Right Wing Idiots

One of the bigger wingnut bloggers, Dan Riehl, is out using the horrible accident that Harry Reid’s family was in to push the lie of “death panels”:

Come on, Harry - do your civic duty. The nation's broke and counting on you guy. Pull the plug and get back to work. And don't bill us for a full day today, either. This is no time to be sloughing off. Air freight her home, you can bury her during recess on your own time and dime. Or are you going to bill us for that, too?

And I sit here thinking of how the wingnuts like Malkin go off on hissy fits everytime some anonymous commenter posts on a progressive blog saying they wish Cheney’s last heart attack would have done him in, or that Rush would have died in the hospital. These people aren’t just hypocrites, they are sick and twisted assholes.

Markos has just released a new poll with some very interesting numbers. These are from self-identified Republicans:

Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?

Yes 39
No 32
Not Sure 29

I would love to know what high crimes and misdemeanors they believe he has committed.

Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?

Yes 63
No 21
Not Sure 16

Again – a total myth. President Obama is to the right of Hillary Clinton and they still think he is some socialist. Why? Because of the bank bailouts? Those were enacted under Bush and heavily supported by John McCain – the Republican nominee at the time.

Markos has much more on this madness.

Wingnut mouth piece Confederate Yankee:

Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) has seen far better days, and is often little more than a warm body when he is helped into the Senate. Granted, lucidity and coherence is not a priority among Senate Democrats, but Byrd is an embarrassment even for a party that regular drafts the imaginary or dead to vote.

Robert Byrd has been around a very long time, and his many decades of service have made West Virginia a wonderful state in which to manufacture methamphetamine or frame the locals for murder. But it's time for Senator to do the right thing, and expire.

It isn't too much to ask for Byrd to step off for that great klavern in the sky before the Senate vote that may force this nation to accept government-rationed health care. Even a nice coma would do.

Without his frail, Gollum-like body being wheeled into the Senate's chambers to cast the deciding vote, the Senate cannot curse our children and grandchildren with crushing debt and rationed, substandard healthcare.

I suppose some will be shocked and appalled that I'd wish for the former kleagle to die on command. I'd remind them that the party wheeling in a near invalid to vote in favor of this unread monstrosity of a bill is the one that should feel shame.

Yup – the party of God® wishing for people to die.

I just caught Matt Kibbe from Freedom Works on  MSNBC saying that the problem with Democrats is that if you are conservative you HAVE to vote with the liberal caucus and Nancy Pelosi.

Matt is either a complete liar or 120% ignorant to American politics. If what he claimed was true then we would have awesome healthcare and a robust public option.

And this reminds me that I really need a new capture device for my computer that will work with Windows 7 so I can go back to making videos.

Matt Osborne has a must read at Huffington Post on the life cycle of the nontroversy that is “climategate”.

One of the biggest turnarounds in the blogosphere this year has been that of Little Green Footballs and their head honcho Charles Johnson. As this year has progressed we have seen Johnson break more and more with the wingnuts and conservatives on issues. Last night he laid out his reasons:

1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)

2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)

3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)

4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)

Read on…

Needless to say this post has sparked a lot of outrage from the wingnuts. An example of this outrage comes from Robert Stacy McCain:

What obtrudes in CJ's hate-list modus operandi is that he cannot rationally prioritize dangers. Pamela Geller, creationists, Tea Party crowds, global-warming skeptics and Sarah Palin are, in the demented mind of Mad King Charles, as dangerous as al Qaeda. Or me.

I don’t see where McCain comes up with Johnson prioritizing dangers. It seems like this is a game of crying wolf on the part of McCain; “Oh he is picking on me so he must side with the terrorists”. At issue here is people like McCain, Malkin and the other’s that Johnson talks about siding with the right wing extremists – those people we see at tea parties holding signs advocating the assassination of our President or even a military coup against the White House. In all honesty, threats coming from home like that are every bit as serious, if not more, than threats from al-Qaeda.

Sadly the wingnuts are unable to look in the mirror and see that Johnson has characterized their traits perfectly. These are the same people who considered anyone criticizing Bush as traitors, yet they find it perfectly acceptable to generate far worse attacks against President Obama. True none of that is shocking coming from the wingnut crowd.

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It’s been over a week now since some hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit surfaced showing that researches sexed up some data; something the right is calling “climategate” and proof that global warming is a hoax. Since then the right has complained nonstop about the lack of media coverage on this non-story.

Let me take a moment and remind everyone of an actual event of lying. This act didn’t involve some scientists locked up in an office somewhere, just trying to make their data show a stronger case for what it already proved. This is a case with much more dire consequences.

