Category: Rants

A few days ago one of my Instaputz colleagues brought attention to this piece from Debra Saunders of the SF Chronicle. Entitled "Enough of Sarah Palin, the Victim," Ms. Saunders opines:

I wish Sarah Palin would just go away. During the 2008 presidential campaign, I wrote about the unfair personal treatment to which the political press corps subjected Palin and her children. Now I just want her to stop milking her role as GOP martyr. Palin should stick to her day job – by which I mean, governing Alaska, not being fodder for talk-show humor.
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Both parties have their umbrage industries – thanks to true believers, who love nothing better than to see themselves as victims of a perceived double standard. Last week, comedian David Letterman's two off-color jokes about a Palin family trip to New York led to an orgy of indignation.

I can only hope that Ms. Saunders survived the shocking orgy of indignation which, like clockwork, streamed forth from America's Favorite Female Alaskan Incumbent Governor last week. While still not quite dismounted from her crucifix over a stupid David Letterman joke, the woman who wants to be your President set her sights on even bigger, even more powerful game: some two-bit Alaska blogger named Linda Kellen Biegel. Ever heard of her? Me neither.

Ms. Biegel did a 30-second photoshopping job on a picture of Palin holding her infant son, replacing his face with the face of an Alaska media personality, AM Radio jockey Eddie Burke, who is (apparently) perceived to be Palin's lackey. Here is the amateurish result:

The humor isn't very complex. Palin holds baby. Baby replaced with radio host. Radio host is Palin's baby. I guess the most offense you could take from it is, based on the fact that the baby is Trig, Biegel is insinuating that the radio host is retarded. Personally I find that hilarious. Regardless, Trig is Palin's only baby at the moment.
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Her other kids are all grown. So if someone wants a picture of Palin holding a baby, it's going to be Trig. God knows she took every possible opportunity to be photographed holding PropTard (facing out, of course) during the election.

The reaction was predictable. "Recently we learned of a malicious desecration of a photo of the Governor and baby Trig that has become an iconic representation of a mother's love for a special needs child," (emphasis mine) Palin spokeswoman Meghan Stapelton told CNN. "Desecration"? This isn't the fuckin' Shroud of Turin. It's a public domain .jpeg of which about 300 billion versions exist. I suppose such a common photo could be "desecrated" if it had, you know, the Dalai Lama or Pope John Paul II on it. I'm not convinced that anything associated with Palin, including this picture, is "iconic." Just a little full of ourselves, aren't we, Meghan Stapleton? Someone photoshops a Palin pic and all of the sudden it's like someone airbrushed a damn Weezer logo on the Magna Carta or pasted Jesus' face on the unfortunate bottom in sadistic gay porn pics.

Stapleton followed that, "The mere idea of someone doctoring the photo of a special needs baby is appalling.
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" So would photoshopping a non-tarded baby be OK? I'm confused. Was the photo "desecrated" in the sense that Palin's child was made part of a partisan attack or is it because said child is "special?" I need clarification.

By the way, this is the 7th picture which comes up when Google image searching "Obama photoshop."

I can't imagine how even the most ardent Palin supporters have the stamina for the level of faux-indignant martyrdom she's embracing at this point. How can anyone be so constantly and so grievously offended by…well, everything? Oh, wait. It's because said person has absolutely nothing else to say. The McCain campaign and Palin's own media handlers have been beating this drum since Day One. As I noted way back when, it's the Spiro Agnew strategy all over again: bring some complete idiot into the limelight, have him/her sit there like a wounded puppy, and try to reel in sympathy votes when the media rips Puppy to shreds.
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Aww, that's terrible! How could anyone do that to such a helpless little puppy?

Sarah Palin used her kids, whether it's her handicapped baby or her knocked-up teenager, as Social Conservative Credential props more than any national candidate in the last 50 years. Even Bush never stooped to waving his daughters around so the media could attack them and he could benefit from sympathy. The Bush kids spent very little time in the spotlight even though the media badly wanted them on camera (because, of course, they're hot and blond). I have the feeling that if they were Palin's kids she would have had them in thongs, spread-eagle on the hood of a 1968 Pontiac GTO in full view of a few dozen photographers so that the Governor could wring every fake tear out of the ensuing outrage that the privacy of the candidate's family could be so violated.

