More on the Frost affair
I will stop blogging about this eventually, but Right Wingnutistan’s latest foray into unabashed insanity has even me stunned. Big Daddy Ezra K writes:
Something has really gone wrong on the Right. Become sick and twisted and tumorous and ugly. To visit Michelle Malkin’s cave is to see politics at its most savage, its most ferocious, its most rageful. They say they’ve spent the past week smearing a child and his family because that child was fair game — he and his family spoke of their experience receiving health care through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. For this, right wingers travel to their home to inspect its worth, they insinuate that the family is engaged in large-scale fraud to receive government benefits, they make threatening phone calls to the family.
This is the politics of hate. Screaming, sobbing, inchoate, hate. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to drive to the home of a Republican small business owner to see if he “really” needed that tax cut. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to call his family and demand their personal information. It would never occur to me to interrogate his neighbors. It would never occur to me to his smear his children.
And that, my friend, is what is truly stunning. I say a lot of nasty things about right-wing crazies such as Dan Riehl. But it would never occur to me to invade his privacy by posting live dispatches about his living conditions from the shrub outside his driveway. What Malkin and her fellow travelers are doing is creepy and immoral, and they don’t seem to give a damn about it one way or another. The idea that these people make up any significant part of our population- even if it’s only 30%- is terrifying to me. Where does this sort of viciousness come from?
“Where does this sort of viciousness come from?”
Fear of losing one’s unearned power, and the likely public scorn associated with the evil one advocates is certainly a strong motivation to hide and destroy as much evidence as possible. They are aware of the Nuremberg trials even if they willfully ignore their lessons.
The lizard brain. That’s where.
They’re evil people.
And by the way, Dan Riehl needs to mow his lawn.
Something has really gone wrong on the Right. Become sick and twisted and tumorous and ugly.
They’ve been doing this for a while. Valerie Plame, Scott Ritter, Dan Rather…anyone who dared to tell the truth about the Emperor and his lack of clothes was made into an example, in the most vicious fashion possible.
What’s different about this…MAYBE…is going after a 12 year old just might wake up some people who are still on the fence at this late date in time.
P.S. I really want to hear what Howie Kurtz has to say about his favorite blogger now.
They are on the ledge , privilege –
And another thing: this is happening in Baltimore, Maryland, 35 miles to the northeast of our nation’s capital, where the Washington Post decides what is and isn’t news. So far, the mugging of the Frost family by these delusional psychopaths of wingnuttia has merited PRECISELY ZERO MENTION in the Post. None, zip, nada.
The almighty Post has a blog called Maryland Moment. The blog covers state government and news from the various Maryland counties. News of the day? The fourth anniversary of a county smoking ban and a trip to Israel by Ike Leggett, County Executive of Montgomery County. Graeme Frost? Never heard of him.
Now, we all now that Howard Kurtz, arbiter of all things media-related, has hailed right-wing blogs for their alleged “coups,” and has ignored their embarrassing string of gaffes. Has Howard had anything to say about Graeme Frost? Nope.
What do you think the average American would say if they saw right-wing freaks poking around in the metaphorical trash of a family that had had two children suffer devastating injuries in a car accident? I don’t think the term “fair game” would be part of the response. The right-wing nutosphere has revealed itself in all its glory — if you disagree with us, we will attack and smear and defame and harass you, decency be damned. All concerns fade before the greater glory of teh cause.
This story is news, and it should be covered as such. The silence from the media is deafening.
I can’t answer that, but this does have the potential to turn against them.
The media lives by narrative. If an event doesn’t have a catchy story to reinforce it, it really doesn’t get traction. Blah blah meta media blah.
They want the story to be about some rich welfare queens. It’s worked so well for them in the past. But here it’s different. These are middle-class people, entrepreneurs, struggling to make ends meet, build a business, raise their kids. Hell, they’re even white (by which I mean if they were black or Hispanic or, god forbid, Islamomexihomofacists, we’d be witnessing whole other dimensions of ugliness). These people aren’t so much different from me. Certainly not much different than lots of other middle class families.
Their kids had a catastrophic event and they took advantage of the support that decent societies offer in those cases.
