Here’s a pretty entertaining read from a right-winger who used to write for the National Review who is now just appalled how insane the right has become.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Their freedom requires your slavery.
Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.
Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.
But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.
Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?
I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.
JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?
When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.
Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.
You can’t love your country only when you win.
Not all heroes wear capes.
Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.
Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.
Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.
Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.
Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.
I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.
Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.
This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.
Only Democrats have agency, apparently.
This really is a full service blog.
You cannot shame the shameless.
Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?
Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard
chopper
aw, for the love of george tierney jr of greenville SC.
MikeJ
Meh. He acknowledges they’re nuts, but really all he’s complaining about is tone. He’ll still vote for Romney.
redshirt
Yeah, he’s got several steps to go towards the light. But a good start!
Matthew B.
Fumento is a real piece of work himself, though, and still seems unrepentant about his own well-compensated efforts promoting right-wing pseudoscience. He’s mercenary, not crazy, but that’s not earning him any sympathy from me.
Villago Delenda Est
@MikeJ:
This.
Until he denounces Rmoney on the merits (not on the obvious problem that Rmoney’s a shitty candidate on the basis of personality and believability) I remain skeptical.
Fumento is going to have to come out and proclaim, outright, that anything from Reagan on in the field of economics is anything but outright dumbassery and wishful thinking.
Lee
From the article:
Then he goes on how conservatives should stick to facts.
Maybe he should follow his own advice.
Dave
let us all applaud as some random dude concern trolls the other side, wow, is this fun
?
dedc79
Some are pointing out that this guy hasn’t so much seen the light, and is really just fed up with the level of discourse. I don’t think the goal can reasonably be to win everyone over to progressive causes. That won’t happen. It would be nice, however, at a minimum, to have an honest and rational debate between competing ideologies. And we are very far from that right now.
So yeah, I probably wouldn’t agree with this guy on 5 issues out of 100, but i’d far rather the argument be with people like him than people like malkin.
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©
@Villago Delenda Est:
…anything from Reagan on in the field of economics is anything but outright dumbassery and wishful thinking.
It’d be nice to hear that from President Obama, too. But I don’t think you should hold your breath.
~
SatanicPanic
@Lee: I stopped reading after that. I award no points for half finished work.
WJS
Sounds like someone forgot to dish a little wingnut welfare his way.
The ones who stay bought off are more than happy to continue finding new and exciting ways to invent crazy subjects for their mouth-breathing readers to glom onto. Someone needs to give him some space on The Daily Caller or the Freedom Fonzi site and drop a few bucks in his tip jar.
This story reminds me of Juan Williams, who laments the fact that he is not on NPR anymore because that was a very informed audience (just not one that was willing to tolerate his nonsense).
Conservatives are passionate, but ill-informed. Everything Fumento said could be boiled down to those six words.
Gin & Tonic
This “civil and nopartisan” stuff is starting to rub off.
Fuck that.
Villago Delenda Est
@ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©:
Obama can’t say anything like that, because the vermin of the Village would have kittens on the spot.
“ZOMG, he’s blaspheming the great Saint Ronaldus Magnus! Oh my stars and garters. Quick, fetch me a fainting couch, I’ve got the vapors!”
Satchel
SIGH. DOUBLE SIGH. As long as he’s perpetuating this canard, he’s still firmly in the right-wing frame.
Mark S.
At least he admits that our economic inequality is a serious problem. That’s the first step to admitting you’re a
homosexualcommunist.Thoughtcrime
I have only one thing to say to Fumento:
http://i.qkme.me/68ff.jpg
Nutella
This guy calls for accuracy and decorum. Decorum like we had in the good old days of Reagan(!) and accuracy like his own statement that
‘Limbaugh infamously dispatched a young woman who expressed her opinion that the government should provide free birth control as a “slut” and a “prostitute.”’
Fluke never said a word about free birth control and the ACA rules she was supporting and Limbaugh and co are upset about have nothing to say about free health care for anyone. So he can’t be bothered to make any accurate statements, either.
It’s a tone argument against wingers.
Villago Delenda Est
@Satchel:
His devotion to fact is highly questionable, given that he’s repeating the outright lie of the framing.
PeakVT
The title – “My Break from the Extreme Right” – says, at best, he thinks the far right has become too extreme. But our problem is that all of the right is just plain wrong on everything.
13th Generation
Only thing I took away from the article is “BOTH sides are bad, so vote Republican.”
Corner Stone
He’s Frumming you, and everyone knows it.
japa21
However, he is obviously one of the few who realizes that both sides do it, where it represents anything bad. Obviously trying to emulate the great Broder. Although this will probably offend his sense of civility, he is an ass.
EconWatcher
@13th Generation:
On this point, I don’t agree. He was careful to point out that there’s not much of a market for screeching on the left (citing Olbermann’s poor ratings), but there’s a thriving market on the right (citing Malkin as the most visited blog on the internet). So to his credit, I don’t think this was really a “both sides do it” piece.
But yeah, he’ll probably vote for Romney. Nothing in the posting suggested otherwise. And the notion that Fluke was asking for something free from the government is a howler.
Lee
@WJS:
That is probably very true.
Rob in Buffalo
It includes the “I was a conservative under Reagan, when we were right about everything” premise. No you weren’t, and Reagan was the worst president ever.
The Other Chuck
Seems Fumento’s main lament in his self-aggrandizing rant peppered with snide truth-free asides is: “Hey guys, we can’t keep fucking people over effectively if we don’t sell the Big Lies with a sweeter tone.”
Well fuck Fumento and his ideology, and I don’t care if my tone sends him to the fainting couch. The right has been out to personally destroy us for decades, and it’s payback time.
