Even the liberal Peter Daou has lost patience with the Teabaggers:
I’ve gone on the record disagreeing with the term ‘Teabaggers’ and with the use of the word ‘un-American’ – I’ve done so because despite the astroturfing and the faux-grassroots opposition to health care reform, I place a premium on citizen activism and I don’t want to tarnish legitimate protesters, even if I strongly disagree with their politics and ideology. There’s no denying that some Americans have real fears and genuine disagreements with Democratic policies and it is wrong to assail their right to protest.
I have, however, singled out racists and other assorted Obama haters, some of whom are intent on inciting violence. They should be spared no scorn and should be universally condemned. Their actions are not about protest and dissent but about hate and violence.
I am deeply concerned that the summer of 2009 has set the stage for bloodshed to come. The kind of rage we’re seeing, based on Limbaugh, Coulter and Hannity-style soundbites, is dangerous. It’s like a cancer that grows with time and we need to be vigilant in defending against it.
He goes on to link to a video of some teabaggers talking about sending illegal aliens home with bullets in their heads. So that’s what it took to get him to admit that we shouldn’t just see teabaggers as just fragile, like all of us.
And I don’t mean this in an “Al Gore discovered Willie Horton” kind of way, but all the PUMA bullshit about hard-working white voters comes from the same poison tree as birtherism.
It’s Lee Atwater’s world, we’re just living in it.
Comrade Jake
The sanctimony is strong with that one.
Wile E. Quixote
Fuck! I had just about forgotten about that horrible fucking column he wrote about Palin. Thanks for bringing it back up, Doug, ya bastard.
Josh Huaco
I haven’t seen anything by BOB lately. Did he get another timeout?
Martin
I have to say I’m pretty impressed at the success GOS and other sites are having getting advertisers to dump Glenn Beck. That’s how things should work – no advertisers, no show.
ellaesther
@Martin: Eh? What’s this? I haven’t heard about it, and I’d reallyreally like to. Hell, I’ll throw myself into the effort, if I can!
beltane
@Josh Huaco: Maybe he’s out there heckling cancer patients at town hall meetings.
Seebach
That’s how things should work – no advertisers, no show.
I’m almost somewhat afraid of what would happen if Beck didn’t have a show on Fox. Then he’d have a radio show and a website, or maybe just a website. His fans would still listen to him.
The goal I hope would be to keep him around, but cautious. Driving him underground is the worst thing we could do.
General Winfield Stuck
I’m still waiting for the first teabagging birther to show up at an Obama protest wearing a Gorilla Suit and sporting a sign that reads “Yes, We Have No Bananas Today”. Mr. Atwater can then be transferred to hell, if he’s not there already.
JK
Given the fact that Lee Atwater is dead, I think it might be more appropriate to say “It’s Rush Limbaugh’s world, we’re just living in it.”
Crashman06
I wasn’t around 41 years ago, but is this how things felt before the world went to hell in ’68? Because I’m getting really worried that there is violence on the horizon. I can’t laugh anymore because these people scare me.
Keith G
Peter Daou, meh.
Martin
GOS has 3 diaries on the rec list now of advertisers that have issued statements that they are pulling their ads. They periodically have diaries that list advertisers and there’s a site now that let’s you fill in a form and they’ll fire off a letter on your behalf:
colorofchange.org/beck/
The Moar You Know
@Martin: I wish it was that easy; Murdoch has shown no hesitation in running money-losing operations for years, and Beck wouldn’t get different treatment – Fox would run him commercial-free if they had to.
cleek
they just take it as a badge of honor and pimp their other shows harder during the breaks where commercials used to go.
they think it’s a war.
r€nato
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: just imagine what would have happened if the shoe had been on the other foot in Election 2000.
Raise your hand if you believe Bush/Cheney and the RNC and all the wingnuts would have bowed out as gracefully as Al Gore and his supporters did.
