You guys probably don’t bother to keep an eye on comment threads on FoxNews. Neither do I, since the iron-stomached Charles Johnson over at LittleGreenFootballs does it for us all, so I thought I’d check in to see how the wind is blowing over there now that Obama has endorsed gay marriage. One day we should give Chuck a medal for his fortitude.
Holy shit. Here’s a sample from one comment thread on the subject— it’s at 7000+ comments and they’re still coming in faster than anyone can keep up. Notice again how the commenters deliberately avoid the filters by careful keyboard work. Lovely;
I’m surprised he didn’t go one step further in approving of inter-species marriage, seeing as how he’s married to a baboon, or is she a really tall chimpanze? Anyway, if it’s cool in kenya, why not here???
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Obama thinks everyone should get screw’d up the a$$, no matter what gender they are.
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NiggyThe Panderer’s failure of the day!!! Keep failing NigBama!!!
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LOL! 0bama’s ol’ lady has a face ugly enough to stamp out gorilla cookies, a sham marriage, sham birth certificate and a deceased gayloverOFcourse he is in favor. Maybe now 0bama can do the first honest thing in his life and marry another dude…that’s what 0bama REALLY wants.
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Homosexuality and lesbianism are personal sin issues trying to pass themselves off as ‘rights’.
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THIS IS A GREAT DAY FOR ALL GOOD AMERICANS!!! THE END OF AN ERROR IS UPON US!!! HE ALREADY HAD THE VOTE OF EVERY DEVIANT WHO SUPPORTS GAY MARRIAGE, SO HE GAINED ZERO BY THIS POLITICALLY FOOLISH MOVE…BUT HE JUST LOST THE CRITICAL 2-3% IN THE MIDDLE< GURANTEEING HE GETS DEFEATED IN NOVEMBER!!! “HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN”
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Democratic code for “I gots your backside Polesuckers”
“FOREWORD into OBAMA 2012!”[…]
Obama is living proof that repeatedly beating your head on a prayer rug will cause brain damage!
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Let’s see now…30 states already have laws against s0d0mites getting married. So Oblamya comes out in support of it. Figures.
Nice move Barry. This flip-flop will cost you more than a few votes. I don’t think any of the pole_smokin’ nancys were gonna vote Republican anyway.[…]
Another issue he is on the Wrong side of…
I’m glad he Came Out… Now America knows What kind of Deviant Behavior he Supports!!![…]
LOL! What surprise. Everything this anti American COMMUNIST does and everything out of his MOUTH is the exact OPPOSITE of common decency and morality. Everything he does is the OPPOSITE of common sense and reason!
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What a complete and utter DISASTER and DIGRACE this man is to this nation! Family is the FOUNDATION of success this nation was BUILT ON! And this DISGRACE wants to TEAR IT DOWN and make a mockery of the American Family!
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Children are supposed to be raised by a man and a woman. Letting sick people who practice homosexuality, raise children is hurting not only our society, but it’s hurting these children, and that has to stop.
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FACT: homoFAGGOTS molesting has been on the rise since middle of 2009.
is this a coincidence?[…]
obama…now that you come out for gay marriage, would you mind getting the phuckback to work and start worrying about unemployment, our $13 trillion dollar debt, holder’s war on the citizenry, and solving our domestic energy problems…in other words, “don’t be a DICK”
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Can anyone say election year!!! The only way this COWARD can get back in is if he get the Pole Smokers and Carpet Munchers and Illegals to vote for him!! Then as soon as he gets re elected every thing will change!! This man is a liar and a coward we need him gone.
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So at the wedding ceremony do the faggots_exchange cock_rings?
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My guess is this clears the deck for Lakqisha and LaShasa to bring home their white girlfriends…JMO
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Obama better come out and support fathers marrying their adult daughters. Equal is Equal right?
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Unwittingly (does he ever do it any other way?), Soetero can now pander to the NASCAR people…
“Hey, y’all, I’m the pole-sitter in this race!”[…]
When Obama sits down to issue executive orders he does not think he is violating the Constitution, rather he says to himself, “I’m sodomizin dis bit ch!”
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I sure am glad that my grand mother is not alive to see this.
The first blk president of the US, stopping at nothing to be reelected.
next week he will have Mrs. Obama walking the streets of DC selling her assets for a vote. you have to wonder where it will end.[…]
There will be much celebration among_faggots around the world. Emergency rooms worldwide are preparing for the associated spike in anaI prolapses that will surely follow.
UPDATE; Fox has now deleted the entire thread, but you can be sure it’s cached somewhere. There was a time not so long ago when Fox didn’t give a shit, and would let things like this remain up, but more and more vigilant bloggers have been capturing these hatefests and publicizing them more widely.
Here lately Fox has been a little more on the ball about taking this kind of stuff down. But notice they have no moderation in real time—they never delete selected comments—they just shitcan entire threads whenever they get noticed by the civilized world, then pretend it all never happened.