Just Some Fuckhead
Shorter Fumento: both sides do it!
13th Generation
Also too:
“But SO MANY Democrats would vote Republican if they understood our positions better!”
“Reagan! Buckley! George Fucking Will!”
Zach
“Yes, I’ve also questioned the extent to which man-made gases have contributed to that warming and concluded that expenditures to reduce those emissions would be as worthless as they’d be horrifically expensive.”
Ah. The Jim Manzi approach. It’s impossible to reduce CO2 emissions because changing the planet’s atmosphere in a way that’s irreversible for over 1000 years is something that can be compared on the back of an envelope to the one-time slowdown in global economic growth that’d accompany a switch to renewable energy (a switch that, by the way, will inevitably happen within that same 1000 years because peak oil/gas/coal does exist even if it’s totally overstated on shorter timescales).
This guy’s just angling for a gig at the Atlantic with his contrarian nonsense… perhaps McArdle can focus on economics full-time and let this dude have the obesity-is-not-really-a-problem beat.
WJS
@Rob in Buffalo:
Exactly. And if Reagan were around today, he’d have been thrown out of the Republican Party already.
gex
And even he can’t stop from just being an outright liar. Sandra Fluke was testifying for “free birth control?”
They really just cannot help it. Everyone not them is a moocher. That his medications are covered by insurance but hers aren’t is not at all relevant to him.
In fact, he clearly still belongs in their club, he just won’t do the name calling. He’ll imply it by careful phrasing.
yopd1
Come on. When you lost the guy that published a book arguing that AIDs isn’t as big an issue as we thought and to a large degree only affects people we don’t really care about, you’ve lost the heart and soul of the GOP.
Comrade Dread
I beg to differ.
I remember quite well when conservative talk radio was born and Limbaugh first came on the air.
I remember all the lies and conspiracies that surrounded the Clinton administration and how almost all of them stemmed from right wing talk radio.
Conservatives have spent at least 20+ years demonizing Democrats and liberals in a widely accepted and venerated GOP media.
The right gathered the firewood, the tinder, set up the firewood, poured kerosene on it and used a flamethrower to light it.
It’s a bit late to plead innocence just because you’re getting burned by the forest fire that resulted.
Comrade Mary
Fumento. Ick. Throw him back.
God, I just could not finish that wankfest. There was a little humility when a Cole or a Johnson came into the light. Fumento just freaks out that everyone else isn’t as SMRT and RAISONABLE as him.
gex
@Comrade Mary: There should be a nice home for him at Reason then.
eemom
Same old “reasonable conservative” shit, different day. Bo-ring.
@ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©:
Fuck off, FDL-fly TM (R) (c). Don’t y’all have some Nader/Kucinich rallying to do?
Just Some Fuckhead
Belly crawl like a sniveling dog, Fumento!
Rob in CT
You know what? Even if this guy had really seen the light (as opposed to, as someone put it above, “Frumming it”), it’s 20-fucking-12. A few decades late, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars short, asshole.
Violet
Just another tone argument. Yawn. The fact that the truth of what the GOP is being revealed is what’s really bothering him.
Frankly, I like the frothing crazy in the Republican party to be more visible rather than less. It’s what they’ve always been but have been much better at hiding. The more people see it, the more repulsed they’ll be.
Rommie
This guy still thinks all the ideas are totally correct and stuff, but darnit, he wishes the crazies would stop acting crazy, because it could give the impression that the ideas are crazy too.
After all, he only needs to give the average Liberal a good talking-to and they’ll see the True Light of Conservatism, guarant-damn-teed.
IOW, I don’t see a real step away at all. If and when there is a connect between the ideas and people supporting them being crazy, then I can see some hope.
feebog
The asshole probably dislocated his shoulder patting himself on the back. He gave two feeble examples of the “both sides do it”. Note that there was no link to the Franken example, just his take. How about both sides do it, but the right does it to a magnitute that cannot be calculated with any known math? I am so tired of these right-wing concern trolls and their bullshit. Don’t like the direction your party is taking? Time to switch parties Skippy.
13th Generation
@eemom:
You should check the disc on your turntable, it seems to be unrepairable.
Warren Terra
Fncking Salon apparently has one of those immeasurably useless website designs that detects a browser following an incoming link is on a “mobile device” (in this case an iPad; the screen is plenty big enough to see normal sites) and so rather than let the browser see the damn story it wants, takes the browser to the homepage of their “mobile-friendly” website. And in this case the damn thing doesn’t even look like it would be mobile-friendly.
So Much Fail. This is what you expect from misbegotten newspaper websites that misunderstand the Internet. But Salon is supposed to be entirely a creature of the Internet.
kindness
Have you read the comments over there? Man….if only they could listen to what the writer said. Something intelligent might happen, but no….some can’t have that.
japa21
@feebog: Yeah, I was wondering about the Franken thing as well. Doesn’t ring true considering Franken was going over to Iraq to entertain the troops on a regular basis while the rest of the RW radio contingent were staying here.
mdblanche
Translation: The extreme right was doing all well and good for a while there, but then I became a target.
“The next generation of the nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters.” Can’t you just feel the civil and respectful reaction to anger and hatred?
Now why would Burke have ever objected to that phrase?
WJS
@ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©: You mean like how President Obama believes that austerity is a failure?
http://www.heraldscotland.com/mobile/news/home-news/obama-tells-eu-growth-not-austerity.17640935?_=acc3938f2906d73cf4d4a2ac30077892bf572304
I believe you can shut the hell up now.