Fulcanelli
Watching the daily Town Hall news video coverage of the GOP ‘base’ twitching and bleating like a herd of racist sheep with Tourette’s conjures up within me a surreal cinematic vision I can only liken to perhaps: Federico Fellini directing “Who Moved My Cheese”.
thwak
I’m a hard working white voter. still trying to vote. dang. I must be hurd!
ow, my balls. It’s like I take pride in being ignorant.
r€nato
Dear wingnuts:
We had an accountability moment in 2008. You lost. Now we’re going to do things our way.
Love…
JK
@Martin: @The Moar You Know:
Rupert Murdoch has no conscience so he’ll never throw Glenn Beck under the bus.
Beck is like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs, and Rush Limbaugh. All these guys are coated with high grade teflon. There’s nothing any of these assholes can say, other than the 7 dirty words, that could ever get them fired.
wasabi gasp
Atwaterworld: a documentary in which the fucktards conquer all reason only to be left drifting forever in the seas of their own bile.
Martin
Nah, he’ll go Hal Turner and the Secret Service will give him a federal enema. Crashman is right, though – the violence is coming. I don’t think there’s any stopping it now.
Dr. I. F. Stone
LMAO!!! This has to be the silliest and funniest post you’ve yet put up since joining the team. Keep up the good work!
cleek
sometimes, i think they have: the Dems have made their circular firing squad big enough to fit the GOP, too. now nothing gets done!
Seebach
I always refer back to this digby post.
This is what Lincoln said about the South:
… what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them.
We just want to live and let live. But this doesn’t work for them. We have to be like them. We will let them have their fundamentalism and their guns and their country music, but it’s not enough to just leave them alone. Until we declare them the best, and the winners, we are their enemies.
JK
According to Jim Pinkerton, it’s all the fault of Rachel Maddow and MSNBC.
“Scare tactics is Rachel Maddow taking the first ten minutes of every show this week to denounce them and call them names and talk about Astroturf. […] The real terrorism going on is MSNBC and the liberal media,” – Jim Pinkerton of the New America Foundation.
h/t andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/08/malk-1.html
MBSS
it’s pat buchanan’s world, we’re just living in it.
Kryptik
@r€nato:
Wasn’t the Brooks Brothers riot proof enough? Just multiply that by…er…hrm… 4 x 365 + a day for leap year is…
Aaaanyways…
Seebach
More, because it’s just SO GOOD:
The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.
These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.
Doctor Science
Crashman06:
It was a *lot* worse in ’68, at least after the assassinations. MLK was killed April 4, RFK was killed June 6: even as a child, I could feel the fear coming like a wave. Cities had *burned* the summer before, everyone was thinking the summer of ’68 would be worse.
The teabaggers are clearly angry and some are armed and dangerous. But they’re mostly *old*, they have a real backward quality. It’s different when what’s marching in the streets is clearly the future.
Kryptik
@JK:
That made me laugh with rage. Yes, a news personality announcing the rather questionable links the “grassroots” organizations involved here have with corporate interests is terrorism. While standing outside, openly armed where the President is going to speak, holding ‘Its time to water the Tree of Liberty!’ signs…that’s just free speech, and how dare you suggest that shouldn’t belong outside a Town Hall.
DonkeyKong
“You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.” -George Wallace
MBSS
i think it would be tremendous to make Beck a loss leader for Fox. Murdoch can keep his weepy little lunatic on the air as a vanity project. or should i say: insanity project.
JGabriel
@r€nato:
We already know how that played out. Bush lost, and he and his supporters didn’t bow out gracefully.
.
Crashman06
@Doctor Science: this is reassuring. I hope you are right. They do seem so old, and even scared themselves
JWW
I guess your name is Doug,
You seem to like making a joke of, American history. You know nothing about it, but it sells for you. You are so shameless.
Like your boss and paycheck manager, John, the current Tea Parties are a joke to you. As I’m sure both of you are ignorant to the facts of America. The Boston Tea Party(as with current tea parties) is what actually started the War of Independece. The Boston Massacre was the result of this act.
