Glenn has a great post up documenting the nonsensical whinging of the modern right about being victimized by, well, everyone and everything, that is well worth a read. A snippet:
The predominant attribute of the right-wing movement is self-victimizing petulance over the unfair treatment to which they are endlessly and mercilessly subjected. Last week, C-SPAN broadcast a Commentary Magazine event that almost certainly set a record for most tough-guy/warrior nepotism ever stuffed onto a single panel, as it featured William Kristol (son of Irv and Gertrude), John Podhoretz (son of Norm and Midge), and Jonah Goldberg (son of Lucianne). Jihadis around the world are undoubtedly still trembling at the sight of this brigade of Churchillian toughness.
Exemplifying the deeply self-pitying theme of the entire discussion, Jonah continuously insisted that conservative magazines are so very, very important to the political landscape — indispensably so — because conservative voices are frozen out of mainstream media venues by The Liberal Media, so that poor, lonely, stigmatized conservatives can only get right-wing opinion in places like Weekly Standard and National Review. In between Jonah’s petulant laments about how conservative opinion cannot be heard in The Mainstream Media, Bill Kristol talked about his New York Times column and his Washington Post column, John Podhoretz told stories about his tenure editing The New York Post Editorial Page and Charles Krauthammer’s years of writing a column for Time and The New Republic, and Jonah referenced his Los Angeles Times column. None of them ever recognized the gaping disparity between those facts and their woe-is-us whining about conservative voices like theirs being shut out of The Liberal Media. So important in conservative mythology is self-victimization that they maintain it even as they themselves unwittingly provide the facts which disprove it.
It is worth noting this is nothing new, and it is surprising how often they go to the well with the victim schitck. In response to a close election in NY-20 last night, Newsmax blares the following headline:
“NY GOP Moves To Block Franken-Style Vote Grab”
Got it? The incumbent Republican Senator of Minnesota, Norm Coleman, wasn’t just unpopular to such an extent that he could not win a three-way race. That would not be an acceptable frame for the permanent victims. Instead, we are alerted that the election was “stolen” in a “vote grab.” Also notice this sets the stage for Republicans doing whatever they want in NY, because they have to, otherwise they will be victims of the Murphy/Democratic cabal. Tedisco, with his dozens of years in the Assembly and huge network of supporters and insider knowledge of the system just doesn’t stand a chance against the Murphy machine. It would be funny if they weren’t serious.
Yesterday, the following piece circulated the right-wing blogosphere:
A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”
Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the ommittee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”
This is the mother lode, isn’t it? It is the whine equivalent of the superfecta. The liberal NY Times, ACORN, the Democrats, and Obama all conspired to steal the election from John McCain. John McCain wasn’t doomed by the fallout of decades of Republican rule. He wasn’t doomed by his poor performance in the debates, his choice of an idiot for a running mate, or his ridiculous response to the financial meltdown. No. Instead, we learn that the Republicans lost because a “game-changer” was suppressed by a liberal cabal of evildoers designed to keep the man down.
You are probably laughing, but what you don’t understand is that these guys actually believe this.
robertdsc
If I were a conservative, I would be writing GBCW emails and flinging them across the ether because of my embarrassment at the ineptitude of my chosen political party.
BTW, I forgot to say it before, but major props on switching over to the new ads without interruption.
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
Good with me if they believe this crap. It means that they are just that much farther from understanding the realities of the day, and that much more out of touch.
It means that if they aren’t careful, 2010 will come and go, they will lose more seats, and have no idea what happened to them.
Which is, you know, exactly what we want to happen.
Let them wallow in their self-justifying delusions. I am glad to help them along.
Sure, our liberal media porked you in the poopchute. Sure, Acorn was in your hoodz stealing your votz. Get your rage on, Christian Soldiers! Don’t take it lying down!
Zifnab
Hey, after eight years of Regan, the Republicans still managed to overcome a 10 point deficit and get GHWB into the White House. And after losing the popular vote by a quarter MILLION people and coming down to a margin of hundreds of votes in Florida, the Republicans still had enough SCOTUS judges to get GWB Jr into office.
With a track record like that, the Democrats must be doing some pretty shady shit to get their guys into power. How else do you explain it?
Fencedude
tl;dr
WATB
c u n d gulag
Just like Linus, they can’t be wrong! The Repub’s are waiting for "the Great Pumpkin" to rescue them.