Am I the only one who can’t quite get over the idea that these people can actually type?
Sigh. I wish there was some kind of effective way of rebutting this crap, but you can’t shame people that don’t got no shame.
Can anyone more clued up tell me what the closest equivalent to this on the other side of the aisle was in the Bush years? Did raging liberals invent very silly and demeaning names and speculate wildly about the pulchritude and availability of his spouse?
pulchritude is a great word, isn’t it. Makes the quality of beauty sound sort of vaguely dangerous, underhanded or criminal.
And don’t forget folks, Murdoch owns Fox.
Sib -
I’ve certainly taken many pops at Bush over the years, and even more at Reagan. Evolution may have even been mixed in there (i’m not saying it was, can’t remember). I used to take pops at Laura Bush until i read in a VF profile that she killed an old high school friend when she ran a stop sign. That has to be one of the hardest things you could ever live with. I still take pops at Barbara Bush, unashamedly.
But no, nothing at the level of the above comments i don’t think. I still can’t believe Fox lets that stuff stand on the site. I’ve never been to Redstate, Jon Appleseed said it makes him look like a liberal so it must be pretty bad. Even the Telegraph has some really awful coments, they don’t really seem to mod there. The Mail seems to mod a lot more. There are plenty of ignorant comments on there, but i don’t remember seeing stuff like the above on that site. The articles are worse than the comments.
Whatever you may think of him, Andrew Sullivan has a beautiful article up on the Beast.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/07/17/andrew-sullivan-why-gay-marriage-is-good-for-america.html
Belittling nicknames are as old as names, I’m sure. Certainly as old as human politics.
Bush, as I recall, was attacked for his actions and his inactions. Lampooned mercilessly, sure, but for the things he did and said and didn’t do and didn’t say. I don’t remember much vitriol aimed at Laura one way or the other. Those comments quoted above are pure unadulterated race hate and woman hate and homosexual hate.
A signal difference between the Democrats and the Republicans these days is that, as far as I can tell, Democrats do not actively cultivate or pander to this or any other kind of hatred. But the Republicans do.
There was certainly plenty of belittlement directed at Bush and Reagan for their intelligence, or lack of it. I plead guilty.
And forgetting about potuses for a moment, we’re certainly had our fun with Bachmann, O’Donnell, and Palin. But again, i don’t think the liberals sunk that low, but we certainly took the tone down many notches.
Those comments are really disgusting!
I think the benchmark would have been if Bush, Palin or one of the others were black.
Condaleza Rice must have had bad press at times. Did she ever attract venom like that from the Dems?
I don’t remember Condoleeza Rice getting widespread crap like that.
But from Sib’s question -
“Did raging liberals invent very silly and demeaning names and speculate wildly about the pulchritude and availability of his spouse?”
I reckon there was an awful lot of demeaning names and speculation on availability and pulchritude for Bachmann, Palin, and O’Donnell. I give you Lefty’s poetry, exhibit A. (Which i certainly laughed at.) We did speculate on Bachmann’s hubby too. And Rick Perry. So no, libs are not blameless.
Porny,
yes but then the serious drooling over Palin, Bachman & O’Donnell was always coming from their fans.
I’m thinking that because their (relative to other politicians mind you) sexiness seemed to be the only thing any of them had going for them, the drooling may have seemed more like fair game.
But then we have to remember that the (literally hate-full) racists whose posts gunny quotes above sincerely believe that Obama only was elected because of his ‘looks’ i.e. the color of his skin. To them it couldn’t possibly have been anything the man did or said.
Do comments along the lines of Lefty’s poems justify any of the spew above?
Bluth -
I’m just pointing stuff out. The racist element is hideous. The racial element was missing from all of those sexist comments, and they were indeed blatantly sexist for the folks inclined to look at it that way. (I wasn’t one of them). And then race wasn’t a factor with any of those people either. Dunno what you mean by fans – but there were many, many lefties on CiF alone who were doing more than drooling. Including Lefty. I count myself among the many who speculated on the sexuality of Perry and Mr. Bachmann. Fair game in both of those cases i believe.
One guy opinined that Ron Paul looked like a dessicated scrotum. I laughed my tail off and heartily agreed. So shoot me.
Bluth -
fwiw i certainly don’t remember anyone on the left, or the right for that matter, going after Rice, Colin Powell, or Cain on racial terms. Not quite so blatently, anyway. There was some black guy / white woman stuff about Cain from the left. (Not from me.) Rice did and still does get speculation on her sexual orientation. Maybe it’s true, maybe not. Hillary got a lot of comments about her ass. Both Amy Carter and Chelsea Clinton got plenty of unpleasantness, as i’m sure there was plenty of speculation about the Bush twins.
The sexuality of anyone who attacks people for their sexuality is fair game absolutely. And women in the public eye for any reason whatever women everywhere get comments on their bodies from all sides, that is true. And we all see racism as something categorically worse, but racists probably think they are just being ‘honest’. I don’t know the answer to my question, I was just asking it.