Villago Delenda Est
@Rob in Buffalo:
I used to think this was true, but along came the deserting coward and Darth Cheney.
Villago Delenda Est
@Violet:
“You fools! You’re letting the brown shirts show!”
trollhattan
That’s just great. I hope he was preceded by a man waving a flag, to warn others he’s coming.
David in NY
I really sort of disagree with most of the comments here. The right wing that is not like him is so divorced from reality that it is truly scary. And I mean (Godwin forgive me) scary in the 1920-30’s central European scary. The big lie lives. I would really like to see discussions of issues that did not devolve into whether Obama is or is not a Marxist Kenyan.
Lots of people above raise points about what he’s said that show he’s no liberal. But at least some of them are ones that one could fruitfully discuss with him. I bet he’d give in on Sandra Fluke and free birth control, for example. One could actually discuss the merits of the costs of remediation of emissions of man-made greenhouse gases, with maybe fruitful results. For all I know, he’d buy cap and trade — a market solution. But this is totally unlike the crazy right — with whom no such discussions can ever even take place.
If the right wingers being put in Congress were more like him, deals could probably still be made that could at least be partial solutions to the problems we’ve got. But the true crazies rule, and there can’t even be any discussions, much less actual progress, however halting.
I know, before you say it, he won’t agree with most of what we want. But neither did the Republicans who used to think health care with a mandate was a good idea, cap and trade was a good idea, and so on. Those guys, and this guy I think, one could work with. So I don’t see the point in trashing his failure to agree with every point we want as some kind of precondition for thinking he might be a serious person. He’s the kind of conservative who used to make some progress possible, and the rest are all gone now.
Rob in Buffalo
“Civility and respect for order – nay, demand for order – have always been tenets of conservatism.”
“The White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically . . . “sometimes the numerical minority [whites] cannot prevail except by violence: then [whites] must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.” — Wm. F. Buckley
Warren Terra
Having read the piece, the guy is a loose cannon, firing stupidly in all directions. His criticisms of the Right aren’t wrong, but so much of the rest of what he says is arrant nonsense that I don’t know it will matter. Maybe his asinine flailing at Swine Flu fears or whatever will endear him to denizens of the Right so they will absorb his message, but mostly it just makes him look like a smug got. He needs to take David Frum lessons, and write more focused essays in which he criticizes the Right without offending the rest of us (while doing that in other</I essays) if he wants to stick around in this Conservative Gadfly line.
@mdblanche:
Yeah, the complete misunderstanding of “J’accuse” rather stuck in my craw. He invokes it as if it had been a rallying cry used in mob violence during the French Revolution. In truth, of course, it was a rallying cry by Progressives against Conservative, Catholic-led mob Antisemitism, specifically in the injustices against Dreyfuss.
His George Will worship was another absurdity, as Will may be staid and bowtied, but I don’t think he’s ever particularly called out the nutters.
JGabriel
I’ll just post links to my comments on the Fumento article, here and here.
.
WJS
@David in NY:
I think the salient point here is that he might tell you he agrees with you to your face, but when he has a chance to go do something about it, he’ll stab the knife in your back and laugh till he pisses himself watching you bleed out. These are not people who are equipped with empathy; they hate empathy and use it to their advantage when they spot it in others.
This is not an article written by a person who is reasonable. This is an article written by someone who understands that he is now associated with people who forgot to pretend to be reasonable in order to get close enough to kill a liberal.
Big diffy. They want everyone who is a liberal to be dead. Their eliminationist rhetoric grows more insistent by the day. They hate, and they want to eliminate their enemies.
And, yes–that’s the title of Ann Coulter’s next book: (Pretend to be Reasonable So You Can) Kill a Liberal
BillyGibbonsBeard
Aw, that poor baby. The Frankenstein monster he helped to create is lashing out at him.
JGabriel
__
__
David in NY:
The new standard for Reasonable Conservative(tm): Only moderately divorced from reality.
.
Warren Terra
@Warren Terra:
Goddam iPads should be recalled until they’ve got a web browser that works and a text entry system a tenth as good as Swype. The edit function isn’t working on mine. I’d fix some of the errors, but they aren’t that interesting.
trollhattan
@JGabriel:
The whole pesky Overton Window thing. Can’t imagine what they’d do if Obama was in reality the scary blackityblacsokkalistman they make him out to be.
Just Some Fuckhead
Where was Fumento when Republicans were lampooning Kerry’s war wounds? Or when Republicans were smearing war hero Max Cleland?
Both sides do it, you know!
Jebediah
@Lee:
That was the same thing that really jumped out at me, too.
Randy P
Yeah, he only has slightly more contact with reality than the people he’s criticizing. I had already sputtered “What? What?” about 4 times by the time I got to this:
I’m not familiar with the incident, but I’m just going to go out on a limb and guess that Franken was not making fun of his injury; that in fact the injury was completely irrelevant to whatever Franken was criticizing.
Or is this the McCain principle, that being injured in war automatically exempts you from all criticism forever?
Robert
Fumento takes a picture:
http://wonkette.com/226537/a-very-special-malkin-war-on-christmas
Yutsano
@Randy P:
This is only true if you root for the correct team. To wit: Max Cleland and Tammy Duckworth.
Mark S.
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Give the guy a break. He’s obviously been in a coma for the last ten years. He’s just heard about Ann Coulter.
RareSanity
Everything one needs to know about this article, is clear in the title, “My break with the extreme right”.
How much of a limb are you really going out on, to wag your finger at the likes of Limbaugh, Malkin, Breitbart and West?