I think that may be Newt, but I’m not sure.
Dreggas
Of course they believe this shit. Republicans talk about dems always playing the victim but once again the republicans are projecting.
Ricky Bobby
Just like pimpin’… Republicatin’ ain’t easy.
perception manager
So, Anita Moncrief went to to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom with some invented right wing bullshit and was surprised when the NYT asked for proof or some other corroborating evidence. Since there was none, the NYT didn’t run the story, like say, Faux Spews would, thus denying a "Game Changing" story and a McCain victory to the American people.
The best part of the article was this:
Yep. Could possibly, maybe. You can never know about these things. And that pattern of getting in trouble for violating federal election law? Well, Michael P. Tremoglie must of been on a deadline.
blogenfreude
…because it would have been a “a game changer.”
Like the birth certificate kerfuffle, Rev. Wright, and Bill Ayers put together!
I will say it once again – the GOP is now composed solely of sociopaths, the home-schooled, and the clinically insane.
Jay in Oregon
I bet that lawyer is still breathlessly awaiting the appearance of the Whitey Tape.
Bill Teefy
The Media has to be liberal. How else can you explain that Glenn Beck has a show?
It’s a historic fact that the American media is owned by a bunch of disenfranchised lefty loons who pooled their welfare checks to print the New York Times in their mother’s basement.
It is the "projecting" thing. It’s opposite day. Whatever.
Why do they believe it? Because if they didn’t the rest of the house of cards would collapse on itself.
WATB in spades.
blogenfreude
@Jay in Oregon: Damn – I knew I left something out – the Whitey Tape.
Comrade Dread
No, I spend enough time over on wingnut sites to know that no matter how badly they fail, it is always because they weren’t given a fair shake by the Man.
The corollary to that whine is that we dumb American sheep just don’t understand the conservative message. It never occurs to them that we get their message just fine, we’re just not buying it. Hence all of the calls that they need to get it out there in terms stupid enough for us to understand.
If you understand that latter point, then Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin make perfect sense.
Steve V
They’ve turned ACORN into this massive monolithic enemy. Not a day goes by that they don’t pull them into some conspiracy. Pisses me off. None of them had heard of ACORN until maybe October.
Comrade Dread
But they’re black! And not rich! And Democrats!
Therefore it only makes sense that they are a secret cabal of radical Muslim communists secretly plotting with the liberal media to commit massive voter fraud and install an illegitimate Muslim president to confiscate all of the rich’s hard earned money and give it to single mothers in the ghetto.
It’s the only possible explanation, damn it!
The Moar You Know
I understand it just fine, that’s why I’m laughing.
Bootlegger
I once heard O’Really say (and I’m paraphrasing): "As I’ve said countless times on my radio show, on the Factor, and in my books, the secular progressives control the media."
Had he been standing in front of me he would have been eating his own ass.
Margaret
I saw the "idiot of a running mate" yesterday. Her driver ran two stop signs. We almost hit her. It seemed pretty representative of her general style.
Btw, she was skipping important discussions (RE: refusing stimulus funds) in the legislature to visit my small Alaskan community.
Bootlegger
@blogenfreude:
What’s the difference?
Margaret
Correction: …to visit a private event in my small Alaskan community, and then jet back to Anchorage without addressing the public.
Bootlegger
@Comrade Dread:
Which is just damned funny for the party of personal responsibility and the Rugged Individual.
I think a lot of folks love the idea of personal liberty and small government. If they practiced what they preached they wouldn’t be such laughingstocks.
Joshua Norton
Or as someone else once put it – There’s 2 kinds of republicans, rich people and morons.
jcricket
I do think the best thing about the victim narrative is that it can never be disproved (like a good conspiracy theory). If you find evidence, you’ve proved your point. If you find contra-evidence it’s planted by liberals. And if you find no evidence, it’s because liberals are hiding this. It’s the mobius strip of political theories.
But when your core constituency is the Left Behind watching, gay hating, evangelical christian right, it’s no surprise this type of ridiculous nonsense appeals.
Again, if not for the fact that it encourages people like Timothy McVeigh, I’d be all in favor of this conspiracy/fascism/glenn beck nonsense. Would make it clear to anyone sane that the GOP is no place for them.
Ash Can
If Sensenbrenner is talking about the times ACORN flagged obviously bogus voter registration forms, which they were required by law to turn in to the Secretary of State offices in the states where they were conducting voter registration drives, he needs to be grabbed by an upperclassman and stuffed back into his locker. Ignorance and dishonesty are the modus operandi for these fuckwits.
