Of all the memories of what a vile waste of space of a human being Jesse Helms was, this detail jumps out at me the most: That he taunted Senator Carol Moseley-Braun by whistling “Dixie” at her. I think it’s because we’re so often piously told that the symbols of the Confederacy that are embraced by some wingnuts are about “heritage” and “history” and “pride”, you know, and not hatred of black people and a longing for a racial caste system or even slavery. I love it when you get glimpses of evidence that people don’t believe their own bullshit.
Filed under Choads, Republican Scourge.
One of the worst problems in American politics is that once a wingnut myth takes off, it never dies, no matter how much evidence you can marshal against it. There are people who will go to their graves believing that there was a good reason to think that Saddam Hussein was hiding WMDs as part of his plot to re-blow-up the World Trade Center after he personally crashed a plane into it the first time. Or, as a less hyperbolic but still baffling example, my dentist told me a couple of weeks ago that she still, in the year 2008, has to talk down patients who are in a full blown panic about fluoridated drinking water.
Which is why the second I heard the words “pregnancy pact” on the TV, I realized two things at once: a) there was no fucking way and b) no matter how much evidence you marshaled to prove that there was no fucking way, wingnuts would believe that gangs of teenage girls are roaming the countryside, sucking up sperm from hapless men with their succubi cunts of doom in order to get their hands on that diamond-jewelry-buying welfare cash. The fact that the movie “Juno” was blamed was just an added bonus, and evidence that teaching women such as screenwriter Diablo Cody to read and write was the first step on the road to teenage sluttitude hell.
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Filed under Choads, Conservatives Sure Are Funny, Reproductive justice.
I’ve been suspicious from the beginning about the existence of “PUMAs”: Female Clinton supporters who are so bitter about her loss that they will throw equal pay, reproductive rights, the environment, and a chance at peace under the bus to get their revenge by voting for McCain. I’m skeptical even though they show up in comment threads all over the internet, claiming they’re real. I’m skeptical even though they wrote Rebecca Traister letters claiming that they exist. I believe that the Republicans would not hesitate to set up a secretive operation of people running around claiming to be Clinton voters who are voting for McCain to keep the legend of the PUMAs alive. If you can convince people that there are PUMAs, then you accomplish two giant goals for the McCain campaign:
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Filed under Election 2008.
Let me preface this by saying that on the issue of gun control, I’m often and unusually agnostic. I think pro-gun control people make a lot of intellectually dishonest arguments, such as when they deny that an armed citizenry would be a good thing to have against a tyrannical government, especially when they point to government tanks and missiles. That fails to take into account how police states generally work, on a more person-to-person level where armed citizens would be helpful. But anti-gun control people are also intellectually dishonest when it comes to crime.
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Filed under Feminism.
Lindsay Beyerstein catches an important story—an FTC lawsuit against CompuCredit Visa has revealed some of the unusual things that will get held against your credit rating. Oh, it’s not just your income or your borrowing history. Nope. You’re considered a credit risk if you travel more than to work and back and maybe occasionally to the mall, because if you get your tires retreaded, that’s held against you. Good citizens don’t have friends, family, or fun. But what’s really surprising is that if you go to marriage counseling, that’s a strike against you on the credit report.
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Filed under Economy, Marriage.
Salon has a doctor writing about how even “socialized” health care is way too expensive because the emphasis is on “get sick, go to the doctor” instead of on prevention. Like pretty much all decent people outside of the U.S., he takes first world nations’ responsibility to see to the health care of all citizens as a moral given, much the way Americans see “socialized” education, roads, and fire departments as a given. So really, this is just an argument about the hows, not the whethers. It’s worth noting that Dr. Parikh uses Canada as his main point of comparison, and theirs considered one of the most inefficient universal health systems.
That said, I agree with him that an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure in health care. Which is why I lose my shit watching wingnuts in D.C. redirect HIV aid from prevention to treatment, because I believe they think AIDS is a good disincentive/punishment for having sex and they don’t want to interfere with catching it. No matter if you can get AIDS drugs to every man, woman, and child who needs them around the world, you’ll save more lives if you blunt the spread of the disease through condoms and education. Few diseases, once acquired, have a magic bullet cure. To use a more mundane example, think about dentistry. They can do amazing things in that field, fix teeth that a century before would have fallen right out your head with a lot of pain attending. If you do lose your teeth, they can make new ones for you. But there’s no crown, no filling, no dentures that can equal the tooth you grew by yourself, and any dentist will tell you that. The disease of tooth decay wasn’t cured, really, but its worst symptoms were managed. Same story with heart disease, diabetes, and other illnesses that plague our health care system.
The problem is imagining a way to really get prevention at the forefront of a health care system. Dr. Parikh has ideas.
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Filed under Health.
Straight people shouldn’t be allowed to marry. That’s what I came to realize that Maggie Gallagher must believe after reading this article of hers, where she suggests that gay marriage isn’t really marriage because—get this—some gay couples are non-monogamous.
Less than a decade later, Eric Erbelding from the perch of his legally recognized Massachusetts gay marriage, is quite comfortable explaining to the New York Times that “Our rule is you can play around because, you know, you have to be practical.”
Eric elaborates why he think it works for gay men: “I think men view sex very differently than women. Men are pigs, they know that each other are pigs, so they can operate accordingly. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Still, Mr. Erbelding said, in what to the old-fashioned ear is the most astonishing single sentence in the whole piece: most married gay couples he knows are “for the most part monogamous, but for maybe a casual three-way.”
For the most part . . . except for the casual three-way?
But hey, if the word “marriage” can be redefined as a civil-rights imperative, why balk at lesser ideas like “monogamy” or “fidelity”?
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Filed under GLBT, Marriage.
The assertion that liberals don’t do well on TV is a classic example of an Everyone Knows myth in action. Addressing yet another article that peddles in the idea that Keith Olbermann’s success is a miracle, because liberals traditionally fail on TV, Matt says:
How many failed attempts were there, exactly? My recollection of the relevant history is that first O’Reilly was successful. Then, because you’re not allowed to put liberals on television, networks responded to his success by putting more conservatives on. Then someone at MSNBC had the crazy idea of giving Phil Donahue a show. Then Donahue’s show became MSNBC’s most popular program. At which point MSNBC canceled it because you’re not allowed to put liberals on television. Some time after that, MSNBC put Keith Olbermann on intending, as Boyer reports, for his show to be a “newscast of record.” Then, by accident, Olbermann started doing some liberal stuff. And it was successful, which based on the track record (one effort to put a liberal on cable and his show became the network’s highest-rated program) is exactly what you would expect.
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Filed under Mainstream Media Wankery.
Some of the smears against Barack Obama being generated seem kind of pointless and empty, but I propose that we should fear them more, because what seems like ripe nonsense to us often resonates with some of the more paranoid, right wing parts of the nation. Take for instance, this exercise in making people hate Obama, and all because he’s been to Bali. Let’s do a close reading and think like a wingnut for a moment.
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Filed under Barack Obama, Conservatives Sure Are Funny.
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