Apparently the “extreme right” doesn’t include people like Paul Ryan (blessed be his name), John Boehner* or Eric Cantor. If you his “extreme right”, only includes the very loudest of poo-flingers, what the hell are you really breaking with?
Let’s put aside the fact that he doesn’t even outline what the “made fun of” entailed. Those two examples are TOTALLY equivalent. One person “dehumanizing” people, and a comedian making some unknown comment, that “made fun of” someone else…both sides do it!
You keep thinking that the only problem with “conservatives” is the most extreme of the extreme, Fumento, you prick…
The problem with “conservatives” is people like you. People willing to accept all of the other bullshit that Republicans do, because there are other Republicans, that are doing even worse.
Idiot.
(*) – I like how when typing Boehner’s name, the spell checker, rightfully, listed “boner” as one of the suggestions.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Mark S.: Maybe his underwear is too tight and is limiting blood flow to his head.
moops
I think I’m more with Cole in the reading of this article.
This is a person that has very different opinions on most every topic we could imagine (That he thinks the Reagan years were a big success is a clue that people can view things very differently) but his point is that the right is now incapable of operating in a civil fashion.
I can argue and debate with someone that is at least a neighbor of reality. Someone that is just two lies apart from my position and theirs. If I have been spoon fed certain facts, Reagan’s years do look good. I can add new facts to this discussion, unless the opposition has resorted to ad hominem (or “dehumanizing”) attacks from the start. Then my hair is a bird.
He is also not someone that says both sides are the same. The nasty Left is not popular, or powerful, and he states it plainly, while the boldly nasty and willfully ignorant on the Right are swimming in filthy lucre and influence. He indicates that the Right is not just sometimes crazy and cruel, he uses just material from Malkin from today to show that it is constant, the norm. The narrative on the Right about Obama is one example he gives of how ridiculous one side is being.
I don’t care what brought him to state it publicly (left out of the wingnut welfare is a decent guess) but those are important points to note.
Yes, he still has a made-up narrative about Sandra Fluke, but he is willing to discuss it more. He might even change his mind. He says he cherishes facts. His failing in life has been to sit happily with the facts that already matched his opinion. There is at least the possibility to insert new facts.
D0n Camillo
But see the respectful tone with which he lied about what Sandra Fluke actually said!
Just Some Fuckhead
@Robert: Holy shit, I totally nailed this one. His underwear IS too tight. I’m right about everything first! I think I’ll turn my giant brain to something sciencey.
Raven
Tweety is now sucking Newts cock and licking his hardballs. Live.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@JGabriel:
__
A Reasonable Conservative may be divorced from Reality, but at least he’s negotiated visitation rights on alternate weekends with their children Massive Fuckups and Unpaid Bills Coming Due. Of course Dad just gives the kids candy and toys and lets them play video games all weekend and then sends them back to Mom all hyper and sugared-up, but at least they get to spend some time together. It’s a start.
Ash Can
I’m with David in NY. It’s foolish to expect someone like Fumento to go whole hog left-wing Democrat over night (and if his tipping point was the Heartland America billboards, it hasn’t been too long). Of course he still says and believes stupid things. What’s actually important is that he’s had any kind of epiphany at all, and what’s even more important than that is where he goes from here. I’d be willing to bet that even our distinguished blog host didn’t just wake up one morning, leap out of bed, and shout, “By God, this country needs single-payer health care!” Dismissing Fumento’s piece as worthless is like ditching a scientific study after the very first experiment because the results weren’t exactly what you were aiming for in your finished product.
Matthew B.
No, Fumento is not a guy you can look to for an honest discussion. He continually lies about the research he discusses, and he was fired by Scripps Howard News Service for taking money from a biotech firm and then writing a newspaper column about how great their products were. Seriously, check out a few of the posts about him at Tim Lambert’s site.
kc
Salon’s site is slow as hell. Almost as bad as the WaPo.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Deleted for inaccuracy due to missing information, see my post below.
slag
From my standpoint, no one is irredeemable. But like so many here, I am unmoved. What @Mark S. said. Not buying it.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Ash Can:
If he turns into a little baby girl over being compared to a terrorist, he’ll never make it on our side anyway.
Corner Stone
@Ash Can: It’s nothing but Fruminating.
Sm*t Cl*de
respect for order – nay, demand for order – have always been tenets of conservatism.
Ah. Authoritarian douchenozzles, IOW.
Soonergrunt
@Corner Stone:
I think a person can be arrested for that in some jurisdictions.
Or is that the thing they do on stage with vaseline, mayonnaise, balloons and tongue depressors?
karen marie
@Rob in Buffalo: Well, until GWB.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Matthew B.: Ahhh, this puts it in an entirely different light.
He’s a grifter who’s pissed that the market for his bullshit is drying up, nothing more.
Turgidson
So he’s basically saying “on substance, all the noxious bullshit we’ve spread about the issues for the past three decades is true, we just have abhorrent spokesmen nowadays and that makes me sad. Also too, both sides do it but my side looks like ignorant clowns when they do it and that also makes me sad.”
I suppose that makes him slightly less of a dick than Limbaugh et al. But only slightly.
Frankensteinbeck
@Villago Delenda Est:
And while Obama’s not going to call out Reagan by name, he’s given lengthy national speeches explaining why every basic tenet of Reaganomics is wrong from both a moral and practical standpoint. Man just can’t get credit for what he’s already done.
