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Of course, Tom Toles drew this cartoon well before yesterday’s tragedy in Arizona. But when it popped up on my Gocomics feed this morning, it seemed strangely appropriate to the Murdoch-mongering, Koch-sucking “BOTH sides are guilty!” apologetics.
Reader Interactions
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Yutsano
Oddly enough, I have a feeling he drew this during the lame duck session, when everybody and their dog was predicting the right side would happen…and then more or less the left side did. It might be poorly timed but it’s still kinda funny. And unfortunately very true.
handy
Hey did you hear somebody on a blog said they hoped Bill Kristol would die in a fire? Obviously the same thing.
El Cid
Both sides were screaming at Congressional representatives and townhalls two summers ago on how Obama was going to kill the elderly and soshullism was taking over 300% of our economy and how the new Kenyo-Stalin-Hitler was going to pay women to have abortions so that illegal immigrants could get free health care by destroying all small businesses. Right?
Also, it’s snowing and icing up here in Atlanta — where’s your god-damn Al Gore now?
Ha ha! What’s yer damn ‘science’ got to say about it getting cold in winter? Where are your ‘so-called experts’ who a year or maybe two or probably sometime recently were telling us that there would never ever be a snowflake again? I bet they wish they’d changed their tune when there was that panicked mobilization of Nancy Pelosi out of Copenhagen so that those ice axes didn’t cut them in half!
suzanne
@handy: You joke, but a friend of my husband’s actually compared those isolated protectors with “Bush = Hitler” signs to Palin, Angle and Beck today. Then she said that the left wing is equally responsible for the horrible tone of our political discourse because “they take offense to every little slight”.
Vomit.
handy
@El Cid:
The “It’s snowing outside my window and that proves Algore is a big fat liar” club goes predictably silent when the calendar turns to June through August. I wonder why that may be.
Actually, it’s funny, I read someone on another board post some snark last summer to the effect of “It’s 100-degrees where are the AGW deniers?!” totally baiting some guy to respond back, “Everybody knows weather != climate.”
O RLY?
Martin
@handy: Well, that’s not a threat. I’m pretty sure Bill Kristol is used to hanging out in burning sulfur.
Nicole
@El Cid: And of course, when you try to explain to these people that extreme weather variations (hot summers, cold winters) and excessive precipitation are exactly the kind of things indicated as part of global climate change you can just see them thinking, “Mwah mwah big words mwah mwah.”
I occasionally visit a sports blog that has a political thread and one of the especially irritating right wingers (one who said she was fine with Medicare ending as long as she got to be on it until she died. Seriously) explained that it was absurd to blame right-wing political discourse for what happened in Arizona because clearly the devil made the shooter do it. As in, the Devil. When even some of the other right-wingers on the thread started poking fun at her she started screeching her free speech was being oppressed.
handy
@suzanne:
Let’s be honest. There are some pretty uptight people “on the left.” It isn’t even close to the same animal as Super Sarah whipping up crowds with “Obama pals with terrorists” and “Democrat targets to aim your rifle scopes at.” But it’s there.
Yutsano
@Nicole: Cue appropriate Monty Python sketch in 3…2…1…
(Is anyone gonna do a Monty Python explains the world thing any time soon? It seems like they covered just about every damn situation out there.)
sven
You on the east coast know this already but… Louis CK is funny!
Mike Kay
@suzanne:
he’s a parrot. that is the hate radio party line. it dates backs 20 years and it’s a variation of how political correctness (ie you can’t tell tit, gay, and racial jokes at work anymore) is ruining the country. it’s largely a sop to under educated, angry males who graduated high school prior to 1985.
sherifffruitfly
And never forget: even though ALL of the eliminationist rhetoric comes from the right, nevertheless “we” have to to be civil and try harder. Because it’s *our* fault.
I guess we’re just not trying hard enough to love them. That’s why he keeps beating us
Oh wait – got confused there for a minute….
Mike Kay
let’s face it, the people who engage and enjoy this garbage will not step forward and accept responsibility. They will deny and deflect.
the guilty rarely admit culpability.
