JABbering Stooge

Shorter Longer Phyllis Schlafly:

• Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Huckabee? Children’s ice cream!…You know when fluoridation began?…1792. 1792, Huckabee. How does that coincide with your post-Enlightenment feminazi conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core feminazi works.

“Shorter” concept created by Daniel Davies, perfected by Elton Beard and given a beneficial mutation by the fine folks at Sadly, No!
I am aware of all Internet tradtions.™

With apologies to Stanley Kubrick and Sterling Hayden.

Evidently not. Here’s Tim Graham, complaining about Mike Malloy being Mike Malloy:

On Wednesday, radical radio host Mike Malloy took a page from Ed Schultz (or perhaps it was the other way around) in asserting that the “neo-fascist right” takes joy in the killing of a Census worker:

• This is what they do. O’Reilly inspires people to go kill doctors who provide private abortion services, legal services to his patients; and then O’Reilly stands there with that dung-eating look on his face — what a SOB he is. ‘It wasn’t me; of course it was you, you thug!’ And the suicide-prone Glenn Beck rails against Census workers, and inspires his people to kill one for sport; I bet you O’Reilly and Beck and the rest of these monsters on the neo-fascist right in this country love this stuff. It gives them something else to talk about. It’s sport.

And here’s Noel Sheppard (whose NewsBusters bio pic resembles Hoyt Pollard’s character in Deliverance), reveling in the implied violence against Al Gore disguised as humor perpetrated by Pillz-E* on Jay Leno’s new prime-time show last Friday:

As NewsBusters’ Brent Baker previously reported, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh had fun with Jay Leno Thursday evening actually driving an electric car over a cardboard cut-out of Al Gore.

Prior to that hilarious scene, Limbaugh sat down with Leno and discussed politics, President Obama, Medicare, and even weight loss.

So there you go. The new rules for political discourse in this country, courtesy of NewsBusters. Acting out one’s violence fantasies against an cardboard surrogate for a liberal politician? High comedy. Calling out the right wing for their atomic heat-level hate against anyone who isn’t a member of their straight-white-male-conservative-Christians-only club? High treason.

Also.

* For the thinking-impaired at NewsBusters, this is what I’m referring to.

So, I had lunch with Dad today at a Chinese restaurant here in Austin. The fortune in my fortune cookie was rather appropriate in light of the Quitbull’s recent speech in Hong Kong. It read as follows:

Do not listen to vain words from empty minds.

It seems a fair number of people there were (unwittingly, perhaps) heeding that advice.

Oy (via John Cole):

Former Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards talked a campaign aide into claiming he fathered a child born to Edwards’ onetime mistress, sources familiar with the issue said Monday.

Edwards admitted to his affair with Rielle Hunter in August 2008 after months of denials, but said he could not have been the father of Hunter’s daughter, who was born the previous February. Former Edwards staffer Andrew Young has said he was the girl’s father — but has recanted and says he made it because he believed in Edwards, lawyers and others familiar with the matter told CNN.

Young was married with children when he claimed to have fathered Hunter’s child. He never signed any affidavits or legal papers, however, and reversed his claim after Edwards, as one of the sources put it, dropped Young “like a hot potato.”

[…]

The New York Times reported in August that Young has submitted a book proposal in which he tells publishers that Edwards knew all along that he was the father of Hunter’s child — and that he promised to marry her after his cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth, dies.

Wow. We sure dodged a bullet there, didn’t we? Thanks for making me ashamed to have supported you in the primary, jackass.

What’s a paranoid demagogue who only managed to get ~70K teabaggers to show up at a Klan rally Two Minutes Hate (that he himself couldn’t be bothered to attend) to do when bloggers laugh at his small dick lack of organizing prowess? Why, get his buddies to artificially inflate his manhood the crowd size, of course!

Just watch. By this time next week, Beck, Malkin, Limbaugh and the rest will be saying that there were 6.02 x 10²³ teabaggers there. Because that’s how they roll.