I’m sorry I didn’t explain the Boston Massacre, you may want to do a Wiki. This will give you the short version as with all you other detailed knowledge you pretend to display
You and your readers will have to use Wiki too hone up on your history. You are a sorry lot, you run your mouths and lay blame yet your spine lies in a safety deposit box.
Martin
Yep
Barbara
This is what I felt like nearly the whole time I lived in the retro South (before I moved to the blue lagoon oasis I live in now). I would wonder why it never seemed enough for them to live their lives, why they had to live mine as well. It was the insecurity that comes with losing position. Their rage has been turned around and aimed at the wrong target for decades. I remember watching a KKK march and reading a columnist who, correctly, noted that the protesters weren’t losing their jobs to African-Americans, as they insisted they were, but to overseas manufacturing. Still, they railed against affirmative action, not corporate favoritism. It’s the power of race, one way or another.
But Lee Atwater was a big loser in the end. Even he knew it.
JGabriel
It’s Roger Ailes’ country and we’re just trespassers.
.
robertdsc
Tell that to the President and the Dem leadership. They haven’t got the message yet.
thwak
Barack Obama, the POTUS, acted like a leader today.
Also acted like a candidate, but, ?
Fucking guy campaigned on exactly this and he was elected and so now he’s campaigning for the shit that he was elected to go ahead and do. I think he’s going to win. He tends to do that. eh? Fucking guy has a record of success. jus sayin
thwak
c’mon. who did I piss off?
Mnemosyne
@r€nato:
That was the not-so-veiled threat from the beginning: give the election to Bush, or we start burning shit down. Given that Timothy McVeigh was still the most lethal terrorist on American soil at that point, it didn’t seem like an empty threat, at least to me.
DonkeyKong
JWW, you’re a minute sixteen shy of your two minute hate.
Jason Bylinowski
@Crashman06: “this is reassuring. I hope you are right.”
Nonetheless, I’m still looking at Martin’s prediction of violence. It might end up just a couple of tacky beat-downs, maybe a death or two. Hopefully nothing too terrible. But ot me it seems inevitable. Now, it’s POSSIBLE that Obama is sitting on something and getting the old rope-a-dope ready (maybe something to do with the attorney firings, I hope?) that would take the wind from their sails; that would end the whole conflagration mighty quick.
To me it’s absolutely stunning that it’s even gone this far, crazy as it is, and no-one has been killed yet. What also stunning to me is that this isn’t all just some sort of whacked out dream I’m having. Anyone else feel the surreality of this past week or so? It’s like I’m living inside the movie Idiocracy. I mean, I just CAN’T BELIEVE they are letting this shit on the news with the credibility that it’s getting. It really has been a revelation to me and I hope it doesn’t leave us all too jaded.
MikeJ
The Boston Massacre, which took place in 1770, was the direct result of the Boston Tea Party, which happened in 1773?
Dude. Stop getting your history from wikipedia.
Quaker in a Basement
But not Lee.
Mnemosyne
@MikeJ:
Don’t blame Wikipedia — they got the dates right. I’m guessing his source is the infallible Glenn Beck.
DougJ
As I’m sure both of you are ignorant to the facts of America. The Boston Tea Party(as with current tea parties) is what actually started the War of Independece. The Boston Massacre was the result of this act.
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that I was ignorant of what happened at the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre. How would that affect my criticism of these “tea parties”?
NCReggie
well you know Barack and the Dems are socialists and all…
Michael
That’s some sheer dumbfuck ignorance, undoubtedly from the David Barton School of Telling Lies for Jesus, Talibornagain Edition.
As somebody with a better than fair background in history, I’m pretty well aghast at the audacity of the stupid expressed in the quoted paragraph.
MikeJ
My apologies to wikipedia. I only mentioned them because he did, and I foolishly assumed he knew how to read his own sources.