El Cid
@handy:
They don’t, because there’s always somewhere which is having a cooler summer than usual. This is not snark or exaggeration. That’s what they really do.
And remember, if anything is happening, it’s because of the Sun, because the Sun is Hot and the Sun is Big, and no scientists have ever thought that the Sun could affect temperatures here on Earth. The fact that no one has given a strong and well-supported theory of how the Sun is changing Earth’s temperature right now is irrelevant. The fact that the Sun is Hot and the Sun is Big means that it must be true.
handy
@El Cid:
And let’s not forget that more CO2 in the atmosphere is better not worse. Cuz like, trees need them and stuff!
trollhattan
@Nicole:
Yeah, those crowing about Al Gore’s blizzards were probably silent while 19 nations were setting record high temperatures in 2010.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2011/01/2010_dominated_by_record_warmt.html
El Cid
@Nicole:
It would seem that if the Devil has the power to make a guy go shoot a bunch of people in public including officials, surely he has the power to control right wing blog commenters, so technically it’s Satan who is oppressing her free speech. Unfortunately it would also follow that the Devil would fail to be moved by pleas to stop oppressing her freedom of speech, because he’s the Devil.
Except that everyone knows that the Devil never visits right wing blogs because conservatives are like giant glowing crosses, and the Devil spends all his blogging time on liberal sites because we’re so ready for his temptations anyway.
RareSanity
@El Cid:
This is one of times, that putting up with all of the B.S. living in the South, finally pays off…
Three, maybe four, day weekend….yippee!!
I grew up here in Atlanta, and I just love, how the entire city just shuts down when it snows.
El Cid
@trollhattan:
They’re never silent. They just lie about stuff which goes against what they want to say. For example, any time you show charts and data like you linked to, it turns out it was all disproved by some emails which were hacked and this one scientist whose report we’ll summarize quickly for ourselves so that he or she ends up sounding like a climate-denying hack when the paper says the exact opposite.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@El Cid:
If your drink gets hot and you want it cold, you add ice. When you have run out of ice your drink gets hot and stays that way. Our polar caps are melting, keeping our ‘drink’ nice and cool.
No worries though, we will soon be out of ice and we will all be enjoying hot drinks! Fucking idiots. It’s thinking like theirs that will lead us to a global climate disaster. No worries about that either since they will all be long dead and the problem won’t be theirs to deal with. It’s cash out now and make them pay later.
Think of the children they are leaving this mess to? Not if it’s going to cost money!
El Cid
@RareSanity: I find it interesting that all the people too stupid to realize that rain makes driving hazardous so every time it rains you have loads more accidents yet you continue to see people following far too closely on the interstates at 70 – 80 mph and ignoring mergings and exits, suddenly can be seen to drive extra carefully in snow and ice. Maybe because they can see it, and also rain doesn’t sound like it could be dangerous.
handy
@El Cid:
Also did you hear about the one how the data is unreliable because all the thermometers are next to heaters? That one is a riot.
El Cid
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Clearly you forget that God sent Noah the rainbow in order to promise that never more would He immaturely and petulantly bring nearly absolute genocide to every man, woman and child on Earth as well as nearly complete ecocide, all because He loves us so much.
El Cid
@handy: Also they stopped putting mercury in thermometers because they needed it to put in vaccines in a liberal plot to spread autism.
RareSanity
@El Cid:
meh…that’s just how we roll…dangerously!
It’s just one of nature’s unsolved mysteries. Every time I see some idiot fly past me doing 80, in a Civic, in the rain, I just shake my head. The only answer is that cars have gotten too safe and they are preempting the process of natural selection.
Phoebe
Eh? If the cartoon were advocating that Obama squash an elephant with that gigantic walking thing from Star Wars, then we’d have both sides doing it. What we have is the right wing using violent rhetoric against people who disagree with them, and the left [the cartoonist] being… mean, because it’s accusing the right wing of thinking violent thoughts against Obama. But nobody’s using violent rhetoric against Republicans here.