@moops:
I’m on this side of the debate. It’s important to understand that this guy isn’t our friend. He’s an old style conservative, a selfish authoritarian asshole. The point of this article is that EVEN ASSHOLES LIKE THAT are looking at the modern GOP and going ‘What the fuck is wrong with you people?!’ This guy badly, BADLY wants liberals to be the angry and uncivil and unreasonable dirty hippies. A large part of this article is about how, even though every fiber of his being screams against it, he must admit that his own side is way more angry and uncivil and unreasonable than the dirty hippies he hates. This is not a man who’s seen the light. It’s an ‘If you’ve lost this guy, how far around the bend are you?’ thing.
Stuck in the Funhouse
Speaking of the crazy and we know it, from our wingnuts being wingnuts files.
I can’t say I’d have done any different at 22, and somebody gave me 1 million pesos. Though as a good liberal, I hope I’d have had the sense to throw in a few pounds of primo reefer, and a few Led Zeppelin concerts. maybe. I mean, fucking “boats”? jeebus, and obviously not house boats, having to move back in with momma.
MattR
@David in NY:
I would take that bet. I don’t know much about the guy, but from what I have read he is not interested in a conversation where differing facts and opinions are honestly discussed and he would have no problem twisting things (or playing semantic games) in order to prove that he was right all along.
Yes, it is better that he realized the far right has gone kooky over the past 20 years or so. But it is a sad state of affiars for our country that this realization is earning him so many kudos. Whoever it was above that posted a link to the Chris Rock image with his famous line “What do you want, a cookie?” was right on target.
slag
@Just Some Fuckhead:
The vast majority of little baby girls I’ve known are made of sterner stuff than either him or you.
Mark S.
@Ash Can:
I still say any conservative admitting that our worsening income inequality is a serious problem is someone who might eventually turn away from the kool-aid. That’s even rarer than a conservative admitting global warming is real.
Violet
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
You missed the part where Dad badmouths mom to the kids the entire weekend, blaming the entire divorce on mom being a shrew and a nag, conveniently forgetting to mention how he was cheating with Miss Deficits Don’t Matter for most of the marriage. Not to mention his ongoing dalliances with the twins, Miss War in Iraq and Miss War in Afghanistan. And how he’s now friended their older sister, Miss War in Iran, on Facebook and he hopes they can start seeing each other too.
The kids don’t just come home hopped up on sugar, they’ve spent the weekend with dad’s mistress of the moment and got told how mom’s the worst thing that ever happened to dad and no man should ever have anything to do with her.
Just Some Fuckhead
@slag: oooh, sizzle burn! How do you do it?
Tony J
@Soonergrunt:
“Mary, hold my calls. Now, you were saying..?”
slag
@Just Some Fuckhead: Easy targets. I’m inherently lazy.
Corner Stone
@MattR:
This is pretty clear.
His OODA loop is still significantly retarded. And his framing makes it clear he’s not interested in change, just differently orienting himself for that sweet wingnut cash from another mother.
MikeJ
@Mark S.:
Anybody who votes for Romney is voting for increasing inequality.
Can you pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?
Corner Stone
@Violet:
Yeah. But damn they are so freakin’ sexy!
bemused
@redshirt:
Not so fast. He said he believes, nay, he knows from talking to liberals that some would, if they understood “real” conservatism, they would come to adopt some conservative positions. I guess we all think we can convince others of the error of their ways if they just gave ours a chance. Easy, peasy.
Turgidson
@Mark S.:
He’s not the only batshit rightwinger to say that. Cantor did too.
The acknowledgment that income inequality is a bad thing is only an accurate indicia of sanity if his solution to the problem is something other than tax cuts, entitlement..ahem..”reform” and deregulation.
karen marie
@Matthew B.: In other words, Fumento is attempting to rehabilitate himself into a prosperous new gig? Say it ain’t so!
Ash Can
@Just Some Fuckhead: Not on this site, at least. But seriously, I think you and most of the commenters here are missing, or ignoring, the main point, which is that this guy has done something of a 95 Theses by writing and publishing an article like this at all. Am I calling him a lefty convert, or even a centrist? Of course not. But he’s taken a step in that direction. Only time will tell if he takes more steps, but it’s silly to ignore or dismiss this one altogether.
Fwiffo
Gee, a winger wrapping his own bullshit and nonsense in a shroud of “calls for civility” hoping to magically confer upon them some kind of reasonableness. Sure, he’s making up shit about global warming and smearing Sandra fluke, but he’s denouncing some bat-shit conservatives, so he’s “reasonable”.
Just Some Fuckhead
@slag: There was nothing lazy about the way you asserted yourself there, simultaneously making a stand for little baby girls and taking on the internet bully.
Southern Beale
I read that. It was very much “whatever happened to civility!” to me. Probably need to re-read it.
Just saw this little item:
Joel
@Thoughtcrime: I think this is also apropos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lQW-FWMcBo
Joel
@Thoughtcrime: I think this is also apropos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lQW-FWMcBo
DFH no.6
@WJS:
To ifthethundohforgetit™ , and other assorted firebaggers in the comments in places like Eschaton, we’re apparently “Opologist, Inc.” over here. An “enemy” – just as much as the fascists, I suppose – who should be shunned.
So, yeah, the purity troll can go fuck himself.
He’s just a fucking seagull, not interested in engaging in discussion.
burnspbesq
This Is Better Than Sex
slag
@Just Some Fuckhead: Wait a second. I thought I was the internet bully.
bootsy
OT, but OMG! Do youse guys know about the whole dead-tree book dissecting the mustache of understanding!: http://gawker.com/5912631/gawker-book-club-the-imperial-messenger-thomas-friedman-at-work.