Ever since I was old enough to string words into sentences I have been amazed at how regularly people seem to ask the wrong questions. Throughout the Reagan years (bearing in mind that I was given a daily ration of the era's prevailing wisdom throughout) everyone in white, suburban America was up in arms about "welfare." No one bothered to define exactly what that meant, which was unimportant so long as we all properly understood it to mean theiving government bastards stealing white people's money to give it to the coloreds so they could buy cigarettes and crack and bouncing cars. The problem was explained to Young Ed thusly: welfare was too generous, comparing favorably with the salary one would earn if working full-time at minimum wage. Why, the argument went, would anyone work if sitting at home was worth an equal paycheck?

It was, one must admit, solid logic. Staying home or working 40 hours at Pizza Hut for the same money (or close enough) is a slam dunk decision from a rational choice perspective. Thus the argument carried the appearance of logic and truth. But eight year-old Ed had to spend a lot of time wondering why everyone thought "Is the gap between welfare and minimum wage work big enough to discourage loafing?" was a more appropriate question than "Why does working 40 hours a week at the prevailing wage provide people with a sub-poverty line income which can barely house and feed single individual, if that?" The problem was always that welfare was too generous; it had to come down. Never was the problem that the minimum wage, which was a stunning $3.15 in the early 1980s, was too low. The rational choice game for the welfare recipient wasn't to work and live a decent life or to lay around collecting pitiful checks to live in abject misery – it was between working and living in abject misery or not working and getting the same. Anyone interested in facts (and really, who was back then?) would note that not once in its 80-year history has the minimum wage, if earned 40 hours weekly, hit the Federal poverty line for a family. Not once. Really:

This is why I concluded at a very young age that adults are bizarre. Reaching adulthood has given me no reason to revise that. I see this kind of red herring-vs.-Occam's Razor questioning all the time, debates which are fierce but avoid more obvious solutions, problems, and questions entirely. For instance.

We're fat. By "we" I mean Americans, although the non-American readers should note that most of the industrialized world is doing yeoman's work to close the obesity gap lately. While I recognize that obesity can result from medical problems or genetics, there's also a whole lot of American obesity that results from shoving heathen portions of disgusting food into our faces and maintaining activity levels somewhere between that of the three-toed sloth and a rock.
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We're fat and it's a problem. We're lazy and it's a problem.

On account of our fatness the airline industry periodically threatens to start charging us more money if we are too fat to fit in one of their seats. On the surface this is logical. More weight on the plane means more fuel and, if we happen to take up another revenue-paying seat, fewer fare-payers on board. Again, though, I think this argument is a red herring set up to let us bloviate on Fairness and how Fatty should pay up. It misses a more obvious question that I prefer to ask when I fly (which is often): why are the seats so fucking small?

I'm not a large individual. I am usually described as lanky or, in the past, too thin. But at ~6'3", most of which is limb, I am forced to shoehorn myself into coach seats. Especially with the rapid movement of domestic routes to "regional jets" with small cabins, I commonly fly with my knees in my chin. I'm not really that big. There is nothing exceptional about my size. I barely fit myself in Delta's idea of a reasonable seat. What do people who are taller than 6'3" do? What do people who weigh 400 pounds do?

The larger (pun intended) problem, in my opinion, is never discussed: the overwhelming failure of airline deregulation. Having created only the illusion of savings (believe me, you've paid back all that money you "saved" on lower fares in airline bankruptcies, fuel surcharges, and pension bailouts) while doing absolutely nothing to introduce real competition on most routes (try to find a non-Delta flight to/from Atlanta. I dare you.) it has succeeded only in setting up a market in which airlines cut every possible corner to save a nickel. The Heritage Foundation says it has given us lower fares.

I say it has given us six-across seating in MD-90s and airline customer service that rivals that of a Nigerian intercity bus line.

Of course we cannot expect airlines to provide seats that will comfortably sit any conceivable passenger; if you weigh 400 pounds the experience is still going to be uncomfortable even if the seats are a couple inches wider. But can the airlines really be surprised that their seats, which can barely accomodate people of unexceptional size (and even then cannot do so comfortably) pose problems with obese customers?