General Winfield Stuck
And here we are in modern times. And the New Tea Parties in 2009 caused the Great Truth Massacre of 2008. Go figure.
geg6
Don’t you guys get it? The Boston Tea Party is directly responsible for the Boston Massacre because…shut up that’s why!
NCReggie
speaking of my home state of NC, only 24% of the repubs around here think obama is a citizen. But then again NC voters kept reelecting that piece of shit Jesse Helms for like ever. Crazy I actually met the guy and took a picture with him for my Congressional Youth Leadership Council trip back in ’01.
Turgidson
@MikeJ:
Haha. I’m pretty sure wikipedia is more accurate than JWW’s history lesson was. He/she is getting their info from a fever dream, I suspect.
MBSS
boston tea party lead to the boston massacre which lead to boston baked beans which lead to the boston celtics.
they could have just stopped at the baked beans ftw.
Onihanzo
and how many minutes allotted for editing?
Jesus, that’s priceless.
Dick Weathers
@Turgidson:
Keep laughing sheeple. A quick trip to wikipedia shows us that JWW was clearly using “Boston Massacre” to refer to portions of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, which did in fact occur after the Boston Tea Party.
Ripley
Socialists have bosses and paycheck managers? Huh. Point me to that wiki.
Citizen_X
You seem to like making a joke of, American history.
Yes, but we also know true mastery when we see it. You win, sir!
MikeJ
One fucking home stand doesn’t make up for losing to us all season, Yanquis. Three day stand at the Fenway starts 21 Aug. Three days in the Bronx Sep 25. We will be avenged.
J. Michael Neal
Yep, the Boston Tea Party. Petty vandalism in protest of a tax *cut*. How very Birther of them.
Brachiator
@JK:
Not even the 7 dirty words. Rush could pop a Viagra and have on-microphone sex with Ann Coulter and he would still be on the air.
It’s about the ratings. Period.
For example, even though she talks about voluntarily moving on to other challenges, Dr Laura was recently fired by Los Angeles talk radio station KFI because her ratings declined bigtime compared to other hosts on the station, which also carries Limbaugh’s show. Some background here:
latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-kfwb11-2009aug11,0,6823897.story
As long as Rush and his fellow wingnut goons give their listeners what they want, they will be around for a long time.
Martin
Well, it depends on what you want to count as ‘it’. The 3 cops killed in Pittsburgh by the guy who thought Obama was coming for his guns? How about the jackass at the Holocaust museum? The Tennessee U/U church?
The right is twisting itself into an ever tighter knot (and Obama isn’t exactly discouraging it, from my view) and the tip of that rope is really going to snap.
I’ll be honest, I don’t entirely fear it. American’s are really quite forgiving of speech. No matter how horrible a thing you might say – even if it was honest and led to terrible acts, it takes no more than months to get back in the good graces of the public. So none of this jackassery on the right will be remembered. The public will forgive calling Obama a racist, the birthers and deathers, they’ll forgive the town hall hooligans, the media apologies, all of it. Honestly, this movement won’t end until shots ring out and lives are taken. Then the public will care and will denounce this crap and then it will start to draw down.
We’re not going to get anywhere in this country until the shit really hits the fan. That’s a pretty dark attitude, I’ll admit, but I really don’t see any other way out of this. Obama’s win was as good a shot as the left has gotten in decades and they’re getting nowhere because the wingnuts have a disproportionate voice thanks to the media and inertia is too easy for the populace. The public needs to roundly reject that voice and embrace a different course, and that’s not going to happen through debate. The public needs to see what the right is willing to do here to win. That’s how civil rights happened. That’s how all major change happens in this country, unfortunately.
Onihanzo
Uh huh. I’m sure that idea is all good and well…until such time as it’s your shit, or your family’s shit, in the fan.
Major change, indeed.
Martin
And what makes you think that’s not already happening? How many people die each year due to lack of health care? If I lose my job, that might actually be my family. How many soldiers died in Iraq because the left wasn’t able to get a voice in the debate?
I don’t wish it on anyone, but look around. Are things getting better? Is this working?
thwak
anybody touches my shit…
thwak
…you fuckin’ die!
