Whitehouse reporter.
Krista
I have a feeling you’re right, and that those e-mails were more about their love for Colbert than their concern for the direction in which the country is heading. At any rate…a “lynch mob”? I mean…really? Has anybody died from this? Have families or livelihoods been ruined? It’s just a bunch of pissy emails clogging up somebody’s inbox. The left may be Angry ™, but the right certainly seems to have cornered the market on Melodramatically Persecuted ™.
Parahalo
Eschaton crew are not smart people who think they are in a position to be smart, but, if you try to take that away, you find they are the same as MSM in the early days acting like modern dems wanting money and power.
So, when it comes to sensing and following coups, maybe they should listen a little instead of destroying what was in power to have them taken out of power and feeding on the the corpse like a maggot of who they did’nt like like someone else to get ahead of a game everybody else already had figured out like the persons in the country they are trying to effect by not affecting and keeping quiet until what they really wanted to happen happens and then claiming they were as right as the persons who arranged the coup, not tht those were locals in that country being used by some other country that Eschaton wants a job from or, at the least, something special(they are).
Well, I guess they allow comments now, but that’s because…………….
Ryan S.
Since they found out they couldn’t run government any better then the left.
Andrew
Oh crap, strike that first point. Al must have accidentally hit submit before his rant was finished.
Davebo
Cohen, like Cole but to a greater extent, has no choice but to reprint hate mail from readers.
He has to deflect the fact that he (and Cole) are partially responsible for one of the biggest bonehead foreign policy ideas since the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.
Frankly I find it hilarious that John is complaining about faux outrage in a piece who’s only real point is to create a faux outrage to deflect from the very real outrage generated by their past boneheaded decisions.
Al Maviva
Hey, if you feel that way, then go throw some sewage, Andrew. Please. Be my guest. Be as angry as you like. Whatever makes you feel better. And keep using gays as a metaphor in your commentary on Republicans. That scores points too. Very impressive. Like Neil, you just won both of those arguments. I’m convinced.
NMitrea
Just read this too understand why Cohen felt it was rude and why he shouldn’t have – http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hilden/20060509.html
tBone
Who would have ever suspected that Al Maviva, King of the Absurdly Long Post, would turn in an excellent Cliff’s Notes version of an entire thread? Nice work, Al.
LITBMueller
The really interesting part of the “who’s angrier” debate is that its the right that more often turns their righteous indignation into action (at least in the past 10-15 years).
I mean, its not the “moonbats” who are forming militias and gathering on the border with Mexico, or gathering outside a hospice to demand that a woman be kept on life support even though her cerebral cortex had turned to mush, or staging “Brooks Brothers Riots” to stop an election recount in Florida, or protesting at abortion clinics, or dressing up as a ninja and torching a porno shop in order to serve God.
I guess this can be seen in two ways: (1) that there is a difference between anonymous drive-by emailing and lashing out in public, and (2) perhaps the left would be more successful politically if they turned their anger and “frothing” into some form of organized (and civilized) political action.
Al Maviva
I’m sorry, Andrew. I’ll try to keep things in a format you can follow. No more than ten words per sentence. No more than two syllables (sill-uh-bulls) per word. No more than ten short sentences. Is this paragraph okay? It has a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 2.5. That is a bit high for you. But if you try hard, you can do it! I will try to find a crayon font if that is easier for you.
tBone
I think Andrew was using prison rape as a metaphor in his commentary on the Washington press corps, Al.
John S.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Wake me up when someone has anything interesting to say.
ppGaz
I don’t see where I’ve urged anything called “meaningful discussion,” especially here. The name of the blog is a metaphor for Hot Air, not discussion.
What I’m urging is that the right take some responsbility for its commentariat. If stupid taunts and “lefties are poopyheads” are all you have, then you might as well give it up. This is a lefty blogsite now.
My approach to this has always been the same, which is basically “respond in kind.” That’s all I do, and it’s a tactic that works almost all the time. There is no faster or surer way to piss off your adversary and throw him off stride than to respond in kind … just mirror back his own rhetoric and bullshit. Try it on Brian sometime and see what happens. You can get him to go meltdown in 36 hours or less every time.
The GOP era of struts and chest-beating is over. The GOP has failed, its government has failed, and it’s blog representation has failed. If you want something useful going forward, you are going to have to come up with something better than Brian and Darrell and their idiotic taunts. I can out-taunt them all day and all night, and have, and will again, and neutralize them completely. They are the ones without the ideas and the vision at this point, not us. We have a clear vision: The government is fired. It failed, the people are sick of it, and it is fired.
Sit around here and defend it for old times’ sake?
Why? To what purpose? To what effect?
Cut the crap, fellas. This party is over. Been over for a long time. We’re just fuckin with ya at this point.
canuckistani
I’m an angry lefty (a moderate liberal in canadian terms), but I am also disgusted by the ad-hominem attacks on both sides.
I present this comic for your consideration:
Penny Arcade
Bone-In RibEye
I still haven’t seen the Colbert routine but it is sooooo entertaining watching the right trip over themselves trying to outdo each other in the game of shitting on the Colbert routine. Makes me feel we have a chance to boot these ‘republicans’ from office and get this country moving again.
Andrew
Well, just Jeff Gannon. But I totally love Prison Break! Wentworth Miller is so dreamy! And T-bag would soooo make David Gregory his bitch.
ppGaz
So, you would choose to hang around (a) a blog whose name is a metaphor for “Hot Air” …. and (b) a blog where the principal owner has been know to post entire series of articles explicitly “just to piss off” commenters ……………………
…..why?
Andrew
Actually, I think we should start planning for the internment of Christians as the final solution to the War on Christmas.
ppGaz
Well, we have a lot of the most troublesome ones confined to Colorado now. That’s a start.
fwiffo
Richard Cohen, Joe Klein and the like strike me as truly remarkable weenies. Golly gee, they got hate mail because they wasted paper on their dingbat opinions. My God, think of the children!
I once had the temerity to post on my web page that I don’t like the Beatles. I’m not talking about some major blog here – it’s my personal vanity page where I play around with web design and occasionally post random junk. It doesn’t even have blogging software, and I don’t know if I’m even linked from anywhere. You wouldn’t believe the volume of hate mail I recieved.
Ya know what I did? I rolled my eyes and ignored them. For one particularly persistent person who decided it was a good idea to send me multiple megabytes of articles explaining how wrong I was, I blacklisted them.
Seriously, if an inbox full of idiotic crap is such a disaster for these people, perhaps they ought to get a real job and find out what actual hardship is like.
Ancient Purple
Great post, Al.
However, I noticed that you still can’t comment without having at least 10 paragraphs.
Alexandra
How does he know he got three thousand angry hate emails? It sounds as if he opened about three of them. What a crybaby.
dave
Proof that Colbert wasn’t funny–
NOBODY IN THE ROOM WAS LAUGHING.
is that so hard to figure out? Saying he wasn’t funny isn’t the same as saying his comments weren’t biting and incisive and risky and provocative and sharp and spot-on and all that crap.. but if they were funny, wouldn’t the room have been falling apart with laughter?
IT WASN’T.
Funny is about the comic making his audience laugh. He didn’t. End of story.
Bone-In RibEye
You don’t like the Beatles? Why not?
Pb
Al Maviva,
Nice try, but you forgot to caricature your inevitable response:
I shortened it a bit for you. You’re welcome. :)
yet another jeff
Seems this isn’t Cohen’s first flaming. Why is he acting like he’s new to the internet or something?