Was air travel palatial before deregulation? ("Ah, for the days when aviation was a gentleman's pursuit, back before any Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham.") I doubt it. The point is that where airlines once competed on amenities, service, and comfort, they now compete on the only basis that American businesses understand: out-cheaping one another. And we're supposed to be thrilled that we can fly AirTran on some winged tin shitbox for 0 while being charged for our baggage and asked to open our wallets by surly, overworked flight attendants who are too busy worrying about what happened to their benefits to care about passengers.
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Maybe I'm nuts, but asking why airlines are so strapped that they have to charge for the extra few ounces of fuel that a heavy passenger necessitates or why airline seats are apparently designed for small children makes more sense than having an argument about whether or not it's Right to charge fat people more.

Local conditions may be different wherever you live, dear reader, but in my city the graffiti, stickers, and other public displays of the "9/11 was an inside job" movement are so numerous that they have become part of the urban landscape, no more noteworthy than stop signs or flyers for band shows.

That we are nearing the eighth anniversary of the events in question and the conspiracy theories are only getting more popular is more depressing than it is alarming.

Are our lives really so fucking dreary that we've resorted en masse to this kind of delusion as a preferred alternative to reality?

These theories are popular and, if you spend a lot of time reading things with comment sections on the internet, on some days it seems like half the country believes them. The internet isn't a random sample, of course, but the evidence for the popularity of these theories is clear. A Scripps-Howard poll from 2006 showed 16% of people believing it is "likely" that "controlled demolition with explosives" brought down the WTC while a whopping 36% believe that the government knew of the attacks in advance and willingly chose not to act.

On the plus side, we might applaud Americans for these "low" numbers…compared to the 55% who believe they are protected by a guardian angel, 20% who believe that God has spoken directly to them, and the full one-third of your friends and neighbors who believe in alien abductions, astrology, and witchcraft. Compared to those figures we look like a nation of solemn skeptics regarding 9/11.

To paraphrase the argument in The Great Derangement, there are three major explanations for the popularity of such opinions. First, Americans are stupid and, in contradiction of everything known about the relationship between wealth and education in the history of civilization, getting stupider. Second, conspiracies about shocking, unbelievable events have always been popular because we can't accept boring explanations for traumatic events. Third, the post-Watergate public is so jaded to governmental malfeasance that even the most idiotic claims seem downright plausible. So many things that we would have considered implausible have actually happened that in order to stay one step ahead of the real news coming out of Washington our imaginations have had to delve into the truly ridiculous.

Of course all three explanations are relevant. We are dumb. We like to think things are more exciting than they are. Watergate, Iran-Contra, Kuwaiti incubator baby hoaxes, and eight years of Bush featuring a war in Iraq based entirely on pure bullshit have put many people in the mindset that no conspiracy is too outlandish to be true. Hell, if I just woke up from a 30-year coma I'd find the possibility of the government having planned 9/11 and a bunch of jurassic neocons starting a war with the evidence used in 2002/2003 to be equally implausible. And one of those things actually happened.

That's not a statement of support for 9/11 conspiracism, i.e. If Iraq happened then maybe this is plausible too. One argument has facts beneath it and the other doesn't. But pushing more and more people to the fringes of plausibility in their beliefs about what our elected leaders are capable of doing is just another negative externality of our carnival sideshow in Iraq. It re-defined what is plausible to younger generations like Watergate did for those before us.

The sad thing is that I love a good conspiracy theory, especially when there are tantalizing shreds of evidence to support them. I do not believe that we know everything we will ever know about 9/11. Over time we will see more information declassified, more offical "we fucked up" admissions (i.e., NORAD admitting that it lied its ass off to the 9/11 Commission), and more facts/evidence uncovered. Personally, I will not be shocked if we someday find conclusive evidence that the Bush administration had far more advance warning about potential attacks than it has thus far admitted. But natural skepticism based on our political system's tendency to withhold information is a far cry from swallowing theories about controlled demolitions, "inside jobs", computer-generated planes, and all of the other horseshit these people believe.

In an era in which the availability of information makes us all self-appointed experts ("I watched WTC 7 videos on YouTube and there was a lot of stuff flying out the windows, which totally looked like an explosion!

") this is inevitable, of course. I divide the blame and my anger at the American public for being dumb enough to swallow something so stupid and elected leaders whose actions have gotten so brazen and so corrupt that our imaginations have been forced to go beyond the merely implausible and take up the downright ridiculous in order to stay one step ahead.

I am astounded daily at the lack of shame, originality, effort, and reading comprehension skills shared by the right-wing luminaries on the internet. Having just written up the phenomenal laziness of Glenn Reynolds yesterday afternoon, he forces me to do so again less than 12 hours later. Here is a post from Instarube, late Monday evening:

LARRY KUDLOW: “According to a recent ABC News/USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care. That could mean up to 250 million people are happy. So why is it that we need Obama’s big-bang health-care overhaul in the first place?”