Ash Can
And speaking of GOPers suffering from victimization, good old Joe the Plumbing Tool was in Harrisburg PA yesterday campaigning against the EFCA, and needless to say hilarity ensued. Actual plumbers were on hand, as well as numerous (other) real, live union members, and they were singularly unimpressed, especially when Sam Schnitzelbank admitted that, well, he’d never actually read the bill. (h/t GOS)
El Cid
If I recall correctly, during the very same years that Republicans controlled every single branch of the federal government (2003 – 2006) and most state governments, and were screaming about ‘yer withus er yer agin’ us’ and ‘the Permanent Republican Majoritah’ and the Unitarded Executrix, and the entire news media decided that what this country needed to read or see or hear was any god damn bullshit lie the White House felt like throwing out unchallenged, at that very time they were still complaining that they were being shut out by the liberals.
To this f***ing day they complain that they couldn’t do anything about the Great Economic Satans, the CRA-commanded Fannie and Freddie, because OMG BARNEY FRANK WAS ON THE COMMITTEE.
Wile E. Quixote
The Republicans have bought into the myth of the master race big time. This is what the Germans believed in the 1920s, they didn’t lose the war because of the ineptitude of the German general staff and the Kaiser, no, they lost the war because they were stabbed in the back by the Jews. You’ve got to be really good at doublethink to buy into the myth of the master race because it requires you to simultaneously believe that you are better and smarter than everyone else out there but that you’re in the situation you’re in because of the machinations of people you condemn as being weak and contemptible. You can never ask the question "Hey, if we’re so goddamned smart then why are we getting our asses handed to us on a platter" because if you do the whole house of cards comes crashing down. The nice thing about buying into the myth of the master race though is that it means, as John pointed out, that you can never, ever lose, victory can only be stolen from you, which ties into the belief that conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed.
cleek
who cares.
fuck em.
the country’s problems do not include insufficient attention to the rantings of the perpetually outraged.
of course these pathetic pissants are protesting: they are Republicans, not Americans. their loyalty is to the party, not the country. they are cheerleaders, sycophants and trolls. they’re trying to win elections, not to better the country.
fuck them.
fuck them in the ear.
Tattoosydney
@Wile E. Quixote:
Apologies for going entirely OT…
Just wanted to say thanks for pointing me at the Richard X Mix of Fugitive…
Somehow I had bought Fundamentalism, copied that track to my Ipod, listened to it once and not actually cottoned on to how great it was. I’ve listened to it about fifty times since the weeked. Great track.
Anton Sirius
@Steve V:
It doesn’t piss me off. It’s become one of the ultimate scarlet letters for the wingnuts. Whenever someone mentions:
1) The ‘Democrat’ Party;
2) ACORN; or
3) Obama’s teleprompter
you know exactly what you’re dealing with, and to use smaller words.
wasabi gasp
Maybe they just need to be rolled up in towel.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
ACORN had a few community meetings at the Lutheran church a block over. I went to a couple of them. I had no idea they were into voter registration; their focus in these meetings was getting the city to install speed bumps on our local residential streets.
It worked, too: every street except the one I live on got speed bumps. (Occidental Ave. is just an extra street between 1st and 2nd Ave. S., therefore is lost in a space warp of some kind.) Now the drag racers use Occidental exclusively, because all the other streets have speed bumps. They’ve already run over one of our cats.
There was not a single black face at any of these ACORN meetings.
(Was this post irrelevant and surreal enough to enter Brick Oven Bill territory?)
Laura W
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge: Well yeah, all but for the dead cat part. Bill never mentions anything in his stories that involves the harming of small animals.
I did not care for that part.
I have a big sad now.
jcricket
Lord help us all! An old, gay, left-handed Jew from the northeast will destroy us all with his grasp of the English language, constitution and Congressional rules!
guest omen
@jcricket:
i caught a little bit of barney today. he pointed out gop controlled congress until ’06. if they wanted to put limits on lending, they could have done so. he also threw down another gauntlet. after returning from the april break, he’s going to introduce legislation to regulate subprime loans. he going to see how many gop critics will end up voting against it.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
@Laura W:
Sorry Laura W, me too. She was all I had to remember her mother by, who just disappeared, and she herself was so sickly her first six months that we almost had her put to sleep but just couldn’t do it. Then she snapped out of it and was perfectly healthy, but she just never grew up, was always just a big kitten; but I loved her anyway.