George Bush engaged in the biggest act of lying to the world in history. He and his administration mislead the entire planet into believing that Saddam Hussein had the weapons to destroy the planet, as well as some how being involved in the 9/11 attacks. One of the basis of their lies was even a forged document that George Bush used in his State of the Union Address, saying that Saddam was trying to get yellow cake uranium from Niger.

Let’s take a moment and compare these two stories. What would the real cost of some scientists misleading the public on climate change be? A planet with a much healthier environment and one able to sustain life much longer. That is nothing compared to the act of lying countess nations into war, something that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and over a trillion dollars on top of making the world a much more dangerous place by emboldening terrorists.

Like I said last week, these hacked emails prove nothing. The whole notion of Global Warming wasn’t started in the late 90s; the research actually dates back to the 60s. Are we supposed to subscribe to the belief that countless scientists around the world have forged their data since these emails? We get new numbers almost daily showing the acceleration of global warming, and if over 90% of the world scientists are involved then that is the biggest case of collusion in world history. Yet we have never had any data proving that George Bush did not lie this nation into war, and the right never wants to discuss that very costly and deadly lie.

If the right wants a national discussion on “climategate”, then we also get to bring up Iraq. We have far more evidence that George Bush lied this country into war than proof that the global science community has lied about global warming. And like I said, even if all the scientists did come together to lie to the world, the cost of Bush’s lies way out shadow the costs of “climategate”.

In case you have missed it there is a sudden shortage on aluminum foil. It has been bought up by wingnuts in order to prepare their latest hats.

I am talking about the case of a British university’s server being hacked and approximately 160mb of data and email being leaked. The server that was hacked was of prominent climate change researchers:

The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.

This has got the wingnuts fired up and pulling out zingers like this:

— “If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW,” says the Telegraph’s James Delingpole.

– Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey claims the emails discuss “repetitive, false data of higher temperatures.”

– The National Review’s Chris Horner salivates, “The blue-dress moment may have arrived.”

– “The crimes revealed in the e-mails promise to be the global warming scandal of the century,” blares Michelle Malkin.

– The Australia Herald-Sun’s Andrew Bolt claims the emails are “proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in moderrn [sic] science.”

I’m not going to take the time to debunk this conspiracy craze by the right; Nate Silver has already done an excellent job at that, concluding:

But let's be clear: Jones is talking to his colleagues about making a prettier picture out of his data, and not about manipulating the data itself. Again, I'm not trying to excuse what he did -- we make a lot of charts here and 538 and make every effort to ensure that they fairly and accurately reflect the underlying data (in addition to being aesthetically appealing.) I wish everybody would abide by that standard.

Still: I don't know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger. And yet that's literally what some of these bloggers are saying!

Instead I want to focus on the source of this latest conspiracy craze – the hacked emails.

It was just a little over a year ago that everyone was focusing on some other emails obtained through hacking. Those emails happened to reside in Sarah Palin’s email account. Did the wingnuts jump onto the information they provided as evidence against Palin? Absolutely not. Instead they wrote them off as being nothing because they were obtained through the illegal means of hacking. Let’s look at how some of these wingnuts described that incident:

The law will catch up to the hackers, but what about the lowlifes who are now gleefully splashing the alleged contents of Palin’s private e-mail account all over the Internet? – Michelle Malkin

The group taking responsibility certainly has a history of partisan attacks, as Caleb Howe notes in his post.  He has a picture and a video that he took of their protest at the Republican convention, although Howe also wonders exactly why they were there – Ed Morrissey

Funny how back in September 2008 hacking was a horrible thing to these wingnuts, but today it is nothing but awesomeness.

Back to the subject of the day – the climate change emails. Do all these wingnuts really believe that 90% of the world’s scientists got together and decided to mislead the entire globe? Perhaps they think that the disappearing ice on the polar ice caps is just some big Hollywood effect? Really – these people are insane. They act like global warming is some big marketing scheme, when in fact denying it is. That’s the reason that companies like Exxon pay big money to the other 10% of “scientists” to actually fake data and rewrite actual scientific reports to try and show that global warming doesn’t exist.

Like I said, aluminum foil is now about as precious as gold since the wingnuts are buying it up.

Here’s what Drudge is pushing right now:

Wow! Showing respect – how “unpresidential”. Seriously, these kind of complaints really make Obama look good. I mean if this is all the leading right wing news site can find to complain about with our President then he must really be doing an awesome job,

This crazy:

Jerome Corsi, the author of "The Obama Nation," an anti-Obama book, says that a proposal in Congress "appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany."

It goes on far beyond that to include the “off with their head” defense of the administration. Yes – the right is saying that the Obama administration is stock piling guillotines to behead its critics.

This latest episode of “crapsiracy theories gone wild” has even sparked some on the right to go after World Net Daily in much the same way that William F. Buckley went after the John Birch Society back in the 60s.

