This article by Glenn Greenwald expresses quite articulately what the Republican Party is all about these days. There was a time when it meant something else (I'd love to see a party devoted to limited government and fiscal restraint, which Bush/Cheney and their rubber-stamp Congress absolutely destroyed) but those days are gone. The heart of Republicanism is Ann Coulter. It is disgusting. And Glenn exposes one of their primary rhetorical devises, one that is mind-bogglingly effective - which is to express outrage at superficial things from liberals while the core of their conservative identities are infinitely more disturbing. "Hypocrisy" doesn't even begin to do it justice.
Glenn's article refers to a few "scandals" that you may or may not be aware of, so I'll quickly sum up. The first is that Edwards hired a pair of bloggers for his campaign who in their own blogging prior to their hiring had said "controversial" things. Some conservatives raised a stink about how they had used bad words (the horror!! bloggers using naughty words!!) and the media actually covered it as some kind of Edwards scandal. That story was dying down when suddenly the President of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue raises a stink about how those bloggers were "anti-Catholic" and hateful and vulgar and somehow the story got new life again, in spite of the raving hypocrisy of Donohue (who has said some of the most hateful and disgusting and religiously-bigoted things you can imagine). The other "scandal" he mentioned is that various conservative voices raised a huge fuss about how a few anonymous commenters on liberal blogs (meaning literally anyone in the world could have anonymously posted a comment, not that the author of the blog said it) expressed regrets that Cheney hadn't died in the recent attack on the base where he was staying. Meanwhile prominent, mainstream voices (not random internet people who could be literally anyone and certainly weren't prominent figures) like Coulter and Limbaugh routinely spew the most vile and bigoted stuff imaginable.
In case there was any doubt, major media is silent on Coulter's garbage.
1 comment:
I heard about Coulter calling Edwards a "faggot" on, oddly, Meet The Press. I was also blown away that this wasn't a big news story, but then again, I'm not surprised. I can't figure out whether no one expects anything better of her or whether no one expects anything better of Republicans right now.
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