Tuesday, May 27, 2008
They Call Us "Moonbats"
Atrios pointed me to this. I made the mistake of looking at the comments. Oy. The general sentiment that the New York Times is some sort of liberal mouthpiece for the Democratic Party is bad enough—are these people ignorant of the Times' relentless coverage of the Whitewater "scandal"? of what the Times did to Al Gore in 2000? of Judith Miller? of the Times' rush to embrace the abortive coup against (democratically elected) Hugo Chavez in 2002? of the Times' reliably neoliberal positions on trade and corporate power? of the presence of William Kristol, David Brooks, and Thomas "Suck On This" Friedman in the Times' editorial pages? of the Times' silence (shared with the rest of the corporate media) on the Winter Soldier II hearings? etc. etc. etc.—but read down a ways and it's kind of like that scene in Jaws where Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss cut open the belly of the shark on the pier and all kinds of sickening, half-digested crap comes pouring out: there are references to "jackass liberal demonRATS," for example, and a war opponent is referred to as a "pink pussy"—oops, sorry, forgot the capitalization, that's "Pink pussy"—and anyone who contests the claim that the NYT is a "leftist" paper is dismissed as a "snooty, skinny, post-modern, self-important, supercilious, Jon Stewart-wannabe ignoramus" (skinny? post-modern?), and, God help me, there are non-ironic references to "ChiComs" and to making the liberals sorry by having all the clever, productive people (such as the ones who spend hours typing semiliterate comments at mediabistro.com, presumably) "stop the engine of the world" by doing "an 'Atlas Shrugged'," which in less ranting hands might be a great name for a dance, now that I think about it.
Gah. Interestingly, though, even as they rave at the various liberal/Democratic/media/pacifist/socialist/communist/America-hating straw men that march perpetually through their minds, even the wingnuttiest of wingnuts in those comments seem desperate to distance themselves from George W. Bush. I guess I should take that as a small sign of hope.