Note Professor Assrocket's original contribution to this post ("LARRY KUDLOW:"). Keep up the good work, G-Ren. Mr. Kudlow, for his part, hasn't done much more work. He's cherry-picked a single statistic which (he believes) supports his predetermined conclusion. Here are some facts that Mr. Kudlow either refrains from mentioning or was too lazy to learn in the first place.

Perhaps Republicans, as elderly as most of them are, don't quite understand how the Series of Tubes works. Most of what one posts on the internet is for all intents and purposes permanent. Sure, we can scrub whatever we want from our own personal websites and blogs, but what we say on things like Facebook or comment sections of popular websites are like tattoos – a lasting testament to judgment both good and bad.

Last week an aide to South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster posted a humorous news item about a gorilla escaping from a zoo in Columbia. Rusty DePass, a long-time GOP activist in South Carolina and candidate for various state/local offices throughout the years, helpfully and hilariously noted, "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors – probably harmless." Charming.

Shortly thereafter, a low-level functionary in the South Carolina GOP saw fit to Tweet the following:

Note the "thumbs up" from Adam Piper, who has openly discussed throwing his name into the upcoming race for Governor in the Palmetto State.

Moving westward, a staffer for Tennessee State Senator Diane Black decided against the newfangled Twitter and used a good ol' fashioned email forward to send the following photo of our 44 Presidents:

The quest to build a Big Tent appears to have hit a few snags. That's too bad, because the Michael Steele-led GOP was really starting to make some progress in appealing to non-white voters.

Wait. No they weren't. There was the Southern California GOP group that sent out a mailer in the style of a "food stamp" bearing the image of the President…along with watermelons, ribs, fried chicken, and Kool-Aid (note: I thought the stereotype was grape/strawberry soda. Am I so out of touch with contemporary racism?). And the California mayor who sent out the "White House watermelon garden" email from his government email account. Or the South Carolina mayor – lot of South Carolinians here, no? – who wondered aloud to his constituents if our Muslim President is the antichrist. Or the Georgia mayor who responded to the flap over Obama's lame gift to Gordon Brown and the rest of the British delegation by expressing relief that Obama had not given them Negro gifts like malt liquor and cigarettes. And who could forget "Barack the Magic Negro" as a campaign jingle for one Tennesseean's effort to win the chairmanship of the RNC? I'm sure there are other incidents I'm failing to extract from my memory at the moment.

These incidents underscore the challenges inherent in diversifying a party whose bedrock constituencies are nativists, unreformed segregationists, frothing-at-the-mouth anti-immigration zealots, and various other rural white people with Confederate flags on their bumpers. This leads me to ask an open question to America's Hispanic, Asian, and black Republicans: What the hell is wrong with you? Is this a race-based version of the "self-hating Jew" phenomenon? I am reminded of the calls for Michael Steele to resign which came from, among others, Dr. Ada Fisher, one of only three black members of the RNC. Dr. Fisher (who, by the way, backed South Carolina GOP Chair Katon Dawson, a segregationist who proudly belongs to a whites-only country club) complained about Steele's efforts to reach out to black voters:

"I don't want to hear anymore [sic] language trying to be cool about the bling in the stimulus package or appealing to D.L. Hughley and blacks in a way that isn't going to win us any votes and makes us frankly appear to many blacks as quite foolish."

Steele isn't making you appear foolish to black voters, Dr. Fisher. The simple fact that you are a Republican already accomplished that.

(Dearest reader, the author of the piece on Ms. Harris informs me that the photograph and story are satirical. Ginandtacos.com salutes the author and admits to being duped along with my friends at Crooks & Liars. I will leave this post intact as a monument to my shame and because the portions which are not about Ms. Harris are still worth something. Sucker, I am.)