Send your copies inscribed “suck on this” to:
Big-Ass Mansion
Owned by Friedman’s Wife
Potomac, MD
Citizen_X
In addition to his fact-challenged comments on global warming, or Sandra Fluke, this jumped out at me:
That’s an hysterical fantasy? Try looking up “AIDS in southern Africa” sometime.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Ash Can: No, the main point is he’s a typical conservative, only caring about X when X happens to him. X happened to him, now he cares about X.
When he’s denied access to birth control, he’ll have that epiphany.
Etc.
Gex
These guys just never will acknowledge that the Southern Strategy and the Christian Coalition were things that fiscal conservatives encouraged to get their electoral victories despite the fact that voters didn’t like those policies.
They did not convince anyone. They’ve packaged some of it as an almost religious-like ideology, but they never legitimately convinced anyone. They invited the hate in to win because they do not value democracy more than they value getting their way all the time.
So cry me a fucking river that the tactics are backfiring now. Boo-fucking-hoo.
Mike E
@Raven: I’ll pass on that. Hopin’ for something good at the redbox on my way home that’ll supplant that horrifying image in my brain
Just Some Fuckhead
@slag:
Maybe that used to be you. Now you’re a hero to little baby girls everywhere, not just the ones you happen to know.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Violet:
__
I was giving the PG-rated version, but yeah, you nailed it.
slag
@Just Some Fuckhead: Wow. That didn’t take much. What I meant to say was that I’m inherently efficient.
ETA For clarity’s sake: We’re still making fun of each other, right?
JWL
“Has” become?
MattR
@Citizen_X: I have seen the argument made that he was not talking about Africa in making that claim. However, in the link he provided (which I think was to a shortened version of a longer paper) he argues that the CDC had to monkey with numbers to get an increase from 2% to 4% of AIDS diagnoses resulting from heterosexual sex and mocks the idea that the number will rise to 9% by 1991. According to recent CDC data, that number was roughly 30% in 2009.
Suffern ACE
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
Criminy, Levi. You posed practically nude for that money. I’m beginning to think he didn’t get the best adult role models growing up.
danimal
I think the majority of commenters are missing the importance of Fumento’s article. For every True Believer, there are a certain number of rational, real-world Republicans who are secretly aghast at the caricature that conservatism has become, but can’t come out of the closet. Each time a Frum or a Johnson or a Cole comes out and says that GOP tactics and beliefs have become crazy and un-American, it gives cover to others to abandon the crazy. While the GOP looks like a solid phalanx of fools (see debt ceiling debacle) much of the time, it won’t take many deserters to start a rout (see Obama/McCain). Fumento isn’t a liberal; we don’t have to agree with him, but his article is significant.
Ash Can
@Just Some Fuckhead: If you think so. The main point to me is that, nevermind what he says about auto-da-fes in his article, he’s in for a real reaming now from all the miscreants he names in his article, and then some, as well as all of their followers. I’ll be watching to see how he responds to that. IIRC, that was what pushed Charles Johnson away from the right wing once and for all. If this guy does the same, I’ll celebrate.
Chris
@mdblanche:
Those two quotes are the ones that stood out to me too.
“Order” as traditional conservatives conceive the term has usually implied the constant threat of violence and coercion against the lower classes. Mayberry was peaceful and harmonious by day because by night, cops and other upstanding citizens put on white sheets and terrorized, beat and killed anyone who might upset the precious Order Of Things (or just anyone who, by virtue of being at the bottom of society, was fair game to pick on). That’s the most extreme example, but not the only one – police brutality in inner city slums, Pinkerton violence applied against those who tried to speak for the underclass, COINTELPRO operations to disrupt and silence any group speaking out against the established way of things. And that’s just in America. Order for the Respectable People has always been purchased with the blood of those who have good reason not to be happy.
As for the “J’accuse” quote, equating Zola and the forces who stood up for Dreyfuss to the forces of “fear, anger and hatred” is possibly the most obscene thing in the article, equivalent to the bastards today who mewl that Obama and liberals are being racially divisive when they point out wingnuts’ attempts to racially divide the country. Possibly the author doesn’t know enough French history to know the context of the quote, but that’s hardly an excuse.
Eh, who knows – he’s only beginning to turn on the right, maybe he’ll come around, those things can take time. For the moment, though, I’d say he still needs a lot of work.
MattR
@Just Some Fuckhead: The corollary is the Andrew Sullivan argument against hate crimes or bullying legislation. “I had to deal with some amount of X and I survived, therefore there is no reason to restrict X in any way”
Suffern ACE
@Gex: There are not now, nor have there been in my lifetime, anything that would resemble something called “fiscal conservatives” in the US in any number sufficient to make a difference. There have been, say, people who vote for “Balance Budget Amendments” every three months who also vote for whatever the military wants or whatever “war on” whatever prison construction is necessary. What they object to is social spending.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
But by and large, when push comes to shove, they go along with it. Sure, every now and then a conservative “intellectual” defects, like this guy or like Bruce Bartlett ten years ago. But it’s not like these guys ever have a meaningful following, either from the elites or the public, and the holes they leave are easily plugged by more faithfully crazy people.
The “old style conservatives” have spent the last fifty years making their bed, and overall, I see no indication that they’re going to stop lying in it anytime soon.
Randy P
@MattR: You’re right. I have frequently compared Republicanism to belonging to a destructive religious cult, something I have all too much personal experience with in my family.
Even when somebody starts realizing that they’re in a cult and starts thinking they should get out, it is very hard to do because to do so would be to admit you’d given a lot of money and years of your life to a bunch of crazy people and their evil leaders. It’s a hard point to get to. And it’s typically followed by a period of real anger at yourself for getting sucked in. It takes a while to get back to “normal”.