We could be seeing the dawn of a major GOP civil war brewing and it is going to be a lot of fun to watch from the sidelines. The war has been brewing for quiet sometime now, and been fueled by GOP members of Congress offering validation to some of these whack-job claims. When it does happen they have no one to blame but themselves, although they will try to blame Obama for it. My guess is it will be the product of some mind controlling machine that caused Republicans to attack one another.

The harassment Democratic members of Congress are receiving while trying to explain healthcare now appears to be a well orchestrated move by right wing groups. Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, two right wing lobbying groups that brought us such hits as the “tea parties” has sent out a memo to supporters which gives pointers such as:

– Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”

– Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”

– Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.”

In the dawn of the Gates controversy I was thinking that perhaps someone should call the police. If yelling in your own house is “disturbing the peace”, then yelling and disrupting an informative meeting on one of the most vital issues facing our nation should also be considered such.

In response to yesterday’s shooting at the Holocaust museum, wingnut Debbie Schlussel writes:

Much is being made by Muslims and their many defenders on the left--and the ignoramus "conservatives" at Hot Air (who lecture us that hate has no ideological bounds, which I already learned not from those clueless ones, but from Sarah Palin e-mails wishing me cancer)--that the shooter of several people (one now dead) at the U.S. Holocaust Museum is not a Muslim but a White guy, James W. Von Brunn, who is a neo-Nazi.

But that is a distinction without a difference. In fact, it is because of Muslims--who are the biggest contributor to the worldwide rise in anti-Semitism to Holocaust-eve levels--that neo-Nazis feel comfortable--far more comfortable!--manifesting their views about Jews. Until 9/11 and our resulting new tolerance for Islam, the neo-Nazi types were marginalized and howling at the wind. We know who has been targeting Jewish museums and centers affiliated with Jews in recent years. And it hasn't been, in general, 89-year-old White guys.

So Debbie found a way to blame the Muslims for the latest exhibits of right-wing extremists gone wild. Even worse she is not blaming them as in “they scare us”, but rather as “they support white supremacists.” This goes beyond wingnut craziness.

There has been all this talk from the fat of how he wants “Obama to fail”. Well now that the government has such a large stake in General Motors, the fat one is calling for a boycott of General Motors. Bob points out the irony here:

Just a couple of weeks ago, the wingnuts were crapping their cages over the fact that a suspiciously high number of soon-to-be closed GM dealerships were owned by Republicans. The "conspiracy" that President Obama was taking out some political revenge on McCain supporters made it all the way to Fox News Channel. It turned out that the political party affiliation of dealership owners was merely reflective of the fact that 86 percent of all car dealerships are owned by Republicans.

And now they want to boycott GM, a move that will surely hurt all the dealerships.

To the educated this can only be seen as a flip-flop, as John Cole points out:

These idiots can’t even keep an internally consistent wingnut meme going for a couple weeks. No wonder the rest of the country has no clue what the hell they are talking about.

To me it takes me back to my original point. This is Rush’s plan to try and get our government to fail. And you thought that was talk you would only hear from people like Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong-il or Ahmadinejad.

Today’s contestant is Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. On Fox News this morning, Shelby reaffirmed his belief that Obama was taking us “down the road of socialism”. The big thing he blamed?

WALLACE: Sen. Shelby, you say that the Obama administration is taking us down the road to socialism. Explain.

SHELBY: Well, obviously. So, they intervene last fall in the bank crisis. No one has ever done it on that scale before. Now the automobile crisis.

And because seeing is believing:

So now the whole TARP was the work of Obama? I almost forgot that it was Obama who took the unprecedented action of suspending a presidential campaign to work on this issue. Oh wait – that was John McCain. It was also Bush’s TARP program. With lying morons like Shelby out there making the case one can only assume the Republicans really love being in the minority.

No – they don’t exist:

A nationwide manhunt was underway Friday night for the "Cape Man" of Blue Jay Way - a gun-loving goofball from upstate New York who threatened to kill President Obama.

Daniel James Murray, who got G-men on his tail by telling a Utah bank manager he was "on a mission to kill" Obama, was last seen heading east in a blue 2001 Buick LeSabre with New York plates.

Murray's pursuers are concerned because he has eight registered semiautomatic pistols and revolvers.

Not at all:

A criminal complaint says 48-year-old John Zaubler called 911 Saturday and said he was going to kill Sotomayor by “blowing her up” because he did not want his girlfriend to go to federal prison.

The complaint also says he wanted to kill Obama by “blowing him up.”

I’m sure glad that the Obama administration caved to the pressure of the right and pulled that report. Just ask Dr. Tiller, we don’t have any right wing extremists in this country. Oh wait….