The story is actually the wingnuts going nuclear on a couple of grade school kids. Frothing-at-the-mouth, bugfuck, dingleberries-on-the-hat-brim nuts simply because the kids stood up to voice their appreciation for a program that made a huge difference in their lives.
The silence from the media is deafening.
Howard Kurtz certainly hopes so, Bemused. If our voices were to be heard, who would pay Howie’s speaking fees?
But if you cornered him at the next Beltway cocktail party, he’d say (in his best self-righteous tone) that giving the Malkintents “more publicity” would be “counterproductive”. Because, in his tiny shriveled heart, he’s terrified that The Twenty-Eight-Percenters might actually be more like 37 percent, or even 43 percent, or at least powerful enough in their curdled malignancy to melt the glaciers of Conventional Wisdom and start a flash flood that will drown all the Reasonable People like Mr. Kurtz.
yes, let’s let godwin’s law go out of the room for a minute.
you gone?
good. this is what the nazis recognized so proficiently: the lizard brain and the rightist need for order can turn to hate incredibly easily.
given that in fact cheney and bush and your average republican are not nazis, they haven’t done a sufficient job of providing an “other” to hate. that is the incoherency of their position. they’ve thought they could do it from afar (the other lives in n. korea, in afghanistan, in iraq, in iran!) but ultimately that doesn’t satisfy the lizard brain right wing authoritarian worshipper compulsion–the enemy needs to be closer to home. that’s where the internet comes in–you can rail against your enemies with hideous and hate-filled screeds from the comfort of your cheeto-stained basement. but that isn’t totally satisfying either. really nothing is, and the fix gets tougher and tougher to sate. ultimately what these fascists want is to plant their boots down on the of the backstabbers who are destroying their country–the “leftards”, the “moonbats” and so on.
i’m not saying anything that Orcinus hasn’t been on about for years, but what you are seeing is the mainstreaming of hate, and the actualizing of a feeling into action. that michelle malkin mans the battlements is no surprise, but there are plenty of others like her out there held back only by their enormous fear of being found out to the be the pussyass no skills weakling pieces of shit they actually are.
Riehl, Malkin and the rest of Shitstainistan deserve a very special edition of Dateline’s To Catch a Predator for this week’s deplorable Wingnuttery.
Sinclair Lewis saw this particular feature in the American character pretty damn well. It’s not new, it’s not unusual and it’s not going to stop. It only recedes for a little while.
Robert Green–
Good point. Makes me want to add that the “other” isn’t sufficiently hate-able unless you can blame something, or everything, on him. Islamofascists in Iraq? Hateful, sure, but they’re far away. I need someone I can blame (my being fired/my wife cheating on me/my kid’s drug addiction/my $2,000 car repair bill/etc.) on. Ie, a fellow citizen who, along with his “race,” is screwing me here and now.
Yep, and to think Michelle travelled all the way from California to Baltimore to snoop around their business and home. I wonder if Faux News paid her airfare.
Where does this sort of viciousness come from?
They’re fucking psychotics.
At some point, Malkin or Limbaugh or O’Reilly are going to get on the airwaves and say, “Kill them. Kill them all.” And we’ll have a quarter of the population running around with hatchets trying to wipe out the rest of us.
I’m only kinda sorta joking. How the hell do you treat 75 million psychotic loons?
Ha, Ha!
From the Crooks and Liars comments:
If nothing else, KO will ample “Worst Persons” to chose from this week.
HAVE ample, rather.
In a good and just world, this whole thing would end in several convictions.
This sort of viciousness comes from having backed the way-wrong pony for way too long. On some low, animalistic level (not to disparage animals), these “people” realize that, yet they don’t have the sense of self-worth to admit it. Thus they continue to lash out, like some sort of reptile caught beneath a rock, or a rabid rat that realizes this last corner of the maze is the end of the line.
Careful what you wish for with Howie Kurtz. I’m sure he’ll address this at some point. But he can be especially even-handed when it comes to the right-wing blowhards. Meaning, he will probably play up the “they are doing journalism” angle, while ignoring the harassment aspect of it.
And betchyerass he will pick up on the attempts to post Malkin’s address. For balance!