Sometimes I envy the faux tough guys like our former overlords who would never let such a thing bother them, but then it makes me hate them all the more.
Svensker
@wasabi gasp:
FTW
jcricket
Sounds gay. Seriously, who wears gauntlets :-)
You know Republicans will oppose the sensible regulation of lending institutions. They’ll keep blaming things like anti-redlining laws (the CRA) or scream about how regulation will prolong the recession by preventing companies from making unlimited profits (ignore the part about how those profits are largely illusory because the costs are socialized).
Judging by their actual actions (3x the normal amount of filibusters, content-free budgets, 100% voting against stimulus) it’s clear all the Democrats have no sensible politicians in the GOP to work with. IMHO, all Democrats need to do is show they continually try to reach out to the GOP but each time are only offered obstructionism or stupid/old ideas. The public gets it (enough) for this strategy to work.
TenguPhule
Corrected.
skippy
ok, i know this is petty proof reading, but…
how much whinging do they do? do they whing alot? what do they whing about? do they whing their partners, do-se-do? do they whing, whing a whong, whing it loud, whing it long?
maybe it’s a new word you purposely invented, combining "whine" and "wingers," for the petulant self-pitying that the right indulges in:
oh look, jonah goldberg is whinging again!
Lee
The latest rage on facebook is "your top 5 X"
Well today my circle (a very very conservative circle) got around to top 5 presidents.
Dubya, made it in most of their lists without it actually being an April Fools joke.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
@skippy:
Re: whinging or whingeing. I see this all the time any more. I want to ask: "Does it rhyme with hinge?"
I think it’s an artifact of this Northeastern dialect feature that’s started spreading around the country the last 20 years or so: losing the aspirated "w" sound in "wh" words. People outside of New England nowadays actually think "Would you like some cheese with that whine?" is a pun.
Tattoosydney
@skippy:
What’s wrong with the word "whinging"?
(I admit that it’s better spelled "Whingeing" to remove doubt, but it’s still a perfectly good word).
Fax Paladin
"Whinge" is a variant form of "whine," used largely in the UK. I first encountered it in an interview with Simon Jones, talking about his radio and TV role as Arthur Dent.
EDIT: Of course, umpty people beat me to explaining this…
Laura W
@Tattoosydney: I wanna know what "cottoning" means.
Is that sorta like what you accused me and Rome Again of doing once and we both got really mad and broke up with you for a long while?
Tattoosydney
@Laura W:
Ah, the great "Are you making jokes at me" Falling Out of 2008 – I remember it well…
Re: "Cottoning on…" – I suspect it’s a peculiarly British/Australian phrase. It’s used in the sense of "to catch on" or to "realise something"….
One can "cotton on", when one has "cottoned on" during the process of "cottoning on", but one never "cottons"… the "on" is an essential part of the idiom.
Where does it come from? At a guess, it’s a mangling of "caught on"…
Argive
No. No. Nooooooo. Fuck these people. This makes me incensed, even though I know it’s not at all worth my time.
I worked for the Obama campaign in Center City Philadelphia for two and a half months. I didn’t get paid for the time I spent working. I did it because I cared very deeply about the outcome of the election. A lot of very committed volunteers and field organizers (and I) worked our asses off on a campaign that was more organized and efficient than any in recent memory. And these fuckheads, who have no idea what it actually takes to win an election can’t just give the campaign the credit it deserves.
I never once worked with ACORN. The few times ACORN ever came up in conversation during the campaign were to disparage that dysfunctional group and how they were making our job harder (but that’s a different story).
We slaughtered McCain in Pennsylvania. Absolutely destroyed him; he didn’t have a chance in hell. Why? BECAUSE HE RAN A BAD CAMPAIGN AND WE DIDN’T. Wingnuts everywhere: Deal with it.
dsc
um, I’d be willing to try to do this if you think it will stop the Yowling.
JC–our Gato (the old man is 14), yowls incessantly if we allow the level of the water bowl to drop below half-full (or, as I suppose he sees it, half-empty). I humor him and fill it up because he won’t stop the yowling unless I do.
yes, they are the overlords of this realm.
r€nato
@skippy:
"Whinge" is a perfectly valid alternative spelling of, ‘whine’, though I understand that the former is more of an outdated British English form of the word.