KEVIN SCHMIDT, STERLING VA
Once again, Richard “Waa! Waa!” Cohen avoids the whole point of Colbert’s speech and those who defend Colbert, and instead embarks on another rant of illogical ad hominems, this time against Colbert’s defenders.
Boo! Hoo! Nobody likes Richard “Waa! Waa!” Cohen because he doesn’t know how to write a civil and logical editorial. Everybody is so mean to him for emanating raw hatred towards Stephen Colbert in his past editorial. Richard “Waa! Waa!” Cohen’s cry baby rant is simply pathetic and an embarrassment for him and the Washington Post.
This is just more proof that Richard “Waa! Waa!” Cohen is irrelevant. Besides Richard “Waa! Waa!” Cohen, the Washington Post, by allowing such nonsense to again be published on its editorial pages, is irrelevant as well.
Richard “Waa! Waa!” Cohen, why are you such a Waa! Waa!???
metalgrid
Short version of the debate:
The Left is angry.
The Right is a bunch of Drama Queens.
Think that about covers it.
Al Maviva
Sorry I left you out, Pb. I’ll remedy that.
Pb: “I went to a lot of trouble to avoid your argument, and basically call you an ass. I sincerely hope you appreciate it. It was a lot of work. I know, it invites detailed argument in response. But if you try to give me anything other than a simplistic caricature of right wingnut views that are easily disregarded, I’ll just mock you out for attempting to be thoughtful in your viewpoint.
Your bestest friend,
Pb
/s
JDRhoades
It isn’t a left wing website that’s selling a T-shirt that says “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required.” It wasn’t a left-wing commentator who said that the only thing Timothy McVeigh did wrong is that he didn’t murder the staff of the New York Times. There’s your lynch mob.
Let me ask you this: if Cohen continuously spouts the Republican line about the “Angry Left,” without ever mentioning the literally murderous rage on the Right, then why should anyone regard him as anything BUT a Republican shill?
Mike in SLO
104 comments on this post, 85% of them from the same 5 people. 2 comments on the Medicare post. Boy, John, you sure gave your blog the proper moniker!
DougJ
Stupid post, John. You can do better.
Faux News
We don’t pretend to be the O’Reilly version of scs. You’re the newbie who keeps reaching for that brass ring and utterly fails every time.
JDRhoades
Seems this isn’t Cohen’s first flaming. Why is he acting like he’s new to the internet or something?
The whole thing smacks of “I’ve got a deadline coming up and nothing to write about. Hey! I’ll whine about nasty e-mail!”
Ryan S.
Yeah, Their too busy tring to figure out who hates who the most.
Todays episode:
The hate filled moonbats, and the wingnuts that hate them.
Grab a seat, get some popcorn. Its gonna be LONG show.
Dave Ruddell
This is an interesting point, although not in the way that I think dave meant it. Just because the audience didn’t laugh at Colbert’s routine does not mean that it was intrinsically unfunny; how would you judge that anyway? OTOH, the fact that there was very little laughter made it less funny for me. It’s sad, I suppose, but hearing other people laugh will often make something funnier (which is why TV networks have laugh tracks, except on shows that are actually funny, you know, like Scrubs, Earl, and Arrested Development).
As an example, consider Killin’ Them Softly, Dave Chappelle’s first HBO special. Hilarious. But would it have been as funny if the audience just sat there stone-faced? No way.
SeesThroughIt
How dare you make light of the horrible suffering that right-wing white Christian males have had to endure since day one in this country! Nobody has been more persecuted than they have–and they will tell you all about it.
Faux News
Good point JD. If someone would care to spend some time perusing the Southern Poverty Law Center website (splcenter.org)or magazine they would get quite an appreciation for the myriad of violent right wing hate groups in this country. They VASTLY outnumber any violent left wing group like EarthFirst! Not to be confused with Dr. Frist’s 2008 POTUS campaign called EarthFrist!
Sorry to disappoint folks like Al and Brian but all those Klan/neo-nazi/milita types who attack and kill Americans right here in this country are not Liberals.
McNulty
Good god, some of you people are dumb.
The main point is that Cohen finds it hard to believe that simply saying someone wasn’t funny could get people so pissed off that they find the need to email him in about it.
And saying Colbert wasn’t funny doesn’t make Cohen a right-wing shill or a Bush apologist. (Newsflash: Right-wing shills and Bush apologists tend to not write favorably about an Al Gore film on global warming.)
I was no fan of Clinton, but I still didn’t find Don Imus’ comments about him a few years back at a similar dinner the least bit funny.
Similarly, i think Ted Kennedy is a scumbag, but i think Chappaquidick jokes are old and tired.
It’s not that hard to understand.
Pooh
Cohen writes terrible column…angry emailers complain
In response Cohen writes terrible column…
This will end well, I’m sure. If only we can get the Jane Hamsher’s of the left involved.
In all seriousness, it sucks that people are getting personally nasty with Cohen. But it also sucks that he’s paid to write thoughtful columns and doesn’t always provide value for money. But that might require some sort of Algebraic formula, and we all know how much RC likes those…
Pb
Al Maviva,
You got me there. You had a thoughtful viewpoint?
Mr Ronnie
democRats are destined to lose, they have a losers mentality.
DougJ
Cohen is an embarrassment. It doesn’t matter where you sit politically — his columns are just plain awful.
If John and Al are going to side with Cohen against Colbert, I’m going to start throwing Lou Dobbs on them to attack Bush’s immigration policy.
Some people are just wankers. Cohen is one of them.
Steve
Why don’t you watch the video again. Pay extra special close attention to Justice Scalia.
Davebo
Since a huge part of Colbert’s schtick was to poke a stick in the eye of folks like Cohen is anyone really suprised that Cohen found it unfunny?
Mo Cheeks
Yeah, you are right. Things were better when people were apathetic and didn’t bother to get involved in politics. They should leave it to people like yourself and remain dispassionate.
W.B. Reeves
What a sand box argument. No one, including Cohen, has any idea what the character of the majority of these emails was. Cohen admits he didn’t bother to read them all. Nor did he publish them. The excerpts he cherry picked range from dull vulgarity to inarticulate but hardly sustain the “tsunami of hate” meme.
Really, how coddled does someone have to be to describe “you wouldn’t Know funny if it slapped you in the face” as emblematic of a “digital lynch mob?”
I’ve no doubt that Cohen received some nasty and probably lunatic emails. That comes with the territory of being an opinion columnist. But if his examples are actually representative, I’d say that he is far too delicate a plant to be in the business. Evidently, he couldn’t come up with a single out and out death threat to buttress his “lynch mob” characterization.
What is interesting about his column is the insight it provides into the mental universe Cohen inhabits. This is a man who imagines that he is still fighting the internecine political battles of thirty eight years ago. You remember don’t you? Back when all those “hateful” anti-war hippies insured the defeat of Hubert Humphrey.
What he ignores is that in 1968 Humphrey was the “stay the course” candidate whereas Richard Nixon ran on a platform that explicitly appealed to the war weariness of the electorate by claiming that he had a “secret plan” to end the war. Pretending that the election of Nixon was a repudiation of anti-War sentiment is a dog that won’t hunt.
Cohen’s whole complaint amounts to a fantastic projection. In his view, people aren’t irate because of what he wrote but because they are the latter day incarnations of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. He needs to get out more often.