I was finishing my part for me.
Anne Laurie
Hell, there was a strong current among the Media Village Idiots that we should just concede to the Bush Thugs, because “conventional wisdom” ran there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Bush and Gore anyway, and Bush wanted it more, and anyways, the MVIs were bored with all things Democratic. A large part of the anti-Kerry viciousness in 2004 was the Media Village doubling down on its failed 2000 pro-Bush editorializing — by 2004 it was clear even to the meanest intelligences, i.e. Dean Broder & David Brooks, that the Cheney kleptocracy was doing its best to destroy America, but admitting that would have meant admitting how badly the Broder/Brooks axis had fvcked up in 2000. And those miserable pismires would rather watch every American *not* on their cocktail-party list die horribly than admit to having made a mistake.
JGabriel
@NCReggie:
And yet they voted for him in the general. How’d that happen?
.
JGabriel
@Anne Laurie:
Damn. First time in a couple years, or more, I’ve had to look up an insult. Nice word.
(FYI, to save others the google, it means “piss-ant”.)
.
IndieTarheel
@Brachiator:
You know, you should be shunned for foisting that thought on us…
wilfred
4,331, of which 98 have occurred since Obama became president. Obama was supposed to be the left’s voice in the debate since, as everybody remembers, the only thing that separated him from the other candidates (less Kucinich) was his adamant stance against the war. Now he has expanded the war in Afghanistan, against the good advice of a lot of sensible people.
The anti-war left was critiqued by mainstream Democrats and has been effectively silenced by them since Obama became president. As proof, look at the postings at this site, which has overlooked the emerging debate over our policy in Afghanistan, troubles looming in Iraq (and no, we will not leave in 2010/11) and staggering rates of soldier suicides in favor of endless wanking on why Sarah Palin is a stupid c-nt, tea-baggers and what she/he/they said about fuck all what.
At least 25 more American soldiers have been killed since the tea-baggers became the force that will KILL US ALL. Why the very fabric of the Republic is threatened, incipient revolution is in the air, God protect us.
bob h
These fuckers are going to come to DC en masse this Fall, I am quite sure. If the Dems decide to proceed without the Republicans, they will arrive in a psychotic state. The Congress will have to be defended, either by the military or by us.
Ejoiner
Wilfred –
I’m beginning to feel like the quote by Marx: In a democracy every 4 or 6 years the workers are given the illusion that they are choosing from various alternatives. (paraphrase)
asiangrrlMN
@Martin: Don’t forget Dr. Tiller. He’s the one who really sticks out in my mind.
The violence, it is coming. I fear it, but I accept it. With the crazy trajectory arcing as it is and very little accountability to be found anywhere in the traditional media, it is inevitable. I so fucking don’t want it to happen, but I don’t see anything short of a massive societal overhaul that will prevent the inexorable escalation of teh crazy.
Fear and hatred permeate the souls of the mobs at the town hall meetings. I would feel more compassion for the ‘real Americans’ who are so crazed out of their minds if they had shown one iota of the same fear during the last eight years.
NickM
What little comfort I can get from watching these meetings is that the angry people are almost invariably old men – the last generation of old white men who can say they totally ran the national show – and they’re scared and angry now that they’re on their way out. They’re more moob than mob.
I’m not saying they can’t be dangerous, but I agree with the poster above who said its not exactly the future out rioting in the streets.
Lola
Peter Daou’s Palin piece was total drivel, and sexist drivel. It is very paternalistic to say we must think of female politicians as children. Who would even think to say that about Mitch McConnell?
PUMAs do love the white voters. I have a gay Asian PUMA friend who likes Palin and is obsessed with the midwest, the white “heartland” of America. It is bizarre.
Da Bomb
Anytime I can, I sign online petitions to get these idiots, and dolts off of my television.
It is true that most of the crazy is from the old fogies who have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, but we should hold our media accountable. This is eventually going to get out of hand.