If Sarah had gone Dolly Parton with her coiffure and then been called Governor Goodhair for it, would that have been sexist? Was it over the top to make sausage jokes about Anthony Weiner?
Maybe, if we want to internalize Caesar’s wife badly enough. But the price of doing that is that we then have no words for the kind of behavior Gunny posted above. And that’s a bigger price than any society can afford to pay. This reflexive, both-sides-do-it shit is at the very heart of the present degradation of public discourse.
Nat
Agree completely.
And at the heart of reasons that the press is no longer doing its job. That institution too has been colonized, and in what is perhaps the greatest PR coup in human affairs, successfully characterized as “liberal”.
Whatever the fuck liberal means today.
Dick J Reavis, a friend of mine and the author of the definitive book on the Waco massacre, finally bailed out of teaching “journalism” and transferred to the English departments for that very reason. He says J-schools are no longer turning out journalists, but PR flacks.
“Balance” has come to mean something entirely new in the last thirty or so years, to where the issues of truth or historical context are no longer benchmarks for calibrating it.
Personally I don’t think the Republicans or Fox News do enough to celebrate the LGBT contributions and accomplishments from Mitt Romney.
I’m not sure there’s a causal connection between insult trading and the near-death of intellectual rigor in most journalism- which except that maybe no one feels inhibited about insulting anyone any more because no one is doing much anywhere besides spinning.
What does seem to be true is that no one who draws his self esteem from adhering to the certitudes of one side right down the line is any longer listening much to anyone who draws his self esteem from adhering to the certitudes of the the other right down the line. That still leaves a fairly large group who don’t draw their self esteem from adhering to a particular line of certitudes of any kind. Who are heartily sick of the shit-talk from both sides.
What’s odd, or ironic, is that both Romney and Obama clearly belong by disposition in that third group. Romney has made it completely clear that he has no deep beliefs about anything beyond the sanctity of money, and every time he attempts to pretend to believe in something he is struggling to keep up in a 3rd rate am-dram. While Obama is so middle of the road he can hardly bring himself to get mad in public about even the most outrageous assaults on the fundamental principles of civic life. And yet these two have each become (or soon will be) demi-god to their own side and the demon to the other. And ‘politics’ really does end up being little more than insult slinging.
Folks, i’ve just been playing devil’s advocate here.
“If Sarah had gone Dolly Parton with her coiffure and then been called Governor Goodhair for it, would that have been sexist? Was it over the top to make sausage jokes about Anthony Weiner?”
Nope. I don’t think so, but my thresholds are pretty high for outrage too, i’m not real mature. And i don’t think it was over the top for me to write a poem about Bachmann’s hubby seeing to have a penchant for rough trade. Or Waco to write one about Perry’s college days.
Anyone see the Graun articles on the abuse of Louise Mensch? Someone i have less than zero time for, and those aren’t Tories heaping it on. And the fact that myself, or some others on CiF seem to think that calling a politician who is a self serving dip shit a slut and whore and worse is bad but get over it, and that a joke about wanting a dumbass female candidate to ride your broomstick is funny and ok, we’re not as bad as THEM says something too. Because we’re on the right side.
There is a very fine line between calling Obama a pole smoker because he came out in favor of gay marriage, and saying roughly the same, if not as blatantly, about Rick Perry because of his hair, depending what side of the fence you’re sitting on. And of course, ours is the right one. Funny how i never heard Mittens called anything like that when he signed same-sex marriage into law though.
I still think i was ok for writing about Mr. Bachmann’s apparent penchant for rough trade because i linked to the video where he said gays needed to be disciplined.
Absolutely agree Gunny.
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And not in any way excusing – but the level of discourse isn’t helped by people hiding behind the illusion of web anonymity.
but the level of discourse isn’t helped by people hiding behind the illusion of web anonymity.
You’re right there, for sure.
Atticus wasn’t wrong, Expat, and you aren’t either, and maybe anonymity has a way of doing to people what we know mobs are so good at doing. And maybe lots of people’s lives are so sequestered and atomised these days lots of them don’t know what it’s like to be part of a physical mob, so they don’t recognize the sense of disinhibition. Who let the dogs out indeed.
On on a maybe not directly related note, what about throwing around words like fascist, nazi, tyranny – throw those around, and then you have no words left for the real McCoy.
You don’t have to believe me, because i’m still posting online anonymously, but i’m more obnoxious in real life than on the web. But i don’t run into the same sort of asswipes in real life either.
Actually, i don’t think i was clear enough in my post above. I cringed at seeing Louise Mensch called those words. But why do we seem to get more outraged by a law student wanting birth control pills being called that? Well, we know why of course, the law student isn’t a politician saying dumb things in the public eye. As much as Mensch deserves to be pilloried, not by those words.
What is a “pole smoker”?
Madame -
http://www.urbandictionary.com/
Oh.