LITBMueller
Guess ya didn’t see Scalia laughing his ass off.
Thing is, though, its no surprise when the people getting picked on don’t laugh – and Colbert hit on the whole room. As for the TV audience, I’d suspect about 60% of viewers laughed, if you accept the latest polls. :)
ppGaz
You need a laugh track to decide if something is funny or not?
The comic page in the newspaper must be hard for you, then.
yet another jeff
But everyone watching on CSPAN was laughing…and do you have any idea how much traffic is generated by forwarding copies of the video/links to the video? Maybe the folks in the front tables weren’t laughing, but millions of people thought it was hilarious.
chopper
i love it. malkin’s followers send physical threats to some leftists after getting their addresses, and it’s ‘well, they shouldn’t have made them public. boys will be boys.’ dick cohen gets an email saying ‘you wouldn’t know funny if it slapped you in the face’ and it gives him such a case of the vapors that it’s absolute proof that the left is doomed.
this is an elaborate joke, right?
Ryan S.
Not to them…. Thats why its so hilarious.
The Ace
Let me ask you this: if Cohen continuously spouts the Republican line about the “Angry Left,” without ever mentioning the literally murderous rage on the Right, then why should anyone regard him as anything BUT a Republican shill?
Gee, I don’t know, because you’re a silly buffoon?
Anyone referring to Cohen as a “Republican shill” obviously has a mental disorder.
I love how you kiddies pretend that a)you’re not angry and b)it doesn’t matter becasue there are angry conservatives out there anyway. (Remember, Republicans are “dumb”, “corrupt” & “evil”, but acting like them is ok silly hypocrite!)
Hilarious.
This is what is called cognitive dissonance.
You wear it well.
People like you are exhibit A as to why the Democrats can’t win a national election. Your silly excuse making, juvenile response, and lack of critical thinking abilities about sum up the Deaniac left.
Keep it up.
Please.
Al Maviva
JD and Doug, good to know that we have folks like you standing on the ramparts, guarding against the Klanners, right wing militias, Tim McVeigh and abortion clinic bombers, that veritable tidal wave of violence that comprises anybody to your right. If it weren’t for people like you tussling with us right wingers on a dank mannichean battlefield, the country would be finished. Well, it’s finished anyhow because Bush is president, but that’s zany over-the-top-hyperbole for another thread. When you’re done whupping Tim McVeigh and the militias and David Hale and the rest of the Republican base, maybe you can come over to the right wing side of the country where we’re engaged in an equally timely struggle against Wobblies, the Hun, Chinese immigration and polio.
The Ace
this is an elaborate joke, right?
Yes, and you’re the punchline.
But please sit there and pretend nobody actually threatened Malkin and of course leftists don’t act violently toward Republicans.
Don’t want to burst the little bubble you’re in…
Pooh
The voice of reason arrives!
Jim Allen
I don’t know what the big deal is. It’s obvious what Cohen needs to do when he’s attacked by someone from the left. He should write an article and call the perpetrator an “asshole” and a “dickhead” and tell him (or her), “go fuck yourself”. Then he should set up a spam filter so no response could get through.
That’s what a real macho writer would do, right?
Brian
If the shoe fits…..
DougJ
In all seriousness, it sucks that people are getting personally nasty with Cohen.
No, it’s not — he deserve it. He deserves worse. I have zero sympathy for people like him, Joe Klein, Deborah Howell , and David Brooks. If anyone at a regular job performed as poorly as they do, they’d be fired. This has nothing to do with politics and everything to with job performance.
Barbar
Cohen writes op-eds in the obscure Washington Post and people actually e-mail him in response? Oh the horror. I would call him a “whiny-ass titty baby” but then we’d need to break out the smelling salts.
And I honestly don’t understand how someone could read a Cohen column and not immediately think “Oh my God this guy is a wanker,” by the third sentence at the latest. Seriously.
DougJ
Al — where did I mention right-wing terrorists in this thread? The only time I’ve mentioned them recently is to suggest that the FBI is using Pajamas Media to implement a flypaper strategy that will attract all of the potential right-wing domestic terrorists to a single place.
Otto Man
What video did you watch? I saw Scalia nearly wet himself, and several shots of people open-mouthed, heads-back. Maybe they were all sneezing?
So yes, unless you’re blind, several people were laughing. But many weren’t. And with good reason — the press and the president were the butts of Colbert’s routine.
Laughing at his jokes would be tantamount to admitting what the rest of us know — the press and the president are/i> jokes.
canuckistani
I enjoy the squabbling before it sinks to personal abuse.
neil
Hey, that’d show Cohen how wrong he is about the left being angry, Neil. Guess you win that argument.
I didn’t say we should throw a bucket of raw sewage in his face because he’s wrong or stupid. I said we should throw a bucket of raw sewage in his face because he seems to have a severe misconception about how pleasant that experience actually is. It might make him realize that reading e-mail is not actually that bad of an experience.
But thank you for hocking a digital loogey in my face by implying that my political beliefs have anything to do with this rather matter-of-fact statement.
ppGaz
This is what has become know here as the Darrell Strategy.
It’s also the standard fare, now, of spoofs. See: Scrutator for more on this.
Don’t lose the perspective here: Bunches of the same people who are now flapping their arms over Colbert being “not funny” are the same people who thought Bush joking around about not finding WMDs was funny.
So, if you can follow this, the president who started a war to save us from WMDs thinks it’s funny that the WMDs aren’t there, but it’s not funny to slam the president in front of his, uh, well, whatever you call those reporter people. His friends, I guess.
See? Does it make sense now?
Brian
Angry Left gets called on their anger, and what do they do? They get MORE angry. No introspection. No soul searching. No consciousness raising. No accomodation of valid criticism.
No, they get ANGRIER! That’s the answer! And exactly how do you think this will get converted into election gains?
Hate is not a family value. Remember that little bumper-sticker quote you guys birthed back in the ’80s? Time to live it.
tBone
Damn those Chinese immigrants. We need to build a large wall to keep them in their own country.
tBone
Brian is doing so much projecting he’s going to have to get a license from the National Association of Theatre Owners.
Perry Como
Dammit. Forgot all about that one.
Barbar
Which of these is not like the other. Heh.
The sort of stuff that would get you punched in a bar. . . . Colbert was more than rude. He was a bully.
The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. . . . I know it’s only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations.
Not nice, but it was what Washington does day in and day out. . . . it was not the intent of anyone to out a CIA agent and have her assassinated (which happened once) but to assassinate the character of her husband. This is an entirely different thing. She got hit by a ricochet.
http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/2941
fwiffo
Worked for republicans.
Al Maviva
I’m sorry DougJ, I meant Faux. Faux is the guy citing the SPLC to prove Republicans are right wing terrorists.
Please, if you could retain my mistake in your insult bank, credit it to my account. Then someday when you write something that I’d find irritating, but I’m not around to respond, just whip out that little bit of misdirected slight and consider yourself insulted. Work for you?
Brian
Wrong. But by all means, keep believing it. In fact, amp up that anger, buddy. It’ll serve your party in the manner I would like.
JDRhoades
Is Ace some kind of Internet ‘bot? Because his answer was an apparently random selection of standard hackneyed wingnut responses (“You’re a buffoon” “You must have a mental disorder”, “this is why you lose elections”, etc.) with no actual relevance to any post.
DougJ
Brian — my God you’re a moron.