These people aren’t so much different from me. Certainly not much different than lots of other middle class families.
zsa: Nor from me. Nor, I would surmise, from many of the attendant followers of wingnut blogs. (The bloggers themselves know exactly what they’re doing.) That’s what’s causing this kerfuffle. The cognitive dissonance is driving them even more insane.
Here’s a nasty little secret from the annals of Nazi historiography that nobody really likes to talk about…
German citizens pretty much knew what was happening in those “work camps” that people were being taken off to. By and large, they just didn’t care.
Oh sure, lots of them probably were just too overwhelmed with their own personal problems to care much – life in wartime Germany was no picnic by any standard. But plenty of average, ordinary, every day Germans knew that genuine atrocities were happening just a few hundred miles from their homes and shrugged their shoulders, because those yids were a pain in the ass, anyway.
Human beings are – all of us, to the very last man and woman – capable of the most vile, inhumane acts imaginable. Not a single one of us is somehow immune to this. It takes a conscious commitment to not being that sort of person to keep oneself from sliding into that darkness, given the right provocation.
Our general unwillingness to post Michelle Malkin’s home address and phone number, given how readily available it is, is evidence of the fact that we have all thought about this issue and made the decision about what sort of persons we want to be.
The fact that they ARE willing to do such things is one half of the primary reason I want to get my pert little bottom out of this country.
Fuck Godwin sideways. This. Is. What. Fascists. Do.
Only 30%? That’s a hell of a lot of people.
I saw a comment from Malkin regarding the worth of the Frost’s home. It may be worth $400K now but how much did they pay for it. My home in nearby Catonsville, MD is now worth $300K+ but it only cost a fraction of that when I bought it 12 years ago. The fact is I couldn’t afford to buy it now. I’m sure that the Frost’s wouldn’t be able to sell there home and buy anything in this area either.
She is a stupid bint.
Jillian is right. You guys are shocked but you are on the inside. Looking from the outside in, it’s just astonishing. The rage that consumes so many Americans just stuns me. I live in a Western democracy and I’m a citizen of another. Each has its problems but neither is *sick*, although Australia is a bit off-colour. You have to think that that sickness pours down from above, and in this case, the rightards are simply reflecting the hatred Bush has shown to less well-off American kids.
That and something that always enrages the herd: taxes. No one likes paying taxes, but the right, who worship greed, hate them more than most. They see their money going to poor kids, and they hate that. They don’t see what they gain from taxation, only the money they do not receive. A demagogue can go a long way by focusing on taxes and the other. If he or she can push the message that the taxes are *caused* by the other (or that any adverse economic event in the individual’s life is), he or she can inculcate unbelievable rage.
This story makes me sick to my stomach.
I knew Malkin et al. were horrible people … but, man, this is just stunning.
Hmmm. Pert?
How pert?
On a scale of one to ten…
mikey
I can’t bring myself to link to her, or my own rant about it, but Megan chimed in on this.
It’s not as bad as her racist explanation of “why blacks iz lazy”, but it ain’t good.
If this and Rush’s phony soldiers crap aren’t the final proof that the hardcore right are pathological, then I don’t want to be here when it does come.
Seriously, the next 15 months or so look more frightening every day.
Imagine what Bush will do in the time between Hillary winning and taking office. Or don’t, cause it’s fucking terrifying.
Next, I fully expect to see the wingnuts going after any business that takes advantage of tax write offs or subsidies. Do they really need it? Are they really qualified? Even if they are, couldn’t they have done without it, or sold something instead?
How about large agribusinesses that take advantage of subsidies meant for small farms? Let’s hang around in their lobby and ask what their buildings are worth.
Drug companies that get write offs to keep their manufacturing in America? (Including, as someone has mentioned, the Marianas, where there aren’t really any labor laws to speak of.) We need to start emailing FOX News and telling them we don’t think these guys are really in need of that.
Oh, hey, how about the tax loophole that gave people a write off for their Hummers on the grounds it was a business vehicle? Are they all, every one of them, being used by a business? Are we sure? Let’s ask their neighbors.