…aaaaaand I’m even later than everyone else in commenting about that. Oops.
LD50
You mean pronouncing ‘whine’ and ‘wine’ the same way? That’s *much* older than 20 years. For starters, that dialect is spoken by at least half of American English speakers, and is considered the ‘prestige dialect’ in Britain.
If that’s what you’re referring to, it’s not so much ‘losing the aspirated w sound’ as simply dropping the ‘h’ before ‘w’.
jcricket
Reminds me of this lolcat about optimist/pessimist cats.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
@LD50:
I know it’s older than that, but what I meant is that it’s becoming universal since I was a kid, anyway. It’s one of a package of Northeastern features like pronouncing "awe" as "ah" (daughter = dotter,) losing the palatal on-glide before "u" after a dental sound (tune = toon,) and voicing stops between vowels (duty = doody features two of them.)
I call the aspirated or unvoiced w a separate sound because the IPA does: it’s written as an upside-down "w." Unvoiced is really the important distinction: if you touch your vocal cords while saying "wine," you’ll notice that they’re vibrating from the beginning of the word, while in "whine," they shouldn’t start vibrating until the vowel starts, just like "vine" and "fine."
I agree we should have stuck with the Old English spelling of "hw," but when Norman scribes came in and had to reproduce this sound, they came up with some real doozies (there’s another one–it should be "Duesy," as in "Deusenberg") like "quh." You’ll notice "Calhoun" is sometimes still spelled "Colquhoon."
Zandar
I’m not laughing. I know that a disturbingly high percentage of Presidents have been victims of attempts on their lives or have been killed because of them.
I also know that stopping 99.9999% of plots to harm the current President means only one pissed off asshole needs to get lucky.
Original Lee
@Wile E. Quixote: Now you’ve helped me understand Sarah Palin.
Damn you. Damn you to hell.
Mike P
Speaking of articles that were possible "game changers" near an election…did the people claiming liberal media bias forget about this?
"Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts"
Damn libruls.
Ed Drone
Truthfully, they lie up, too. And sideways, and around the bend, and in other ways we would think of as physically impossible.
As for "whinge," note that the Dursleys live in ‘Little Whinging,’ per the Harry Potter books. And another gem from those books — the Black house was "Grimmauld Place," pronounced "Grim Old Place." I didn’t get that pun till I heard the British books-on-tape version of the ‘Order of the Phoenix.’ I wonder how many other puns I don’t ‘get’ in those stories.
But one of my favorite recent pop-culture puns comes in the animated ‘Toy Story,’ where the family’s house is being sold by "Virtual Realty." You miss it if you don’t watch for it. What this has to do with ACORN I don’t know, or care.
Ed
matoko_chan
Even Patterico believes it.
OMG! Talk Radio is being stolen from them too.
This is classic magical thinking as the GOP continues its descent into raw stone-age fundamentalism, complete with the ritual purging of defectors and heretics in defense of dogmatic purity.
The "media stole the election" is a mythology that allows the delusion that the GOP is not accountable for the destruction of the global economy and America’s image.
Other common myths are that Breitbart’s "sabotage and distraction", and Goldstein’s semiotics and heurmanetics and intentionalism are corrupting the message. OUTLAW!
The magical thinking is that if conservatives could just get their message out, they would be swept back to power.
Sir Richard once famously said,
And the truth is, conservative memes are teh sukkage.
Skip Mendler
It always amuses me that conservatives see themselves as victims of the "culture of victimization"…
SanDiegoDave
Conservatives (and I used to proclaim myself as one) have lost it. It becomes the question of whether these people (Kristol, et al) have ceased being conservative, or if they have re-defined conservatism at something it should never have been.
For me, one of the spectacular traits of being a conservative was the freedom from living life in a perpetual state of victimhood. I got to look out from my own modest middle class world and just shake my head at those who did nothing but whine and complain, when what they should have been doing was working, staying positive, and naturally spreading a sense of contentment and satisfaction to those around them – even during life’s inevitable curve balls and tough times.
But now these guys act just like the ones we used to look upon with pity. They need to get over it. Rise above the moment (as they used to ask everyone else to do). Make your success or failure in life the responsibility of the one and only person who can truly make a difference: yourself.
skippy
my apologies to all. pls. beleive me, i have never, ever in my life seen or heard of the word "whinge" until now.
and, to be honest, i hope never to again.