I’m sorry that I’m angry that influential people in our media are bragging about how funny they were in junior high as our contry plunges trillions of dollars into debt. I thought that was something that conservatives and liberals might agree about — that the superciliousness of the punditry is hurting America. In fact, I think it is. You’re not conservative — you’re just dumb.
Andrew
Do you guys think we could breed Brian with Al Maviva and create an especially stupid and long winded Bush sycophant?
Zifnab
“Release your anger. Embrace your hate! And your journey to the dark side will. be. complete!”
DougJ
I may disagree with Al, but I wouldn’t necessarily call him a “Bush sycophant”. And I wouldn’t lump in with Brian.
JDRhoades
Do you guys think we could breed Brian with Al Maviva and create an especially stupid and long winded Bush sycophant?
I’m hoping they don’t breed at all, least of all with each other.
Woops, sorry, don’t want them to think I’m (shudder) angry.
Davebo
Brian and Al,
You can certainly spin it anyway you want, but the fact remains.
On just about every important subject of the past 4 years you’ve been not only wrong, but dead wrong. The public has made it clear (and will do so even louder come November) that the folks you worship are incompetent.
And with well over half the populace now hating Dubya’s guts, are you sure you shouldn’t reclassify BDS as a pandemic?
Brian
Sorry, dude. I obviously missed that part in your comment about the economy, and your sincerity about wanting to work with true conservatives on balancing the budget, eliminating debt, and making the universe safe comedians.
I’d like to stick my fist into your nose. Is that anger you can relate to, pussy? Or, how about introducing your next to the sharp end of my shiv?
I might as well speak in code that you can understand.
tBone
Al isn’t stupid, or a Bush sycophant. Nevertheless I think the world is much better off without a Brianviva hybrid.
yet another jeff
Raw anger is well known to be much more nutritious than cooked, or processed anger.
The Ace…so, because Cohen got a lot of flame mail, it’s a time for Intense Retrospection for the Angry Left? Ah, seems like just a couple years ago that The Left was being slammed for never getting angry. What’s Exhibit B? Do we have to forgo the Frigidaire to see what’s behind Door #2?
Otto Man
Thanks for restoring the civility, Brainiac.
yet another jeff
Sorry, sorry…confused when Brian was quoting The Ace…
Man, y’all sure do seem angry about the anger of The Left? Why does the Anger of The Left anger you so?
Brian
Even if you assume this is correct, why do you expect the same public to vote for the opposing party? You have nothing to vote for. You didn’t in 2000, 2002, 2004, and now, 2006. All you have to bet on is a protest vote, and most Americans take their votes seriously enough (you don’t, but they do) to vote with a conscience. And why would they toss away a perfectly good vote on BDS? If the Dem’s won that way, they’d have to pander to that segment of the party, and Americans don’t want fuming, flaming, ranting, hyperbolic nutcases in Congress. In other words, they don’t want the inmates running the asylum.
We can argue all day about Bush’s failures, and I’d likely agree with you on most of them. But we’re still left with: why should I vote for you instead? (The “I” being Joe Q. Public)
Andrew
Well, yes, so this is where the Brian-genes come into play.
We could even splice in some Darrell and stormy DNA.
Can you imagine? Four thousand word essays on how RedState is full of leftist sympathizers!
And this is even before the bridge the animal-human hybrid gap with Jeff Goldstein’s dog.
tBone
Brian must have renewed his subscription.
Par R
DougJ writes:
DoodieJoybot, you have long ceased being amusing, and it’s for certain that you don’t possess the “smarts” to say anything remotely intelligent. Why don’t you go back to spoofing Protein Wisdom. Jeff said he kind of appreciated a dumb foil such as yourself.
Brian
Where does civility get me here? Nowhere.
You bring the discourse to your level, and that’s where I went to. You want a higher level of discourse, then engage people at that level.
tBone
Yeah. Americans figure six years of that is enough.
The Other Steve
I still don’t understand.
Why is the Right so *ANGRY* about the left being *ANGRY*?
Oh yeah, one more thing…
My favorite was a friend who claimed Dave Matthews had no talent, yet was a big fan of the Beatles. I declared to him that the Beatles were the Backstreet Boys of the 1960s. He didn’t like that. :-)
Zifnab
As for the whole “Democrats just keep losing elections” meme, I’m impressed that a party with this many people getting indited and going to jail over bribery, money laundering, and Abramoff-related incidents can get off on the whole “We won because the people just love us” thing.
Republicans have been buying and rigging elections for decades now. Florida, Ohio, and California have all been targeted by the GOP political machine.
Basically, Republicans cheat. Alot. And when they win by cheating, even with the slimmest margins, they call it a mandate. And we get a fist full of Darrells telling us how everyone who voted for the opposition is just a bunch of sore losers, that we shouldn’t be mad or get politically active, and that the vast fields of silent majority right wing voters are merely silently, passively flexing their political muscles against those lunatic moonbat hippie internet wackos.
So again, I say ignore them. Ferret out the cheating, persecute the corruption, and go on to prove these guys are full of shit in ’06. I’ve got faith.
JDRhoades
I’d like to stick my fist into your nose. Is that anger you can relate to, pussy? Or, how about introducing your next to the sharp end of my shiv?
Yeah, it’s really the left that’s angry.
Par R
Bob Somerby wrote something somewhat similar to Cohen’s initial post on Colbert, and got flooded with similar shit from the loony left. And Somerby is not only a former Al Gore college roommate and vigorous defender, but a reliable liberal on virtually all issues, including the TRUTH. And I guess it’s his insistence on adhering to the TRUTH that got him in trouble with the moonbats, including I dare say many posting comments here.
Pb
I just wish the Angry Left would stop harping on ridiculously divisive partisan issues intended to distract and divide that don’t do anything to help the well-being of this country (which, naturally, makes them seditious traitors as well), like missing white women, libelous smears of a sitting President, translations of the national anthem, partisan investigations of libelous smears of a sitting President, embryonic stem-cell research, impeachment of a sitting president founded on partisan investigations of libelous smears, building a wall across the Mexican border, banning gay marriage, etc., etc.
…what’s that? I don’t know my Left from my Right? …nevermind.
Pooh
He deserves criticism, surely (just as do Deb Howell and Joe Klein). Maybe even vitriol. But vitriol can also be substantive (see Tim F. for the last few days), somewhat so (see Maviva), or not at all (bad-boy Brian).
I agree that I have little sympathy, but from a purely tactical standpoint, it’s too bad that the nastiness gets personal, because then ‘the hurted feelings’, the last refuge of the useless pundit, is a viable option for retreat.
Pooh
He deserves criticism, surely (just as do Deb Howell and Joe Klein). Maybe even vitriol. But vitriol can also be substantive (see Tim F. for the last few days), somewhat so (see Maviva), or not at all (bad-boy Brian).
I agree that I have little sympathy, but from a purely tactical standpoint, it’s too bad that the nastiness gets personal, because then ‘the hurted feelings’, the last refuge of the useless pundit, is a viable option for retreat.
DougJ
Brian — you’re terrific. Have you ever thought of hanging out at some of the hard-core nutjob blogs, Protein Wisdom, Scrutator, Atlas Shrugs, etc.? You’d fit right in.
Someone want to put together Brian’s greatest hits? That thing about getting me with a shiv’s got to rank up there.
The Other Steve
Great point.
Please, please stop engaging Brian. By engaging people of his level, you are only serving to drive down the level of the entire discussion.
chopper
But please sit there and pretend nobody actually threatened Malkin and of course leftists don’t act violently toward Republicans.
since when is ‘you wouldn’t know funny if it slapped you in the face’ a threat? or are you just an idiot?