It’s a psychological story I’ve read many times in the context of people escaping cults, and I imagine there are a lot of ex-Republicans with a similar story to tell.
MikeJ
@Chris:
What has he defected from?
Just Some Fuckhead
@MikeJ:
Self-dignity, common decency and good taste, if the link at #63 is any indication.
Chris
@MikeJ:
… Objection sustained.
Stuck in the Funhouse
comment deleted due to stupid spam filter on acid.
Villago Delenda Est
@Frankensteinbeck:
The thing is, given the vermin of the Village, Obama cannot come out and say those magic words I’d love to hear, because the low information voters out there might, just might, hear them and become less low information.
Because the rot started on January 20, 1981, when Ronald Wilson Reagan’s first actions were to nullify everything Jimmy Carter had done in the way of energy research that threatened the fossil fuel industry.
Those 30 years are lost, and we are well and truly fucked as a result.
Stuck in the Funhouse
Vote for Jeff Barth (D) for congress, cuz his daughters still got all their teeth, and husbands, also too.
Death Panel Truck
@Thoughtcrime: I’d go further than that
Or am I being too uncivil? Wouldn’t want to hurt his precious fee-fees.
Bill
Ah yes, another unreconstructed conservative declaring “but this is beyond the pale.”
Why in my day we had to walk over facts in our bare feet, up hill, both ways. Now the whippersnappers are using roller skates. And laughing about it.
I guess we shouldn’t be so hard. I suppose with the Right, the first step is to admit someone else has a problem.
Corner Stone
@slag: You’re my hero, fwiw.
DFH no.6
@Gex:
I get what you’re saying, but you know, I’ve been waiting some time (decades, really) for the fascists’ “tactics” (lying, hating, smearing, fearmongering, bigotry, etc.) to begin truly backfiring on them.
Sadly, haven’t really seen it yet.
At least not in the “net effect” sense, where their losses due to these anti-human tactics outweigh their gains (see: “Southern Strategy” for instance).
Maybe it will finally happen this election cycle due to their war on women.
A girl can dream, but not holding my breath.
Chris
@DFH no.6:
Frankly, if the catastrophic state the nation was left in at the end of the Bush years didn’t do the trick, I don’t know what the hell will.
Fwiffo
I particularly love how he holds up William F. Buckely and Ronald Reagan as models of conservative civility from golden times gone by, conveniently ignoring the virulently racist writings of the former, and the cries of “communism” (in reference to medicare) from the latter.
lacp
Michael Fumento haz a sad? Fuck him with George Tierney Jr.’s* dick.
*(of Greenville SC, to be specific)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
You got to love how the write whines about being denounced as a RINO when he himself did that to St Regan Maximus over Regan’s tax hike. Sounds like Mr Civil’s only problem is he can’t keep up with the current crop of Conservative purity trolls.
Patricia Kayden
Reading that article at Salon, I didn’t get the impression that the writer has changed his point of view. He sounds like Sullivan — still conservative but embarrassed by the Rightwingers flinging their excrement in public for all to see. I’m sure he’ll find a reason to vote for Romneybot.
Repubs have been nasty for years — they were awful to President Clinton as well. Wonder why the writer is just noticing how awful Repubs are now.
feebog
So I went on teh Google and tried to look up the Al Franken interview that Fumento cited. The only reference I could find was on site called “Blackfive” which appaently is dedicated to military matters. There is a definite right wing slant on the site. What I gleaned from the reference to the interview and the 18 comments, was this:
The interview was in or around June 2006. It was really a panel discussion with Fomento, Paul Rieckhoff, and a reporter named Jane Arraf.
The discussion apparently touched on embedded reporters, troops returning with PSTD, and so on. All the comments on the post were about Rieckhoff, and in fact he posted a comment as well.
No one commented on anything that Franken said during the panel discussion. If he did say something, it certainly did not spark any outrage on this rather conservative, military oriented site.
I suspect that Fomento took an off the cuff remark that Franken made during the discussion and either took it out of context, or is exagerating for dramatic effect in his article. It is rather telling that Fomento had to reach back almost six years for an example of “both sides do it.:
RalfW
He’s just a respectable winger who doesn’t like Wasilla-y blue collar/low information voters. Or Breitbart/O’Keefe’s obvious fuckery.
But he’s still very conservative. Club room, old school, dress ’em up like Brent Scowcroft, they’re still righties.
patroclus
I have to agree with most commenters that while the intent of the article was laudable, the actual content isn’t. Repeating Limbaugh’s wildly inaccurate framing of Sandra Fluke’s testimony is just one of many wildly inaccurate things Fumento included in an article putatively meant to praise accuracy and criticize inflammatory gibberish.
I’ll give him points for trying, but Brooks, Frum, Bartlett and Sully all do this kind of trolling better, and Frank Schaeffer and our very own John Cole have done it in a praiseworthy fashion. If this is a first step to a more significant conversion, great! But I have my doubts as to whether Mr. Fumento is truly on the road to enlightenment.
Another Halocene Human
@Rob in Buffalo: You win the thread.
Tonal Crow
Fumento is still a winger. I couldn’t bear to read the entire thing, but found these tidbits educational:
There is no scientific basis for the idea that reducing CO2 emission would be “worthless” in reducing global warming. Far, far, far from it. The guy’s still a denialist. And that means a nut.
I was always way ahead of the curve. And my exposés primarily appeared in right-wing publications. Back when they were interested in serious research. I also founded a conservative college newspaper, held positions in the Reagan administration and at several conservative think tanks, and published five books that conservatives applauded. I’ve written for umpteen major conservative publications – National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among them.