Or did I completely miss the point? That would not be unprecedented.
handy
And all this is really to say you can’t trust climate scientists from NOAA and NASA because they are obviously on the government teat, whereas the scientists paid by oil companies are obviously objective and their bosses have no incentive other than the pure pursuit of Truth to publish papers proving AGW is false.
burnspbesq
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
And if you tell them “As Christians, we are called to be responsible stewards of God’s Creation,” boy do they look at you funny.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@El Cid:
If I was this God person I would press the reset button out of pure embarrassment and shame.
Gustopher
“Koch-sucking”?
If it wasn’t so perfect, it would be a bigoted, anti-gay pun. Most excellent.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@burnspbesq:
Ben Franklin said that ‘god helps those who help themselves’.
What a wimp. We’re supposed to wait for destruction, not do something to avert it! Cuz gawd said so. They want the ‘end of things’ to come and they are willing to help bring it on.
Nothing like having an apocalyptic death cult in control of things, eh?
Mark S.
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
The worst article I’ve ever read was by some dipshit economist who argued just that. Of course, it was in Slate:
I don’t read a lot of economists, but I’ve never read one who seriously argued such a ludicrous position, let alone made it their default one. After demolishing that strawman, we proceed to:
It sure doesn’t. I’m glad there’s no evidence in history of civilization regressing from where it once was. It’s just one straight line of progress!
Montysano
2:00 AM here in north Alabama. We’ve had 8″ of snow since 9:00 PM, and it’s still coming down!
Yutsano
@Montysano: My wifey shall haz a mad jelus.
freelancer
@Yutsano:
I’m 380 miles from your wifey and they cancelled university classes here tomorrow. They never cancel UNO. We’re supposed to get a total of 10″. I got to get out of here.
Commish
Too soon.
Elizabelle
The Conservative Constitution of the United States of Real America
Alternative version by David Cole, who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown U and writes for The Nation
among sundry provisions and amendments:
Amendments:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/06/AR2011010602485_pf.html
emdee
But it’s both sides! The evul soshulist is threatening that pure-blooded American elephant with a whip! She had no choice but to take second amendment (or second foot) remedies!
SiubhanDuinne
SNOW DAY!! It’s beautiful right now, before the thick snow is disturbed. But the predictions are for freezing rain, sleet, and icy roads later today.
It did screw up Nathan Deal’s inauguration, so there’s that.
(ETA: He’ll still be sworn in, though; just no big public events.)
asiangrrlMN
@Montysano: I am VERY jealous. It’s very cold here, but we have not had new snow in AGES. We are supposed to get a couple inches tomorrow, though. Fingers crossed.
The cartoon: I don’t think it’s too soon, but I also don’t think it’s very funny. Probably because it’s uncomfortable close to the truth.
Uloborus
@handy:
Yep. THAT is the ‘false equivalence’ Democrats get pissed about. We do indeed have overheated rhetoric. THEY start with overheated rhetoric and move all the way up to barely veiled death threats as part of their mainstream message. In particular, some of their craziest and most hateful opinion makers – Rush, Beck, Palin – have immense power in their party and have blatantly swayed the course of the debate. Do you recall any Democratic politicians apologizing publicly to Olbermann, Moore, or Greenwald?
A pebble is not a mountain.
nancydarling
@Odie Hugh Manatee: I read somewhere that about 75% of fundies think that “god helps those who help themselves” is in the bible.
We have a dusting of snow here in NW Arkansas—less than 1/2 inch.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Liberals engage in violent political rhetoric. Conservatives are moved by concern for America to make somewhat heated statements about liberals.
Ergo liberals are violent, better buy more guns.
Joey Maloney
@handy: Boy you’re right. The nerve of those people, taking offense to every little slight. Trivial things like a bullet through the fucking brain.
Why don’t those people just man up, eh?
xian
@nancydarling: they’d be even more freaked to learn it’s really “The Gods help those who help themselves” and that it comes to us from Aesop.