Mining rights on public lands? Logging? Grazing privileges? The use of public airwaves? Let’s check ’em all out, make sure nobody’s getting anything they can afford themselves.
It amazes me that the party of corporate welfare can actually talk about this without being struck by lightning. There are millions of government programs that help millions of people who may not actually need the help. Sam Donaldson, gentleman rancher, used to belong to a government program that had people shooting coyotes on his land to protect his cattle. Sure, he could afford to pay for it himself, but that’s not the point he explained. The program was there, he was eligible, and there was nothing immoral about taking advantage of that. Quick, let’s stake out Sam.
For that matter, let’s take out and shoot everyone who has ever used one of those Matthew Lesko books.
Your handout from the government? Proof that you are a leech on the body politic. My handout from the government? I pay my taxes and the government owes me certain services.
Megan chimed in on this? Oh, God.
Jillian, If you leave, and our generation’s Delacroix paints “Liberty Storming the Barricades, with Saggy Bottom,” I’ll blame you.
To approach St. Braddelsex’s question, it’s hate not fear. Fear is a good thing. What you do in response to your fear is the tricky bit.
These people leaning on the kid are the guys who are feeding the 25%. For all their efforts to avoid introspection, they are reaching the walls of our decadence first. What happens to their followers?
Take a wingnut to lunch.
a single bullet in the head of one of these assholes will stop them in their tracks, the right wing idiots are a lot like george bush in recognizing the boundaries beyond which their opponents will not tread, they perform their antics with full recognition that they will not be stopped because of the civilized behavior of those who oppose them,. its time to change that.
a single bullet in the head of one of these assholes will stop them in their tracks
We don’t need to go that far. Slots Bennett has been intimidated by undergrads who politely called him on his BS, Coulter was flummoxed when Alan Colmes asked her to apologize to him, Fats Limbaugh has to fake his own transcripts, etc…
Where does it come from? For some years of right radio clown hate speech and Faux News. For others a streak of viciousness and/or entitlement from childhood.
In another thread I said that hate wasn’t our best weapon. I didn’t mean that we should not fight. I didn’t mean that we should not buy a gun and learn to use it, if our area starts to seem dangerous enough. I didn’t mean we always had to be polite and civilized no matter what. What I did mean was that since we are not ultimately interested in continual fighting, as an end in itself, and since we just aren’t as good at hatred as the right wing, we should not try to hate right wingers back as some kind of countervailing force. I don’t think it will work. Or assets are more our ability to look at reality rationally and talk about it (believe it or not some people still care about that), and our ability to mock people for being absurd assholes.
once, a long time ago (2003), progressive bloggers pointed out the dangers of allowing convicted felon John Poindexter to run a government bureau named Total Information Awareness.
the bloggers made the mistake of using Information Technology against Poindexter.. it was meant to demonstrate the danger of hackers, but instead only helped conservatives turn information abuse into a campaign tactic.
keep in mind that any new dirty tricks invented by progressives soon become the standard operating procedure for conservatives.. even as we give up on them as unethical.
Exactly one statistic is relevant in all their mewling and puking, and that is the family’s income, $45K, which ought to be enough to shut them up.
atheist is right, we’ll never hate as good as them. Our strength is our numbers, which means we ought to be able to put representatives in power who will advance our interests, and tamp down teh bad. Somehow that doesn’t seem to be happening, though.
Where does it come from? It’s circulating in the air currents…
ahhh. such class envy. such a right we all have to have everything…
Bottom line is the family could afford health insurance and didn’t need big govt to step in yet again.
For you libs, what shouldn’t the govt control?
Bottom line is the family could afford health insurance and didn’t need big govt to step in yet again.
Bottom line is they went through the process and were approved, meaning somebody who knew more about it than you decided they did need it.
Exactly one statistic is relevant in all their mewling and puking, and that is the family’s income, $45K, which ought to be enough to shut them up.
Ah, but they chose to have an income of $45K per year. I mean really, why couldn’t the father simply have chosen to take a $10 million a year CEO position? Those usually come with full health insurance too! Problem solved!
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The kind of people that got off on tormenting other kids (physically and emotionally) in high school and never really matured beyond that stage?