And where are the “facts” to support the above?
Bobo is clearly much more your type.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. When was that? 1800?
Both sides do it. Bobo has a new friend.
What a pile of stupid.
Tonal Crow
WP won’t let me edit the above. Sorry for the broken blockquote beginning “I was always way ahead of the curve.” What a bunch of self-aggrandizing horse emissions.
karen marie
@Ash Can: I don’t know, I think the question to ask here is why is Fumento doing this and why now. Assuming what others have said above about his background, he pretty much shit his own bed a while back. Now he’s attempting to make a name for himself among “the centrists” and remake himself as a respectable voice.
Fumento, IMO, is just noise.
@Chris: I don’t think he’s even that — an old fashioned conservative. He’s every bit of what he complains of — an opportunist. He’s noise, but he’s polite noise, as opposed to the ugly noise made by Fox News, Malkin, Rush and that mob.
DFH no.6
@Chris:
Exactly.
The fascists’ tactic (well, strategy, actually, to play off Peter “Tyrion” Dinklage’s clever riposte from the last GoT episode) of economic ruination for the many to the advantage of the few (which is what caused the catastrophe; for the umpteenth time, I might add) not only did not truly backfire on them, it actually gave them the platform to double-down and then win hugely in 2010.
I’m not sanguine about my fair nation ever (in my lifetime, anyway) getting a clue as to who is really fucking them over, let alone how or why.
patroclus
@DFH no.6: Do you think Fumento is as bad a writer as Arch Maester Ch’vylathan??
eyelessgame
I have to agree with the people who are pointing out that the article boils down to “All these people we have been feeding bullshit to for years have bad breath now!”
He really lost me on:
I think he has serious cognitive difficulties: he got lost between the first sentence and the third.
Bruce Baugh
It looks to me like a lot of folks may not know much about Michael Fumento’s career. His thing has always been writing about science and medicine in ways that get him published in Reason and Liberty as well as National Review: that is, libertarian-flavored right-wing, with an emphasis on the power of business to make it all better.
He is evil, and I don’t use the word lightly.
In the late ’80s, he weighed in with a bunch of journalism about how AIDS was not a risk for anyone outside the handful of very high-risk categories, culminating in his 1990 book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS. He also had a lot to say about the treatment of cancer and the then-even-more-mysterious-than-now field of autoimmune disorders, that boiled down to “highly profitable patented remedies good, low-cost not-patentable remedies bad”. He provided support for FDA crackdowns on a variety of alternative medical approaches, some of which are now part of the standard regimen for treating things like AIDS and fibromyalgia.
The world of people with (in my case) porphyria, and fibro, and rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus, and on and on, was much more constrained then than now. A lot of us took up BBSing, then e-mail and Usenet, because we literally had no other windows on the world outside our homes, or at least none that we could count on. If we were lucky, we had doctors willing to research alongside us about this strange stuff they’d never seen before, that many of them would never see a case of again. If we weren’t, we ended up in psych wards and on brain-crippling medications, and then we died. It’s not good to have any of that kind of thing now, but you’ve got a world of support possibilities out there, including the kind of documentation you can use to press disability eligibility claims. Back then, not much.
And it was in that context of isolated people with undiagnosable, untreatable pain and misery that Fumento stood there preaching the gospel of corporate medicine and its profits. He set people up for unnecessary pain, misery, and death. He’s never apologized for anything he was wrong about and should have known so at the time, which is a lot, nor made any effort to even say “okay, I got a lot of important stuff wrong but that was limited info times, here’s the straight dope now”. And I will never forgive him for it. He’s not crazy, he’s just evil, and I want no part of pretending he’s a worthwhile human being, at all.
Another Halocene Human
@Suffern ACE: I just had a brain wave. There seem to be about as many true fiscal conservatives as Jews in the US, but the term “fiscally conservative” and wanking about debt are pretty much as popular as “support Israel” and wanking about war with Iran.
Another Halocene Human
@Patricia Kayden:
Back then they could hide behind the notion that it was the Clenis that was awful and they were just exposing/reporting on it. At the time, the MSM was still hesitant to report on presidential affairs (after all, they had kept mum about Poppy Bush and his Jennifer with a J) so the Monica stuff was broken by The Enquirer. The Foster stuff was pure tabloid too, when it broke out of the subterranean depths of winger bbs and irc channels and newsletters, pretty sure those were still a “thing” in the 1990s. And there was right-wing hate radio. And the Drudge Report, which all the reporters were following obsessively but which I don’t recall ever even looking for on dialup. I did know how to find cnn.com… when I felt like waiting 100 years for it to load, then crash.
r€nato
I’ll have to read the rest of these comments later, but it heartens me to see so many agree with what I took away from Fumento’s essay.
He sort of gets it, but not really. Not really at all.
I could write a few hundred words detailing what I think of his essay, but what he gets right would be about 25% of it… the rest would be what he gets wrong.
Reasoned discourse is only found on the left of center side of the aisle. He cites something Olbermann said about Malkin as somehow being equivalent to the vitriol Malkin spews out daily… Hello, “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick” is fairly polite, especially when Fumento just finished pointing out the volume of bile Malkin vomits up on a regular basis! Quick, fetch the fainting couch!
Not one mention of Rachel Maddow. Is there any equivalent, well-known media pundit on the Right?
Not one mention of the Clinton impeachment hysteria. By golly, I’ve got no idea how our poisoned political discourse got this way! It just sort of happened!
I award you 4 out of 10, Mr. Fumento. And that’s being generous.