Missing the Forest for Imaginary Trees Part Deux.

I don't mean to obsess about Althouse, but in a weird sort of follow up to the Allen West hate speech fest, the following, regarding some blogger's crack on Washington Post writer Jennifer Rubin. The blogger called her the journalistic equivalent of a fluffer. For those of you not up on the term, a fluffer is a girl on a porno movie set who's job is to give head to male actors between shooting scenes, to keep them fluffed up. Anyway, Here's what Althouse says.

"Rubin's writings about the Norwegian massacre deserve criticism, but aren't liberals supposed to refrain from writing about women like this?"

Find That Stupid Shit Here.

Ok. Let me break that stupid shit down. Firstly, one writer is one writer. Making a general swat at liberals - plural, from that one incident is stupid.

Secondly (and I am no real fan of Kos. The blog, I mean to say,) this is just some no name blogger. So if one is going to make some sort of comparison to a person of power and privilege in the United States Government, like a sitting Congressman, one is making a stupid comparison.

Thirdly, let's look at the words. And the usage. The nobody blogger made a comparison that clearly was not meant to be literal. Granted, it's a metaphor I would not want anyone making about the female folk in my family, but there is a difference between metaphorical statements and flat out disparagement. For example calling someone an attention whore is not the same as calling them a whore. What the blogger did there was closer to calling someone an attention whore instead of flat out calling them a whore. So taking too much out of the analogy here is just stupid.

I'll go for brevity. Up till now, the most stupid thing someone has said this past week to take a shot at liberals, in general or specific, was the fucking asshole who tried to compare P. Obama's infrequent smoking to Michele Bachmann's debilitating migraines. As if smoking a ciggy is the same as having to be left medicated, in a quiet dark room for hours if not days at a time. The two are not even on the same continent, never mind in the same ball park. But this twisted comparison of the nobody blogger and the congresscritter going all unstable batshit in a personal email sent to another congresscritter, and cc'd to congressional leaders, is at least a close second if not itself, most stupid crack of the week.

Oh and lastly, how fucking typical of wingnuts. The fucking problem with Allen West's email was not principally the, "Not a lady," part. It was the whole fucking thing. It was the entirety of the email. All of it. It was that, and the seeming mental instability of the person for not only thinking of the entirety of the content, but then typing it, addressing it to a recipient, and hitting send. Then again, I totally agree with Marcotte. West is not so much a sexist in my eyes. He's unhinged. That's his problem. I was just reading up about the changes coming in with the next edition of the DSM. The whole way of thinking about personality disorders is changing a great deal. So I have to break myself out of the habit of calling people by the (still current) old diagnostic labels. So I will stick to the layman's terms and just call him a crazy man.

Mittens' Dog Whistle: "Hang Him."

Yesterday I typed out a post regarding Mitt Romney's (so called) gaff, in making an extended metaphor regarding hanging things around P. Obama's neck, like the famous Albatross in the S.T. Coleridge poem. And Mittens ended up saying, "Hang him with that," and immediately pulled his punch with weasel words.

Anyway, I decided to sit on the draft, and did not publish it. Partially, I held my horses back, as I got off on a tangent about Ann Althouse -- her post on her blog set a fire under my ass. I chose to hold back, hoping one of her commenters would point out her misremembering misunderstanding of the meaning of the word lynch. And one did. Kudos to that sharp knife in that drawer.

Also, kudos to the bright commenter who called out Mittens as knowing full well what he was doing. I agree. I just now watched the vid, and I agree. No mistake there. He was engaging in a racist dog whistle with deliberate intent, if not having practiced delivering the line. I am not going to say my theatrical training in the acting arts means I can always call out an actor acting. That would be claiming too much. But I will say what I know about good actors and the best actors. You can see the work, watching a good actor. You don't see the work, you don't see the effort, watching a great actor. And I am going to say, as far as the political stage is concerned, Mittens is one of the greats.

Anyway, that is the set up. So let me now get to the real point. As there is no reasonable doubt, really, that Mittens was deliberately blowing the racist dog whistle there, and this is definitely not the last time we will hear that racist dog whistle from the GOP Contenders and Wannabes, comes the following question:

How far out racist need any GOP Contender or Wannabe get, before the others pounce on him or her like a piece of red meat tossed in the tiger cage?


They all want to run against P. Obama. And this time the nerve to push harder against the racist taboos seems higher already than last time (and that was ugly enough!) But eventually these chuckle-headed clowns will have to understand the following fact. They have to run against each other, before they get to run against P. Obama. So is there some objective point where the dog whistles get too far out there, or will we just have to wait and see who pounces on whom for what crack? I'm thinking wait and see.

There are few blood sports I enjoy, but I do enjoy GOP Gladiator Contests. Or maybe the better analogy is a pack of hungry, feral dogs, pouncing on the weakest member of the pack, for a snack? I'll be well entertained, once that starts. And if what happened to Mr. Comb Over during the Press Corp party leads to the pack smelling blood from that critter, and if the rest start to pounce, then we will know, it's on!

