Tag: Anger and Rants

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Back to the kitchen with you

I was looking around some blogs this afternoon, and in the comments on one blog that I keep coming back to for some reason (even though I can’t stand the blogger, her viewpoint, or her writing) offered this in reference to last week’s elections:

It was nice to see Nancy Pelosi put in her place!

Wow. “Put in her place”. I’d take the charitable view here and assume that this writer meant, as a conservative, that it was nice to see the top Democrat in the House relegated to probable Minority Leader status. But I’m not going to take this view, as this person’s writings over the years have made clear that she deeply fetishizes a time when a woman’s place was a lot more clearly defined than it is now. I’m always surprised to see such rhetoric employed out there.

Nancy Pelosi has achieved the highest elected position ever ascended by an American woman…but now, she’s been put in her place. One wonders if the blogger in question hopes John Boehner gives Nancy Pelosi a fifty and tells her to “go buy herself somethin’ pretty”.

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A helpful hint

If you ever use the construction “I’m not a _____, but….”, rethink what you’re saying before you say it publicly. “I’m not a bigot, but Muslims at the airport scare me” is an asshole thing to say. And so is “I don’t hate fat people, but boy howdy, I sure don’t want to have to look at them!”.

OK, that’s not an exact quote, but it’s pretty much what Maura Kelly says in that piece. I’m sure she struggled hard to find the right words to get her point across; how sad that the point she actually got across was not the one she thought she was getting across. But then, it’s so often amazing to see an asshole shouting from the rooftops without ever realizing that what they’re shouting up there is actually, “Hey! Everybody! I’m an asshole!”

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A man stands up

I saw someone on another blog yesterday comment that “you can’t equate not supporting gay marriage with hating gays”. I thought that a very odd statement: “I don’t hate gays, you see! I just don’t want them to marry. Or serve in the military. Or [insert behavior X here]. Or….” The notion is ludicrous, in my mind; I can’t imagine a motive for being anti-gay marriage or anti-gay anything that doesn’t involve some level of hatred for homosexuality and those who practice it, no matter how uncomfortable certain anti-gay folks might be with the characterization of their hatred. Since anti-gay sentiment is almost exclusively focused on the political right in this country, I checked out the famously insane platform of the Texas Republican Party, and well, if you can read this excerpt and not see hate dripping from the pores of those who wrote it, well, you’re frankly delusional.

Far more heartening is this manifesto, by an Episcopal Bishop.

I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is “an abomination to God,” about how homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle,” or about how through prayer and “spiritual counseling” homosexual persons can be “cured.” Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy. I will no longer dignify by listening to the thoughts of those who advocate “reparative therapy,” as if homosexual persons are somehow broken and need to be repaired. I will no longer talk to those who believe that the unity of the church can or should be achieved by rejecting the presence of, or at least at the expense of, gay and lesbian people. I will no longer take the time to refute the unlearned and undocumentable claims of certain world religious leaders who call homosexuality “deviant.” I will no longer listen to that pious sentimentality that certain Christian leaders continue to employ, which suggests some version of that strange and overtly dishonest phrase that “we love the sinner but hate the sin.” That statement is, I have concluded, nothing more than a self-serving lie designed to cover the fact that these people hate homosexual persons and fear homosexuality itself, but somehow know that hatred is incompatible with the Christ they claim to profess, so they adopt this face-saving and absolutely false statement.

I’ve pretty much reached the same point, myself.

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Dear Carl

You know what you are when you hold disgusting, bigoted beliefs because your religion tells you to?

You’re a disgusting bigot.

Thanks for the opportunity to clear that up.

BTW, I saw this comment on Facebook this morning:

People will vote for him because they don’t see the advantage in voting for a “good person,” if Cuomo even represents that. How does Carl being bigoted or homophobic affect them? How does having an open minded person affect them? If the open minded person raises their taxes, drives away business, and makes their children leave for NC, can you blame them for voting for the nut?

Yup, I can blame them. They could have chosen a candidate who wasn’t a nut, and who would channel their frustration into reasonable policy goals that would move things in a direction they like. Instead, they chose a lunatic whose approach is to say whatever leaps into his brain; who has advanced only a few policy ideas, each of which is a laughable non-starter; whose only appeal to his voters is anger that won’t go anywhere at all. Anger can be useful, but Paladino’s brand of anger won’t be. You can bank on it.