JDRhoades
Where does civility get me here? Nowhere.
You bring the discourse to your level, and that’s where I went to. You want a higher level of discourse, then engage people at that level.
Brian’s a born follower. This explains much.
yet another jeff
It’s sadly hilarious that someone is afraid of a slap from Funny.
Perry Como
A deadlocked government is the best government.
The Other Steve
Them Bob Somerby is clearly an idiot who can’t think straight.
We’ve been all over this. Colbert wasn’t talking to the people in the room. He was talking to the people who watch his show.
If Somerby doesn’t understand that, then he should have kept his fat trap shut.
Blue Neponset
Why don’t we just teach Brian to be long-winded? That might be easier.
Also, say what you will about Al but he certainly isn’t Brian-like. Unlike Brian, Al actually makes real (and wicked long) arguments that more or less make sense most of the time. Also, Al’s insults are actually intelligent while Brian is insulting at an 8th grade level.
tBone
Whoooo. This one needs to go into the Spoof Museum.
JDRhoades
Please, please stop engaging Brian. By engaging people of his level, you are only serving to drive down the level of the entire discussion.
Oh, all right. It’s fun, but I’ll admit it is the sort of fun one gets from teasing a chihuahua and watching him hurl himself against the fence.
yet another jeff
Al is topical and essential to the plot, like a Cartman joke on South Park, Brian is pointlessly referential, like a joke on Family Guy.
DougJ
Brian is the real deal — a right-winger so obviously stupid that he embarrasses his own side of the argument. That’s what I try to do when I spoof, but I don’t think I ever attain the kind of authenticity Brian has — at best, a spoofer can only be Mick Jagger to Brian’s Leadbelly.
The Other Steve
Great point.
Carry on people, taunting the Brian is great fun!
JDRhoades
Al is topical and essential to the plot, like a Cartman joke on South Park, Brian is pointlessly referential, like a joke on Family Guy.
So we should blame the manatees?
DougJ
It’s sadly hilarious that someone is afraid of a slap from Funny.
POtD.
slickdpdx
ppg: get lost kid, the monkey bars belong to us now
Scott W. Somerville
I was pretty upset about Clinton, and couldn’t believe that 66% of America really thought he was doing a good job, but time has persuaded me that right-wing rage isn’t a winning formula.
Maybe left-wing anger will be more successful.
slickdpdx
that should be
shorter ppg “get lost…”
yet another jeff
I’m starting to think that Brian’s advice on how The Left should manage it’s anger to win national elections is somewhat less than sincere.
I don’t care what party the president is from, as long as that party does not control Congress.
Still, if the anger of The Left has the power to piss off The Right so much…how can it be a bad thing?
DougJ
I’m trying to stay away from this blog these days because it’s too addictive, but I’ve just got to soak in all the Brian while I can. I wonder if I could get a plank from Brian’s shack to carry around for inspiration.
jaime
Wow. I always thought it was a combination of gerrymandering, fear mongering, and voter apathy.
yet another jeff
Maybe a splinter of the True Brian’s House? Have you a Donation of Faith to send?
demimondian
Otto:
No, snoring.
DougJ
No, snoring.
No, strung out on oxycontin.
Slide
actually didn’t the Democratic candidate for president receive more votes than the Republican candidate three out of the last four national elections?
yet another jeff
Well…it is still mouth breathing.
demimondian
I didn’t know that Rush performed at the WHCD this year. Cool!
neil
It’s true that CSPAN has pretty awful audience mikes. (I actually had to go to FreeRepublic to read about that, where, _contra_ DougJ, they didn’t really like Colbert at all.) Most of the laughter that clip picked up must have been coming from a few tables — upon rewatching the clip I noticed you could clearly make out somebody talking over the crowd mic.
Anyway, no matter how many Cohens take to their typewriters to warn Americans that Colbert was unfunny, it seems that people are watching it.
tBone
Back on topic – it’s been several hours since John made the original post and no one has called him an asshole yet. Why can’t the Angry Left stop its constant flip-flopping?!?
Steve
John has a bad batting average when it comes to predicting the antics of the Angry Left. Why, some of us are still waiting for the Democrats to call for Cheney’s impeachment for getting drunk and shooting that guy in the face.
neil
tBone: But the emails! Can’t you imagine what the emails are like?!
Brian
You don’t impeach a VP, dipshit.
DougJ
I actually had to go to FreeRepublic to read about that, where, contra DougJ, they didn’t really like Colbert at all.
I only looked at it early — of the first 20 comments or so, most were positive. The tide may have turned as the Brians of the world showed up to comment.
neil
Actually, Brian, you do impeach a Vice-President. But please, heap some more insults on us! By now, that basically means ‘you told me so’ to us.
DougJ
You don’t impeach a VP, dipshit.
Huh?
http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_112.shtml
This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal Opinion page, so someone like you should believe it.
tBone
Article II, Section 4:
“The President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
chopper
wow brian, you sound so angry.
yet another jeff
Dammit, tBone…I was just searching the comments to ensure that when I made the post that it would be accurate. You snuck in while I was researching. Grrr, you win this battle….
tBone
Sorry. I’m an asshole. An angry one.
Davebo
And the fourth ammendment doesn’t say a thing about probable cause.
Geez, it’s a good thing this crowd has decided it can violate any law it wants to.
Since they can’t seem to parse laws in the first place.
Brian
The constitution contains lots of items you folks don’t particularly observe. I didn’t say you can’t impeach the VP, I said you don’t impeach him. No one has, and no one ever will. The fish stinks from the head, so you rid yourself of the President, and the rest fall like dominos, or the VP takes the presidency and pardons the predecessor.
THAT’s how it works.
tBone
Brian makes a solid argument here. I guess it’s a good thing the Angry Left wussed out and didn’t call for Cheney’s impeachment over Shootinganoldguyinthefacegate.
Krista
Ha! Very nice.
Steve
So basically, John Cole predicts the Democrats will call for Cheney’s impeachment, I mention that it hasn’t happened yet, and I’m a dipshit because “you don’t impeach the VP.”
I surrender. The Angry Left is no match for the Incoherent Right.
neil
So if the Vice-President has committed crimes, you impeach the President and let the Vice-President pardon him?
Blue Neponset
Brian,
Didn’t you learn about Spiro Agnew in Civics class last month? He would have been impeached had he not resigned.
chopper
I didn’t say you can’t impeach the VP, I said you don’t impeach him.
that’s one of the best semantic squirms i’ve seen all day.
Steve
Also, he didn’t say Congress couldn’t impeach the VP. He said I don’t impeach the VP, “dipshit.” I still say the Incoherent Right wins the debate.
ImJohnGalt
He also didn’t say “the VP of the United States“, dipshit. He was clearly talking about the VP of Liberia, and you *don’t* impeach that bad boy. Why are you lefties all so angry?
Barbar
Here’s an interesting question. Check out this column from Cohen in 2000.
http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2005/08/cohens_column.html
Is there anyone of ANY political persuasion who can read this and not conclude that Richard Cohen is a wanker by the second paragraph? Even the bizarre right-wing nutjobs who appear here, not to speak of John Cole, who actually seems halfway intelligent.
Surely we can all agree that Richard Cohen is a wanker?