Hey, good news! Katherine Harris, star of the 2000 Election in Florida, has moved past her overwhelming defeat in the 2006 Senate race to find paying work. Doing what? Why, she's selling her services as an election monitor to foreign countries. I can prove it. Here is photographic evidence of a Fox News banner under what appears to be either an old catcher's mitt or Julia Roberts after a six-week vacation on the surface of the sun:

I'll give you a minute to recover from that image and crack up at the idea of Katherine Fucking Harris, Guarantor of Fair and Reliable Elections (for a few dollars more, Michael Vick will care for your dogs, the town drunk will drive you home from the bar, and Sarah Palin will proofread your doctoral thesis). I'm willing to suffer a few more minutes of Ms. Harris in the public spotlight to bring more attention to the booming industry of former U.S. elected officials selling their names, their reputations, and human dignity for a cold buck. The days of Jimmy Carter and the non-profit do-gooders monitoring elections in banana republics are over. Election monitoring is now a very profitable industry, as kleptocrats and dictators are more than willing to shell out cash for the stamp of legitimacy on the clusterfucks they call elections.

When Ms. Harris stopped swallowing Satan's cock long enough to choke out a verbal affirmation of the overwhelming fairness of the recent Iranian election she proved to the world that neither the truth nor principles will get in the way of profiteering when American public servants are concerned. She's far from the first. Washed-up politicos have interest groups to market their lack of shame. For example, the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress proudly advertises the availability of its members as election monitors. Cameroon dictator Paul Biya availed himself of this service in 2004, hiring former House members Michael Forbes (D-NY), Webb Franklin (R-MS), Ronnie Shows (D-MS), Andrew Maguire (D-NJ), Joe Wyatt, Jr. (D-TX), and Dick Schulze (D-PA) to lend legitimacy to his sham re-election. They obliged by breathlessly assuring the world that Mr. Biya won fair and square while a not-for-profit Commonwealth delegation led by former Canadian PM Joe Clark noted that the Americans were too busy being wined, dined, and lavishly entertained by Biya to actually monitor the registration of voters or observe more than a handful of polling places in what Clark called a "deeply flawed" election. Thus six Congressmen sold their reputations to legitimize the regime of what David Wallechinsky notes is one of the most corrupt, brutal regimes on the planet.

We expect amoral hookers like Katherine Harris to sell themselves to the highest bidder and willingly bend over for strongmen of exceedingly dubious character. That's why we're not shocked to hear Harris say that Iran's sham elections were "free and fair" and castigate the opposition with, "This is just sour grapes. The time has now come to move on." Chalk up yet another example of free markets failing; the transition of election monitoring from Moral Duty to Marketable Commodity has the predictable consequences in terms of quality and accuracy. Sadly it is now necessary for us to be skeptical and ask whether the opinions of international observers are bought and paid for. George W. liked to talk about spreading democracy and free elections to our foreign bretheren; putting the stamp of American Approval up for sale isn't furthering that goal unless the 2000 election in Florida represents the standard by which we hope to judge all others.

I finally found an editorial in defense of the Federal bailouts of Chrysler and GM, provided on the personal blog of sometime-WSJ editorial writer Robert Farago. It's pretty poorly argued, but the moment I saw the title I knew I was in for some comment section gold. Dredging internet comments and finding something stupid is like jamming both hands in your back pockets and finding an ass. Regardless, the repetition of one theme caught my eye. To wit:

Listen, I didn’t ask nor do I want to be part owner of GM and Chrysler. Fair? This is not about the producers of things in an economy…its about the consumers. American consumers have the right to do whatever they want. Bailouts circumvent consumer preference at the expense of everyone except those luck few “chosen” ones (UAW). It’s called freedom.

Charming, right? As easy as it is to laugh at shit like this ("It's called freedom!" and the querulous repetition of "Fair? Fair?" in a manner that reminds me of Jim Mora's "Playoffs? Playoffs?" rant) I am more inclined to be worried about it. While 99.999% of the suburban commandos venting their complete political impotence in every available venue are harmless or at least too lazy to be dangerous, the idea that government simply cannot do that with which hardcore conservatives disagree is pervasive and, I'm afraid, going to contribute to the eight years of extremist freakouts which are already underway.

Note the opening phrase in the above comment: " I didn’t ask nor do I want to be part owner of GM and Chrysler." Could it ever have occured to the comment author that no one gives a flying fuck what he wants? Can any of these people handle the idea of a world that does not revolve around their wants? I don't recall signing off on that whole Iraq War thing, but I do seem to recall it happening anyway. It happened because people voted for the guy who wanted it to happen.