So yes, I can totally blame people for voting for the nut.

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Holy crap….

A while back, my friend Kerry had her second baby, and she gave birth in an unplanned home birth. Shortly thereafter, she rode the ambulance with the baby to the hospital for follow-up stuff and…all the stuff they do with newborns and whatnot.

Kerry got billed for the two-mile ride $978. Ouch. (That’s $.18 a foot.) I’ve long known that ambulance rides are a pretty stunning racket these days; we got a whopper of a bill for our two ambulance experiences, and we noticed that while the EMTs who drive and staff the ambulances are terrific people, their billing departments are staffed by ghouls and parasites. Not only do they get that bill into your hands nice and quick, they also turn the bill over to collections even nicer and quicker.

But what gets me about Kerry’s story isn’t the amount she was billed. It’s that they billed the baby too. Come on, now.

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Embracing the Crazy

(A Political Rant with a bit of rude language)

Here in New York, we have a gubernatorial election coming up in which the Republicans have, as they’ve done in races for various offices all across the country, nominated a complete lunatic. But for some reason I’ve never been able to fathom, Americans seem to every so often get themselves into this weird kind of mood where they get so angry that they decide to embrace lunatics as an expression of their anger. I’m hearing a lot of this from supporters of Carl Paladino: “Sure he’s crazy, but crazy is what we need!”

DougJ at Balloon Juice perfectly captures the inherent dangers of this habit:

This kind of reasoning is nearly always stupid, e.g. “at least with Bush, you know where he stands”. People don’t talk this way about things other than politics. No one says “better a quack than all this medical kabuki” or “better Barry Switzer than all that West Coast offense mumbo jumbo”.

If you want to have good government, you do it by voting for sane candidates whose positions you agree with, not by supporting nuts in order to make some ridiculous point about an imperfect system.

I couldn’t agree more. “Carl’s angry and so are we! He expresses our anger!” But what do you want to do with that anger? “Drop a bomb on Albany!” Yeah…but what do you want him to accomplish? What do you want NY’s state government to look like when he’s done? “I dunno…but we’re angry and so’s Carl!” Lather, rinse, repeat. Every time I’ve asked a Paladino supporter what policy ideas of his they find appealing, they can’t cite a single one. They just like that he acts angry.

Along similar lines, a blogger I read recently wrote that President Obama has brought all of his woes upon himself, and that the Tea Party only exists because of his excesses. “The Tea Party wouldn’t exist without him,” this fellow wrote.

But…of course the Tea Party would exist without him. The Tea Party would have happened to any Democrat elected President in 2008, because for all the grass-roots mythology the Tea Parties like to indulge, the fact is very simple: the Tea Party is nothing more than the same pissed-off Republicans who crawl out of the woodwork en masse every time a Democrat is in office. President Hillary Clinton would have faced a Tea Party. So would President Joseph Biden, President John Kerry, President…anyone at all from the Democratic Party.

And one last thought: Every single US Senator who voted against allowing gays to serve in the military (Harry Reid excepted, who only voted no for procedural reasons) can go to hell — especially those who hide behind the excuse that “It wasn’t fair! You didn’t let us offer amendments!” There’s right and there’s wrong, and the fact that you (a) stood up to be counted with ‘wrong’ and (b) claimed as your excuse that Senate procedure is just so much more important than doing right marks every single one of these people as moral midgets of the highest order. Especially John McCain. What a bastard that guy is.

OK, I’m done.

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Racial Nastiness

This may offend some, actually, but it seems a valuable service to me: someone’s collecting instances of people using the ‘N’ word on Facebook, and blogging them. Racism is always depressing when I encounter it, but what’s really saddening here is how casual and open these folks are about it. I found this one particularly depressing, because of the guy’s profile pic — he’s a smiling daddy, holding his kid. I suppose he’s already raising the next generation of folks who hate. Or there’s this one, which nicely juxtaposes one woman’s nasty racism with her oh-so-devout Christianity.