Brian
The great document also says that Congress authorizes war. That happens, right? Well, actually, it doesn’t. You can count on one hand the number of times that it’s happened.
There’s the document, and there’s what’s followed as a practice. And the practice is: VPs don’t get impeached in and of themselves.
Steve
It’s also worth noting that “VP” doesn’t necessarily mean Vice-President. According to my handy acronym dictionary, it can also mean Vice-Principal, Viral Protein, Variance Propagation, or Vapautus Palveluksesta, which is Finnish for “relieved from service.” I trust we all agree that none of those things are impeachable.
Waxmaker
Mr. Furious, paging Mr. Furious…
Steve
Technically, you could count it on one finger, as long as you counted that finger eleven times. Anyway, the Incoherent Right just keeps landing body blow after body blow. Oof!
ImJohnGalt
I’m still waiting to hear why “Lynch Mob” is appropriate, here.
Digby has had a number of illuminating posts on the eliminationist rantings of the right. Still waiting to hear the liberal pundit that advocates a terrorist blowing up the National Review.
Cmoore
It is interesting to me that what used to be two parties just saying they disagreed with each others ideas seems to have degraded into not “I just disagree” but “I dont even like you.” From: “I cant go along with your logic on that.” to “I don’t even respect you as a person, you stupid idiot!.”
Then we wake up and have a political process so polluted with partisanship and vitriol and self interest that I fear the ability for reasoning people to reach across the isle to get anything done is quickly becoming untenable altogether.
What’s good for the country or the state (which ever one your in) clearly comes 2nd or 3rd to what’s good for MY party.
A retired washington lobbyist told me that when they were not on the hill, he used to see lawmakers both Democrats and Republicans having meals together after hours working on issues. Now he says if they aren’t preening for the cameras or in committee all they do is raise money for the next election.
Well I hope your all proud of what we have become. Oh well…. I guess its just “The other guys fault” right ?
DougJ
That Cohen article is amazing — the one Ezra Klein wrote about.
neil
Brian is right, but he’s right in a weird way. I think it’s also true that no impeachment of the President could ever succeed, either — because any President facing likely impeachment would resign before they made him do it, like Nixon.
However, to state it as a general rule, I’m not so sure about. I’ve never pulled an emergency brake on a subway car, but I wouldn’t claim based on this that you don’t pull the emergency brake.
Steve
Of course, the punchline is that John Cole is the one who said the Democrats would try to impeach Cheney, so it’s him that Brian is calling a “dipshit,” not any of us.
RonB
Maviva. He even took alot of shit on his own blog for banning the Republicans to the wilderness.
ppGaz
No, he’s wrong, but fashioned himself a weasely semantic loophole.
Yes, you can impeach a Vice President. The fact that no VP has been impeached, notwithstanding. The fact would have no bearing on the ability to bring impeachment against one, or to convict. It’s just an oddity of history, so far, that one has not been impeached. The fact is, most VP’s have been largely invisible and ignored until the recent ascendancy of executive power.
RonB
Brian, honestly, why shouldn’t they be? Why shouldn’t anyone, for that matter?
Ancient Purple
Out of Lithium again, Brian?
RonB
Par R=GOP4Me
Gop4Me/Par R=???
Steve
Thanks for the explanation of how it works, Brian.
By the way, you know that the President can’t actually pardon someone who’s been impeached and removed from office, right? You did know that, right?
Andrew
What kind of quorum is needed for impeachment purposes? Is there any reason, besides the general spinelessness of the Congressional Democrats, for not filling up the chamber when a few Republicans are also there (to the normally requisite 218 members for voting purposes) and voting on impeachment?
Besides, too, Brian’s constitutional authority to make shit up, I mean.
ppGaz
What’s really amazing is that in March of ’05 when I came here, over half the commenters here were basically Brians.
Can you imagine what that was like? And it was only a year ago.
Welcome to the post_katrina version of BJ. Leeeeeetle different!
But if you think Brian is bad, and he is, wait until Darrell shows up!
Pb
ppGaz Says:
…and the other half was DougJ? :)
Brian
Make shit up? There’s the governmental process you think you have, and there’s the governmental process that functionally exists. They are not the same.
rachel
On the internet, nobody can do anything to you for just being an ass.
Bone-In RibEye
Left and Right…its the new North and South.
tBone
I think 6 years of the Bush administration have taught all of us that, Brian.
Brian
True. A president can’t interfere with an impeachment in progress, but s/he can pardon for the crimes that may lead to the impeachment. So, if Cheney (our VP, in case you don’t know) gets charged, Bush can pardon him before an impeachment occurs, thereby impeding an embarrassing process and Bush having to testify. He’d take a lot of heat for it, but he can do it.
Harley
This Richard Cohen?
The evidence he [Colin Powell] presented to the United Nations — some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail — had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise.
Poor Baby.
Steve
1. For the VP to take the presidency as a result of impeachment and then pardon his predecessor before the impeachment occurs would require some kind of wormhole.
2. In any event, pardoning someone for the underlying crime does not foreclose an impeachment for that crime.
scarshapedstar
Something upsets you- get ten thousand people to fire off vulgar e-mails. Really- it convinces people your position is right.
I must have missed the part where Atrios said “Quick, now everyone send him incoherent emails laced with profanity.”
ppGaz
Un, no. The pardon is a criminal proceeding, while impeachment is a political proceeding. When impeachment proceedings are brought, there’s no “pardon” possible, the president has no standing that I know of. The Senate has sole power to dispose of the impeachment one way or the other as far as I know.
The Other Steve
CMoore wrote:
Let me introduce you to logic.
When this bipartisanship was happening, who was in control of Congress? Answer: Democrats
Who is in control now? Answer: Republicans
Another little tidbit of history. The unwritten rule used to be… politics ends at our borders. Who abandoned that rule? Answer: Republicans
What power do Democrats have in Congress to change this? Answer: None
So, let’s see. Republicans were at fault for poisoning the well, and they are the only ones in control to fix the well.
That pretty much makes it the Republicans fault.
The Other Steve
One more thing CMoore… Newt Gingrich disbanded the various processes which were in place to maintain that bipartisanship.
So again, who is at fault?
ppGaz
Blame it on the bossa nova.
Steve
When Michelle Malkin actually published students’ phone numbers and email addresses on the front page of her blog, John was all like “oh, she just linked a press release, and then some knuckle-draggers decided to make death threats,” as if there was barely any causal relationship. But apparently, any time Atrios calls someone a wanker, it’s equivalent to unleashing an angry mob! I know John is no Malkin fan but I still don’t think he’s playing this one straight down the middle.
What if all of John’s angry commentors read this post and start sending Atrios nasty emails? Will John feel responsible?
Ancient Purple
The most scary thing I think I could hear on this blog is that Brian is a civics teacher.
/shudder
demimondian
The Constitution is silent on whether or not the Presidential power of pardon extends to the impeachment and removal process. It seems wildly unlikely to so extend, however, since that would make impeachment, removal, and permanent ban from holding office of trust totally toothless.
However, if Bush were impeached, I fully expect to hear from the pestiferous punpits of presidential primacy that the power to pardon is parvasive.
Steve
No one ever takes my word for anything.
Article II, Section 2:
Barbar
That Cohen article is amazing—the one Ezra Klein wrote about.
Yup. Can’t we all just get along? In the interests of unity, I suggest:
Is there anyone, no matter of what political persuasion, who can read that Cohen column and then say with a straight face that he is not a wanker?