See, "freedom" and "democracy" and "fairness" mean that we have elections which present the nation with reasonably distinct alternatives. This time we had the option to pick the guy who opposed bailouts (at least when he was trying to appeal to wingers – who knows what he would actually have done if elected) and his sidekick MILF Spice. Instead the nation chose the other guy. They voted for the guy who would be far, far more likely to respond to domestic economic problems with wads of government cash. He won the election. By ten million votes. So this might be a good example of truth in advertising. The President is behaving much like any voter who knows what a Democrat is would have expected under these circumstances. We knew what we were signing up for.

On the right, though, "I don't agree with this" isn't in the phrasebook; that with which they disagree is wrong, immoral, illegal, unconstitutional, and on many dark corners of the conservative movement, signs of our desperate need for a violent revolution. I'm not a psychologist, but I'd estimate that people with this mentality stopped maturing around age 10. People older than that can handle a world that does not always do what we want. Whether it's some guy killing three cops because Obama was coming to take his guns, some militiamen in Montana making truck bombs in their "U.S. OUT OF U.N." compounds, some old Nazi trying to shoot his way into the headquarters of the International Jewry, or just some dipshit unloading his impotent rage into blog comments, the sentiment is the same: this is not what I want, therefore it is Wrong and It Must Be Stopped.

Back in 1964 the Johnson administration refused to allow a popular election to resolve the North-South split in Vietnam because they knew that 90% of the Vietnamese would have chosen Ho and the Communists. It is but one example of America's history of supporting democracy only inasmuch as people will choose what we want them to choose. It is also a good example of what the right means when it invokes "freedom" or fairness or democracy – it is the right of free people everywhere to choose their government unless or until they elect someone to the left of Curtis LeMay. Just as most Americans cannot wrap their minds around people on this planet choosing to live in a socialist state or choosing to live in a monarchy, it appears that we can barely comprehend the results of our own elections anymore. We picked this guy with a pretty good idea of how he would act. Those who dislike his decisions are more than free to cast a vote for Romney/Gingrich 2012. While the majority is always required to respect the fundamental rights of the electoral minority (momentarily overlook the fact that the GOP, when in power, summarily rejects this notion) it never has been nor will be required to make political decisions to the liking of the people who can't scrape up enough votes to keep their Senate delegation over 40.

You know it's getting bad when Fox anchors start cracking up on the air.

I have to hand it to Smith, who apparently has a conscience, for his restraint. He does everything except stare into the camera and scream "What the fuck is wrong with you people?" Unfortunately for Shep, it's going to be hard to develop his line of argument without addressing the key role played by his employer and colleagues in stoking exactly the kind of paranoid, apocalyptic attitude which so horrifies him.

Does anyone doubt him when he says he gets thousands of those emails daily? I don't. But he takes an easy out in trying to explain why, blaming "the blogs" and implying that if only we all got our news from Professional Journalists this wouldn't happen. Is Smith capable of understanding, if not admitting, the role of his own network in promoting the grab-your-guns hysteria that seems to grip this nation every time someone to the left of Pinochet is in the White House? My friend David Niewert has a good write-up on the kind of lunatic fringe viewpoints Glenn Beck regularly promotes, from "states' rights" to "Obama is the anti-Christ" to running around like he's totally fucking bonkers and pouring fake gas on people. In fact David has catalogued many years' worth of violent it's-time-to-start-killing-liberals / Jews / Negroes / Enemies rhetoric on his blog and in a recent best-selling book (The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right) which discusses in detail the pivotal role of Fox personalities like Hannity, Coulter, O'Reilly, Beck, and Malkin in actively promoting violence. Yet no matter how many violent incidents spring forth from the bubbling cauldron of far-right paranoia and insanity, these same people seem utterly incapable of understanding the role they play in these incidents. It's never about ideology or an endemic problem with violent rhetoric on the right – it's always "just some crazy person." Since December one might care to note that we've had one or two "just some crazy person"s each month.

I wrote two months ago, echoing a sentiment that many people in the reality-based community expressed when Obama won, that the fringe right – which is far bigger and more dangerous than their patron saints on Fox and Talk Radio will admit – is going to go absolutely apopleptic for the next eight years. Obama is just a red flag being waved in front of people too inarticulate, too insane, and too deluded to respond using anything but violence. He's black, has an A-rab soundin' name, and is godless communism incarnate. Whatever tenuous connection these mouthbreathers have to reality has been severed and their bat-shit insanity is on full display. Shepard Smith seems to understand that. Now if only he could figure out from where, other than "the blogs," these people get their insane ideas. In the meantime, we all get to live with the consequences.