I don’t know if I’m seeing it more, or if there’s more of it to see, but wow, am I seeing a lot of nasty hate out there. The other day I’m in a store (not The Store), and I see a guy pushing around a shopping card with his toddler daughter in the cart seat. And he’s being all happy and cute with his daughter. Kind of nice and heartwarming, right? Until he happened to turn around, and I saw his t-shirt: a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad, with the caption “The Prophet Muhammad eats diarrhea”.

(Oh, and since I’m on the topic, let me say this: Yes, I think that New York State’s Republican candidate for Governor, Carl Paladino, is likely racist. To my way of thinking, you don’t find the kinds of e-mails he was happily forwarding to everyone in his address book funny if you’re not racist. Any justifications based on some kind of convoluted logic that those kinds of things may be racist, but he‘s not racist because all he did was forward them, strike me as terribly unconvincing.)

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Tales I Cannot Believe

This can’t be true. No city can possibly be this stupid.

It goes like this: Philadelphia is, like just about every city out there, having money problems. Philly has bloggers. Philly gets the idea that since any blog can have ad space, whether the blog actually has ad space or not and whether the blog actually makes money via ads or not, the blog is a potential revenue stream. And therefore, Philly has decided that blog owners have to pony up to buy a business license to operate their blogs.

Unbelievable. Totally unbelievable. This has got to be a joke, right?

Right?

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Gregg, you ignorant slut

I can’t stop reading Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, even though he invariably says something in each installment that is so staggeringly full of crap that I end up wondering if he throws it in there just to see how many people tell him how full of crap he is. In the first regular installment of his 2010 season of columns, he weighs in on a topic that I have for years found amazing for its ability to turn seemingly rational people into Geysers O’Crap. That topic is, of course, former Vice President Al Gore.

Here’s Easterbrook:

Deciding to divorce, Al and Tipper Gore released — via e-mail — a statement calling the split a “mutually supportive decision that we have made together.” Dear, I am supporting you by leaving you. Now Al can fulfill his furtive desire to listen to rap music with dirty lyrics, while Tipper has her revenge by leaving the engine running on her SUV. My advice to couples hoping for a long marriage: Don’t make out on national television. These two did, at the Democratic National Convention in 2000, and look where it got them.

In retrospect, could that nationally televised kiss have been more evidence that everything about Al Gore is phony? When Sandra Bullock and Scarlett Johansson played tongue hockey at the MTV Movie Awards, their mega-smooch was obviously done for publicity; they didn’t claim to be in love. Al, on the other hand, wanted us to believe his feelings for Tipper were genuine.

That’s a lot of crap in two paragraphs, innit? First Easterbrook seems to believe that Al left Tipper, even though there’s nothing to support that; maybe Easterbrook is unaware that couples really do make mutual decisions to divorce. But it’s the second paragraph that is pretty amazingly creepy. Easterbrook is stating outright that since they’re divorcing now, in 2010, then by Golly, Al could never have actually loved his wife. Especially not ten years ago.

Easterbrook’s faulty assumptions here run a pretty impressive gamut, don’t they? He thinks he’s qualified to pass comment on the emotional lives of two people I can only assume he doesn’t know very well, and he seems to be assuming that a marriage that ends in divorce can never have been a marriage based on love at all. Married people might love each other now but divorce in the future? To Easterbrook, this is unthinkable. Heck, don’t tell him that some couples that divorce actually still love one another and divorce because of other emotional complexities; I don’t think Easterbrook could wrap his head around that concept. Do Al and Tipper Gore still love each other, in spite of their separation? Have they loved each other all along and are now separated for complex reasons? Or have they never really loved each other at all? I have no idea, because I don’t know either one of them. But Gregg Easterbrook has seen all he needs to see in order to divine the workings of Al Gore’s emotional life.

What the heck is it about Al Gore that turns people into raving idiots? I’ve been wondering this for years.

Every NFL season, Easterbrook keeps an eye out for the worst play of the season thus far committed by an NFL team. This year, I’m doing the same thing — but I’ll be tracking the stupidest thing said by Gregg Easterbrook thus far this season. Can he get dumber than this? We’ll see!

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