Here’s the link again:
http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2005/08/cohens_column.html
ppGaz
Uh, you’ll need to join Brian in the corner with the large Dunce cap.
Wow. This thread must have set a record for bad information.
Beej
If the foregoing comments are representative of the level of political discourse in this country (and I have no reason to doubt that they are) then God help us all! Please, everyone, explain to me how attacking other commenters personally is supposed to convince them to agree with you. Persuasion is the art of opening the eyes of others with your words. Hard to open one’s eyes when someone is throwing acid at you. But they did it first? So what? You hated it when they did it so now you’re going to do the same thing so they can hate it when you do it? Oh, yeah, that makes sense!
Pooh
Cohen’s kids are huge fans of Ice Cube’s early post-NWA work
ppGaz
Beej, what in the world made you think that “persuasion” has anything to do with blogging?
I always find that one of the oddest and most charming notions that regularly shows up in places like this.
The blog is called an ugly name that represents “Hot Air.”
It’s mostly performance art, and theatrical rhetoric. Persuasion?
In ten years and many tens of thousands of articles in Usenet and blog-o-land, I have yet to see any reliable examples of intended or even accidental persuasion.
Sherard
Yeah you frothing rage filled lefties, you run with that impeachment thing. That’s a SURE winner. Morons.
Beej
ppGaz,
You’re probably right, more’s the pity. Can you imagine what a tool blogs could be if people really did try a little reason and persuasion? One of the reasons I read John Cole’s blog is because he seems to me to be a reasonable person. Too bad reason is waaaaaay down the list of priorities for many commenters.
Par R
New and apparently naive Beej writes: .
The fact that so many of the commenters have no functioning abilities to “reason” is undoubtedly responsible for this result. The collective IQ of any random three probably totals less than the average age of any other three.
Brian
How did you guess??? I teach government at UCLA.
Andrew
I can’t decide if Sherard is slower, more dim-witted Brian or if Brian is simply a more punctual Sherard.
ppGaz
Okay. You, Darrell and Par go first. Set the example.
Give me a call when you think you’ve created the proper environment. My email address is in plain sight. Been using the same one for ten years.
Yours? Par’s Darrell’s? Hmm. That’s funny, you guys don’t seem to be reachable. Well, I’m sure that’s just a minor oversight that will be corrected forthwith.
Andrew
Okay, I take it back. You’re a good spoofer.
Ancient Purple
Or just a liar.
ppGaz
Third time in a row that Brian has taken a sudden powder when the subject of email addresses comes up.
What’s the deal, Brian? You do HAVE an email address, right?
The Other Steve
Lead by example.
Perry Como
You can impeach a ham sandwich.
jpe
This just in: there are lots of crazies out there. Wadda scoop!
demimondian
ppG — you know what? I’m not reachable, either. Nor is DougJ, as far as I know.
Jess
As usual, Digby has a particularly nice comment on the matter:
trostky
Hey, 279 comments. Not bad, but you’re no Richard Cohen, hate-mail-wise.
Ancient Purple
Baloney.
ppGaz
I don’t know about you, but both John Cole and I have exchanged email with DougJ.
But who has exchanged mail with Darrell, Par, or Brian?
Anyone?
srv
All,
Me thinks DougJ has been busy:
Shorter Jeff G
Perry Como
Contact LGF. DougJ is the founder.
srv
And on the 8th day, God:
Put a radial engine on a motorcycle
Perry Como
That scares me. Only because I don’t want my ass pulled into that back tire.
ppGaz
Wow. I like the airplane.
As a bike, though, you need some serious air moving over those cylinders to cool them at any real power setting, eh?
The Other Steve
Apparently the creator of that motorcycle doesn’t have much faith in his ability to survive.
I say that, because I noticed…
He’s got no steering or brakes!
Can you say SPLAT!?
Perry Como
A buddy of mine has a great story about someone that *demanded* a suicide clutch on a bike. Young kid, rich parents, wrecked bike after a couple blocks. Stupidity knows no bounds.
ppGaz
I think it might be a photoshop motorcycle.
Anyway, DougJ, Brian and Beej are all creations of people at Scrutator.
Wasted thread.
The Disenfranchised Voter
Let the haters hate.
Colbert owned the WHCD. He made the press look just as incompetent as Bush.
Obviously Cohen’s panties were in a twist. I wonder if he’d like some wine with that cheese…
The Disenfranchised Voter
fuck!
cheese with that wine.
…damnit.
Jess
Time to put the wine bottle down and go to bed, Dis.
The Disenfranchised Voter
I am totally sober tonight.
Thank you very much.
Usually I have to delude myself with alcohol when speaking politics to Bush supporters.
I like to think on their level and communicate in language that they obviously understand.
Par R
Obviously, I can’t speak for the others, but who in their right mind would wish to engage a complete idiot like you, ppGaz, in some sort of “private” dialogue? I rather suspect many of us aren’t used to associating with pure trailer trash like you, ppGaz.
chopper
i dunno, Par R. i can imagine wanting to engage in private dialogue with some people on this site. but not you, Par R. partly because you’re an idiot, and partly because i hate unnecessary bolding, Par R.
canuckistani
PPGaz – this is why I am opposed to personal attacks. I firmly believe that Richard Cohen should be exposed as the goof that he is, and firmly put in his place with a flood of incisive emails. But crap like the above drains the attacker of anything resembling credibility. If Par R had a point worth making, I’d ignore it if he couldn’t back it up with anything better than calling an opponent “trailer trash”.
demimondian
Actually, Perry, I think that DougJ is George W. Bush. Think about it: he poses as a conservative in order to get the base riled up, says a lot of things he doesn’t believe, and is really a liberal, according to NRO.
Sure sound the same to me, anyway. Has anybody ever seen DougJ in the same room with a pretzel?
ppGaz
Well, send me an email, and I’ll send you the list.
ppGaz
Chuckle! It’s exactly why I am for them.
Par is a spoof. The more you go after him, the spoofier he gets.
mcsey
Odd post considering two post later there’s one filed under “Outrage”.
Hey look a whole category of outrage, https://balloon-juice.com/?cat=15
mcsey
Boy I miss the point sometimes, don’t I;)
Mickey Finn
Richaerd Cohen is a hypocrite. He likes to dish it out, but he can’t take it. A careful reading of his vapors-driven column about “hate” reveals he didn’t even read most of the mail that buckled his knees. I wrote him a critical letter, not at the behest of any blogger, but because his piece was poorly supported and offensive. It contained no profanity or “hate.” Whining about public reaction to his BushCo. apologia in the way he did simply confirms his courtier status in the hermetically sealed DC press bubble.
The Other Steve
Still interesting that the Colbert video is #1 at google. The Bush impersonator is like #5, just behind a lady getting punched in the mouth and a 9/11 conspiracy theory.
Jim Allen
If you prefer a more measured (but biting) response to Cohen, check here..
H/t to SusanG at DailyKos, who also highlighted this one paragraph (from the link):
Brian
Big surprise. Just about everything anti-Bush or goofing on Bush is #1 at Google. The way they structure their engine, gives these results. The guys running Google hate Bush and the GOP.
chopper
so it’s a conspiracy then. interesting.
Candidus
(shrug)
Bipartisanship was easy when Republican congressmen “knew their place.”
Perry Como
Conspiracy theory, actually. Of course a multi-billion dollar company is spiking the algorithm for search results because OMGTHPTdrool!!1eleven
Darrell
She linked to PR release that the students themselves posted with their contact details. It also continued to be posted on Indymedia and other sites as well.