Modern “Journalism” In America:

The perils of dashing off observations on the microblogging site were brought into sharp relief Monday when several overeager ABC News employees — including “Nightline” anchor Terry Moran — rushed to tweet that President Obama had called Kanye West a “jackass” for interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards on Monday.

The problem: Obama made the comment during off-the-record chatter as he was being miked for an interview with CNBC anchor John Harwood.

How exactly did ABC News get wind of it? The broadcast network’s Washington bureau shares a network fiber line with CNBC, and so ABC staffers in D.C. watching CNBC’s feed heard the exchange. What they didn’t hear, apparently, was the explicit agreement CNBC made with the White House that Obama’s chitchat was off the record.

The president weighing in on the biggest pop culture story of the day was too delicious to ignore. Soon, e-mails about Obama’s comment began circulating internally at ABC. Before news executives had determined whether the material was publishable, Moran and a handful of other ABC News staffers posted the remark on Twitter.

“Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a ‘jackass’ for his outburst at the VMAs when Taylor swift won,” Moran tweeted. [The offending tweet has since been deleted, but it lives forever on the Intertubes. — Ed.] “Now THAT’S presidential.”

So basically, ABC was “accidentally” listening in on an off-the-record interview with John Harwood of CNBC and, thinking they had just heard some juicy dirt to dump on the president with, rushed off to do the journalistic equivalent of tattling on him to the principal. Memo to Terry Moran — here’s what the dictionary has to say about the word “jackass:”

jackass — n.

1. A male ass or donkey.

2. A foolish or stupid person; a blockhead.

Example: Terry Moran was being a complete jackass in his tweet about President Obama’s comments on Kanye West.

Note that the definition is not labeled as “vulgar slang” the way words like “shit” or “fuck” are. Not that that matters to the jackasses at ABC.

…but President Obama is really a robot spy from the planet Xenu*!

* With apologies to Thom Hartmann.

Even though practically everyone has done it by now, I couldn’t resist my own commentary on the highlowlights of the (Not Quite A) Million Moron March.

Naturally, there were Birthers there.

Hey, moron: I took a semester of Russian in college. I’m pretty sure that Cyrillic doesn’t mean what you think it means. I’ll spell it out for you: sndigeh. (Which I’m pretty sure is not a word in Russian!)

“Don’t Blame Me — I voted for Sarah” — says a lot about the intellectual acumen of these moral midgets, doesn’t it?

Yep. A purely organic movement, I tell you! No astroturfing here. 

Our protesters are more eco-friendly than your protesters. Yes, indeedy. 

Nope, no racism there.  (For the “front” side of the sign, go here.)

You stay KKKlassy, Fetus Fetishists.

And of course, no Glenn Beck-promoted teabagging would be complete without (not very) thinly-veiled threats of violence…

Right. Because if they tell you they’re Fair & Balanced™®© (every five seconds), it MUST be true!

The freaks who get off on torture (especially torture of Democrats) also put in an appearance. (Dale Franks, is that you?)

Glenn Beck for Prez in 2012. Says it all, doesn’t it?

Hey, look! The Jonah Goldberg Fan Club made it! And they’re just as doughy as their hero!

Ironically, the leading cause of death for President Garfield was an armed lunatic conspiracy theorist.

Probably the only true sign in the bunch, but not for the reason he thinks.

I see the Teabagger Big Tent™ still has room for John Bolton fans.

I think we’re done here.

(All pics courtesy of the 9/12 Flickr photostream.)

I swear, I literally felt my IQ drop a few dozen points watching this tripe:

Thanks a million, JJ! 

* With apologies to the late Sam Kinison.

If you want to know just how desperate the “librul” media is to appease wingnuts who won’t be appeased by any level of obeisance, be sure to check out Glenn Greenwald’s excellent post on Drudgico’s moronic “Dems have crazies that they embrace, too!” diatribe.

However, if you’re the type who frequently finds Greenwald’s posts to be of the Teal Deer™ variety, there’s always this recent This Modern World strip, which pretty much makes the same point more succinctly: