About Tucson: Stupid people and crazy people may not know they are, but dishonest people sure do

According to today's Borowitz Report (see below), "Calls for a reduction in violent political rhetoric have plunged the Fox News Channel into chaos, with a Fox spokesperson warning today that such a move 'would leave us with 24 hours to fill.'”

by Ken

I thought Paul Krugman said what needed to be said about the political climate that made Tucson ineviteable very well indeed in the NYT column today, "Climate of Hate," from which Howie quoted extensively this morning. As a footnote, I'd like to quote this blog comment of Paul's entered before publication of the column:

I hated, hated, hated writing tomorrow’s column. Whatever people may imagine, I really dislike weighing in on purely political matters, and am far and away at my happiest translating economic analysis into hopefully understandable English. But nobody would read a piece about health-care accounting or eurozone adjustment problems if I put it out tomorrow, and there are some things I fear won’t be said if I don’t do it (just as there were during the runup to the Iraq War); so Arizona it is.

I don't have the excuse of preferring to write, as Dr. K, does about the subject that is his professional specialty. I just hate going up against the kooks and crooks (or Crooks & Liars as our colleague and friend John Amato has so famously dubbed them), because they're out in force today doing everything in their feeble-minded but fiercely brutish power to obfuscate and change the subject.

This is emphatically not a time for pulling back, or for allowing the usual right-wing lies to stand. Do we really need to point to more than the obsessively dishonest effort to "balance" the violent hate-mongering of bottom-feeding human trash like Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle with a comment by a commenter on DailyKos -- a comment that, at that, was absolutely, unequivocally, 100 percent lied about by the Compulsive Liars of the Right? (In misreading the comment that the conservative Democrat in question is now "dead to me," and that the commenter will do nothing further for the person's reelection, it is 100 percent clear that there is absolutely 0 percent possibility that no human being could possibly be so stupid as to make this misreading unintentionally. It is only possible if you are desperate to fabricate new lies to support your old ones.

It will be interesting to see (a) how forcefully and (b) how unequivocally the Compulsive Liars of the Right withdraw and apologize for their lying misrepresentation. My guess is that, since it was a deliberate rather than an innocent falsehood, and these people now feel divinely sanctioned to lie, the answers are: (a) not at all, and (b) not in the slightest. In fact, it seems to me inconceivable that the Compulsive Liars of the Right will even acknowledge having, well, once again lied compulsively. In fairness, if it's truly a compulsion to lie, perhaps they really can't help themselves.

I don't really buy that, though. As I tried to suggest in my post title, dishonesty isn't accidental. The liars know when they're lying. They just choose not to try to stop themselves.

I would argue, in fact, that the same is true of what the Right passes off, rather persuasively, as pervasive imbecility and insanity. Oh, there's no doubt that everything said by everyone on the Right at least since 2008 is grossly imbecilic and could once only have been said by people were, literally, clinically insane. The whole "birther" insanity has no explanation other than a total, and I mean total, derailment from the rails of sanity. There isn't the tiniest shred of it that could by the wildest leap of the imagination be defended as the product of a sanely functioning mind.

But the 21st-century American Right has chosen insanity as its dominant mode of reasoning, just as it has chosen imbecility as its preferred quality of intellect. Normal human beings simply don't come as sense-impaired as what comes every day out of the mouths of people like Rush Limbaugh and Paul Ryan and your average Teabagger. But it's really not that hard to disable your brain function so that any random firing of neurons is celebrated as "thought," and the manually disabled brain is never called upon to function according to the processes of sanity.

Maybe the most hopeful "defense" against the Tucson atrocity is the "lone crackpot" theory: that the poor soul is schizophrenic or whatever, and therefore it can't possibly have anything to do with the "climate of hate." First off, it was the Compulsive Liars of the Right who adopted both imbecility and insanity as their intellectual hallmarks. Sorry, peeps, but you thereby took ownership of the plague of mental defectiveness you unleashed on the country. For once, have the gumption to own up to your lying crackpottery.

And of course, the NYT's Unspeakable Gross Douchebag, in yet another masterpiece of lying Douchebaggery, insists, with his pseudohistorical recitation of historical assassinations, that the Tucson shooter is hermetically sealed off from the right-wing insanity swirling around him.

Of course it's only in the minds of gross right-wing douchebags that such tidy surgical excisions are possible. In the real world, not so much. But then, the Compulsive Liars of the Right never seem to visit the real world. However, did you notice that none of the people who now claim to have been alarmed by the future Tucson shooter's loony ravings troubled to do anything about it? Why? One possibility: because his loony ravings weren't easy to distinguish from the loony ravings they were hearing all over the place, including from candidates for the U.S. House (like, to pick a random example, Rep. Gabby Giffords' recent Teabagger opponent) and Senate, none of whom were being routinely described by the infotainment noozemedia as certfiably insane.

Naturally the Gross Douchebag promptly resorts to the Plague on Both Your Houses Defense. All you have to do is blithely declare, "Both sides do it." Of course in this case in particular it's a total, flagrant lie, but you can always get away with the phony-baloney mantra of "even-handedness," and if there's anything the Compulsive Liars of the Right know about, it's the kinds of lies you can most easily get away with. "Broderizing," I believe the process is called.

And if you need another way to appreciate the spectacular dishonesty that the Right in its desperation is currently engaged in, just play another round of our favorite old game: If the Shoe Was on the Other Foot. Just imagine if the ideological bents ran the other way, if it was a centrist Republican who was at the center of a murderous rampage by a lone crackpot who turned out to be a schizophrenic (let's concede that for the moment, for the sake of argument) spewing leftist rhetoric. How quick do you suppose the Compulsive Liars of the Right would be to exonerate what they would claim is inflamatory left-wing rhetoric? How loud would the calls for even-handedness be?

I think we all know the answer, even the Gross Douchebag. But that's the thing about the Compulsive Liars of the Right: They not only have permission but a veritable mandate from their God to lie their putrid guts out. It's who, and what, they are.

Terroritsts and murderers.

BOROWITZ REPORT
JANUARY 10, 2011

Fox News Warns That Without Angry Rhetoric It Will Have 24 Hours to Fill
Would Create ‘Giant Hole’ in Program Schedule

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) – Calls for a reduction in violent political rhetoric have plunged the Fox News Channel into chaos, with a Fox spokesperson warning today that such a move “would leave us with 24 hours to fill.”

“Let’s not underestimate the giant hole this would create,” said spokesperson Carol Foyler. “Fox without violent rhetoric would be like The Weather Channel without maps.”

Ms. Foyler said Fox was preparing for a “worst-case scenario” in which it was pressured to air responsible statements in place of its current programming: “If it comes to that, God forbid, we’ll just air 24 hours of ‘24’.”

In contrast with Ms. Foyler’s alarmed comments, Fox host Glenn Beck took the news of a possible programming change in stride: “If I’m kicked off the air, I’ll return to my first love: standing in the back of crowded theaters and yelling, ‘Fire.’”

But Fox commentator Sarah Palin was less enthusiastic about the new call for tempered rhetoric: “For the first time in my life I don’t have anything to write on my hand.”

NOTE: IAN WELSH'S TAKE

Ian has a great post up on "Why the right wing isn’t going to stop violent rhetoric." Perhaps we'll come back to it tomorrow.

#