Furthermore, there is one hell of a distinction between the actions on the two sides, as Malkin’s readers were reacting to leftist student activists who physically blocked military recruiters from speaking freely with interested students with at least one sign which read “Fuck the Military”. Orders of magnitude more inflammatory than a movie review in which one guy disagreed with some of Al Gore’s hairbrained environmental ideas.
I love how the left does their moral equivalency thing. A mob of “fuck the military” leftists running off military recruiters and vandalizing their property.. in their fucked up minds equates to an unflattering movie review. How rational
Steve
So because the lefties did the more inflammatory thing… the person who printed their phone numbers and email addresses (NOT JUST A LINK BTW) on the front page of her blog is LESS culpable? Seems to me she’d have a lot more reason to know exactly what her readers would do with the information.
Darrell
The students themselves put their phone numbers and email addresses on their announcement. Let me say that again, she was posting what the students themselves were actively publicizing. She didn’t “dig up” their numbers, the numbers and email address were included on the PR announcement which the student activists wrote up and publicized. Those students were not hiding their identities, their contact information, or their activities in the least..
Malkin was directing attention to the students’ own PR announcement, which was also posted on a number of other sites, not just Malkin’s. So take me through the ‘logic’ on how that makes Malkin “culpable”? and culpable of what? Culpable of publicizing what so many on the left on college campuses are actually doing?
Bone-In RibEye
They removed their names from the press release, she dug up the cached version. They asked to stop because they were receiving threats, she didn’t stop, she posted them again.
Darrell
It’s my understanding that they didn’t ask her to stop.. Do you have anything to substantiate that claim that they asked her to stop posting their contact info, and that she refused that request?
Steve
She posted the phone numbers and email addresses on the front page of her blog, she didn’t merely “direct attention” to a press release where that information could be found. She actively publicized the information, beyond the places where it was already available.
To be clear, I never said or implied there was any equivalence between these two things. Nor did I say or imply that there was an equivalence between the people who harassed the students and the people who harassed Richard Cohen. All I asked was how Atrios could be considered more culpable than Malkin. In your head, that somehow makes me a big fan of these students who threw rocks or whatever they did, but rest assured, it’s only in your head.
I’m not going to go through all this again with you. The point I made in the post you quoted – wait, let’s look at it again:
If you want to argue that neither Malkin nor Atrios is responsible in the least for their commentors harassing the students or Richard Cohen, you know what, fine, have a nice life. The point of my post was to wonder how Atrios, who didn’t publish anything at all beyond “Richard Cohen is a wanker,” could be MORE responsible for his readers harassing Cohen than Malkin is for her readers who harassed the students.
If you want to make the case that Atrios is more culpable, great, be my guest. Otherwise, you’re arguing some point other than the one I made.
The Disenfranchised Voter
LOL.
What a buffoon.
chopper
Yeah you frothing rage filled lefties, you run with that impeachment thing.
hey, you frothing hate-filled righties impeached clinton on far less, with far more frothing hate-filled rage.
canuckistani
Is it against the law to say that?
Darrell
No. I’m not sure if it’s illegal even when leftists say things like this
But it doesn’t make it right. If it’s not against the law, you’re ok with it, right? Especially if you agree with the ‘message’.
Darrell
Bone-In RibEye wrote:
Second request to back up that statement. Please show any evidence at all that the students contacted Malkin requesting her to remove their contact info. and she refused.
Or did you simply lie your ass off and make that story up?
TTT
Flawless and foolproof truism, scientifically tested:
“If you don’t find Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart funny, you are old.”
Cohen is every lame 1950s dad grimacing at the first Beatles LP. His tastes are obsolete and wrong, and he is so shocked by the direction of the future that all he can do is demean it based upon petty ideological differences rather than actually critiquing what it has to SAY.
As others have noted, Cohen mewled his way through TWO op-eds without ever actually deigning to address what his critics (Colbert and then email respondents) had to say. He’s little better than O’Reilly, calling people “Kool Aid drinkers” and cutting off their microphones to prevent them from out-arguing him, which on a fair playing field is quite easy to do.
If he can’t tell the truth and can’t even follow a story, why trust him to be able to identify a meanie web-flame?
“OrcSlayer3:[email protected]” is not news. The news is that Colbert publicly reamed the worst two-term president in the history of this country and his idle servants in the Beltway media who love jokes about the absent WMDs our soldiers died for, and he did it to their talentless faces too. Of course they think it isn’t funny: they themselves were the joke.
Sweet Sweetback's Badassssssssssss Song
LOL.
What a buffoon.
Assclown #1, The Disenfranchised Voter, proves himself dumber than the ordinary assclown. Of course, Google has famously rigged their search engine to pull up – guess what? – when you click the “I feel lucky” option on the word “failure”.
Ho ho ho. Learn your facts, clown, before you “LOL” or call somebody else a buffoon. Moron.
Meanwhile, Assclown #2, the bloviating TTT, is quite obviously bound and determined to force the Dems to blow up in the next couple of elections over their internal split about the iraq war — a redux of the Dem implosion over Vietnam that got Nixon elected twice.
Keep it up, fool. It’s a guaranteed recipe for electoral disaster. Just keep that righteous anger coming. I’m loving it!
Hahahahahahahahaha!
TTT
Some guy with the stupidest net-handle of all time wrote:
“TTT, is quite obviously bound and determined to force the Dems to blow up in the next couple of elections over their internal split about the iraq war—a redux of the Dem implosion over Vietnam that got Nixon elected twice.”
I’m sorry, excuse me, but….
“Internal split about the Iraq War”?
Pffft. There’s barely any internal split amongst Dems about the Iraq War, just like there’s barely any internal split amongst Americans or humanity as a whole about the Iraq War. Everybody is opposed to it except for the weird, abnormal cult of people who don’t hate George W. Bush. There are probably more Wiccans in the Vatican than there are Bush / Iraq supporters in America.
You talk about Nixon’s election, but the thing is, this time the silent majority is everybody who hates Bush and his frivolous, no-gain war. And actually we’re not that silent anymore, which of course makes the last few remaining die-hards accuse us of being “angry.” Instead of doing that, Bush’s fans should stick to playing in the band as the Titanic sinks, it would be more likely to accomplish something useful that way.
Sweet Sweetback's Badassssssssssss Song
You mark my words, TTT.
The angry left is going to split the Democratic Party over the war, and it will go down in flames. I realize you’re not going to get this until it’s too late – you’re snarky remarks about Wiccans in the Vatican tell me as much.
But y’all remember what I told you in December 2006 & December 2008.
Remember and write it down on your forehead in big, black indelible letters:
I AM SWEET SWEETBACK’S BITCH
And when your friends look at you strangely, just shrug your shoulders and say, “Yo, that’s the way it is.”
TTT
Kid, seriously, if you think that there’s any real support for this war, let alone enough support for it to constitute a “split” when contrasted to the everybody who is against it, then you’re the one who never got it in the first place and you sure don’t now.
You could just as truthfully claim there’s a “split” over whether the scientific community accepts evolution, based on how a similar fraction of meaningless dead-enders mutter to the contrary. Wait, why’d I say “could”? Since you’re a Bushie, you probably already DO say that…..
BIRDZILLA
Al Gore is out of his mind and crazy as a bed bug he must be the biggist liar around and frankly he should be sent to the mental ward and have his head examened