(And I did not start out trying to throw in as many metaphors as I could. It just worked that way. A subtle bit of commentary, I am thinking.)

Slow News Day, Edition. Birthers, Normalizing the Insane, GOP Racists, and Ann Althouse.

I am not even going to link it, but Ms. Althouse is proving she is as least the 'mess' part of my description of her as a hot mess, by a post regarding birthers . . . as not being as crazy as troofers. Let me explain a bit more. Some poll recently released is saying a bare majority of GOPers are birthers. (I call the phenomenon of this absurdity,"Normalizing the Insane." To borrow and warp the commercial slogan, this isn't your father's GOP. It's the crazy shit version of the GOP.)

Now her lead in, her post title is,"Birthers aren't like Truthers," and to an albeit, tiny degree, I agree. But her argument is so shallow, vapid, ill informed, and ill supported that in the end, she is so mostly wrong she's just plain wrong, even when accidentally right. First, the accidentally right part.

Ya, there is a big difference (and perhaps some minor ones) between birthers and troofers, but the similarity is that both approach their fantasy conclusions from what ever bias they had, before the issue in interest became an issue of the day. I would say that troofers are 'don't trust the government generally,' folk. That's their gig.

However, there are at least two lines of bias behind the birthers. Firstly, in the GOP there is a lot of hate for anyone who resembles the label "liberal." So P. Obama has that going against him (remember how bat fucking crazy the loony Right Wing went when Clinton was elected?) But above and beyond that, is the racism factor. And accuse me of doing a high wire act without a net, but honestly. Has the birth certificate issue ever come up, before it was a black man? I wish that were enough, but I think I need to flesh out my (informed, actually) speculation. Here in 2011 America has evolved as (meaning only) far that most white GOPers get this much; being called a racist is bad, and one can not longer disparage a "nigger" merely for being a "nigger," anymore, save in the company of admitted racists. (I am not saying most GOPers only get that much. Too many only get that much. Or, too few get more than that.) So where does that not yet eliminated racism go? It goes into proxy complaints. It goes into such criticisms as disparaging "multi culturalism," and/or "urban people," and/or strange foreign religions, and anti-immigrant sentiment (some shit never changes,) and it goes into the birther's crazy arguments.

You can not directly say you are unhappy that the POTUS is a black man. But (if you are that self delusional or generally delusional not to know you really are not fooling the rest of us) you can take ass-holey shots at his foreign name, and whine that he wasn't born in the USA.

Now as far at Althouse goes, she seems to have missed even considering any of that. She instead argues that the birthers have one issue and one question. Excuse me? Talk about assumes facts not in evidence. This is the very same kind of self serving, shallow, borderline magical thinking that makes people believe and say stupid shit like celebrities die in threes. (Dummy! They don't die in threes. You are counting in threes!)If you narrow down the entire universe of motivation and causes of the birther's insanity to one cause, you are editing things to suit your argument. That's not only intellectually lazy, and intellectually dishonest, it's pure bullshit.

After that, Ms. Althouse goes truly off the deep end, by quoting Fed.R.Civ.P. 37. For you non lawyers out there, it's one of the rules regarding discovery of evidence. Her citation of that is likely more unhinged than either what the birthers believe, or even trying to defend the birthers, as a general matter. The reason it is unhinged is as follows:

Court's have jurisdiction over matters as granted under the US and various state constitutions and laws. And they are honor bound to follow precedent and applicable rules. Doubting birthers are totally without restraint. To make an analogy between a court of law and the birthers . . . to equate the two is to raise the rules of a simple and silly child's playground game to the holding of a per curiam (by the court, as an institution, speaking in one unified voice) decision of the US Supreme Court. (Gawd, I so fucking hate idiotic, far off analogies.)

But sure. People can decide for themselves what is good evidence and what isn't. But when people depart reason and rationality and substitute crazy shit instead? Well we should call that crazy shit. I have gone long, here, but again, this is a mere example of the deevolution of the GOP or if one prefers, the Conservative Movement. The more crazy shit they accept, the crazier they seem. It might not be the paranoid flavor of crazy, so much. Ms. Althouse makes a sorta marginally, yet likely less than half accurate point there (cause let's be real. Racism is the product of irrational thoughts and beliefs, often including paranoia.)But it is crazy shit, and it is an offense not only to reality and reason to define down normal in that way, but like all bullshit, it is dangerous to all of us and all of society.

Said simply, if every point of view is sorta equal, all sorta valid, than all are equally meaningless.

Get it?

* Note: I found the graphix after finishing the composition. Now I am not going to say that the mere fact the majority of GOP birthers are from the south = proof of racism. But I am not in the least fucking bit surprised by those metrics.