Just after Thanksgiving, or as I alternately call it, Manifest Destiny/Don’t Trust Whitey day, Rush Limbaugh suggests Indians should pay reparations because we introduced tobacco to the pilgrims.
You know, he’s got a point. A lot of people have been hurt by tobacco. Big business has been sued for genetically engineering it to make people smoke five packs a day. We should have told them we only smoke ritually on occasion in small amounts.
And they gave us so MUCH. They gave us those wonderful (pox infested) blankets, they showed us new (involuntary) hiking trails, gave us new land (which was worse than the old land they destroyed or took), alcohol(ics, thanks to the addictive and highly toxic nature and our unfamiliarity with booze), and just treated us so damn well and (had un)protected (non-consentual sex with) us. And to me, that means we owe them.
Rush, we’re so sorry you smoke cigars like you do. We’ll take the blame for oxycontin too. And, good friend that you are, if either should kill you, we totally accept responsibility. 100%, full stop.
How’s it feel to be a terrorist, Terry Jones? That’s the kind of tactic you’re using, threats against a religion or people, in this case to burn a holy book, if you don’t get what you want.
“If they don’t move the ground zero mosque I’m burning korans!” You’re attempting to strongarm someone and violate their first amendment rights because you feel your own supercede them. And it’s not even a mosque. It’s a community center with an open prayer space. OPEN. Any faith, any gender. That alone dictates it’s not a mosque. A mosque, much like any conservative or orthodox jewish temple, is SEGREGATED by sex.
In summary, die in a fire. I hope that if there is a God he starts it with a lightning bolt, but I think if there was one omnipotent deity he’d have struck down Glenn Beck by now, so instead I’ll just go with the fact you’re a terrible person in every sense of the word, and Jesus would hate you.
It turns out beyond being a major crazy player in the Tea Party doesn’t do it these days to get traffic. You have to manipulate the SEO too. I know, shocking, right?
Now it’s one thing, of course, to use normal meta tags. Only these aren’t meta tags. Mark Williams, writer of the “colored people letter to Lincoln” and leader in the Tea Party Express, has done the same thing you see on shady shady websites. Text hidden by Javascript or simply slapped down to size 1 font blended with the background, with clearly politically related text like “Buy Adobe CS4″, “Windows 7 Ultimate License”, and “Download Macromedia Software.” Yes, they’re sales/piratey terms, spamming up the page. BEFORE the actual content. Really. Header image, SEO bait, crazytext.
Naturally, Mark Williams has not responded to the questions about why he feels the need to do this, and why he doesn’t consider it unethical.
Edit:In the interest of fairness, I’m finding out if this was intentional, or if it was a hack. This could be someone attacking his site, him setting up an “I’m a victim of the liberals!” play, or a genuine attempt to get more traffic through deceptive keywords. But we’ll find out soon! Well, probably not, because I think the odds are a declaration of “It was an attack!” is assured, no matter what it was.
I don’t get too political here for the most part (though it’s not hard to guess I lean way left, by any means). I can usually just laugh at death panels and the other lies going around.
Today, thanks to a sign I just saw at the “tea party march” down DC way, I have to make a political post. And it’s going to have some seriously offensive content. Fortunately, some of these people are just stupid, like the one holding a sign covered in stars that said
“I am not a Terroist [sic], Socialist or Extreemist [sic]. I am a PATRIOT.”
Really, they did put in a lot of effort. A circle of stars, nice color work, just uh…well, not so much with the spelling. And right now I’m looking at someone walking with a “Fair Tax” flag (now that I could write plenty about later). He’s holding it backwards. And there’s signs saying “Who is John Galt?” from the objectivists who forget someone has to scrub the toilets, to quote Frank Fontaine. The standard implication Obama is a Nazi, via a sign saying “Got Swastika?” Most of the time, we can just be amused by these signs. And an interview with a woman who said “We have some people in talk radio that are tellin’ us the truth!”
This time, one sign really concerned me.
“Obama,
We have waken[sic] up to your evil plans to destroy our country. Take your racist, un-American *ACORN* group and arrogent[sic] wife back to your own country and strip their rights away.”
Now granted, there were plenty of insane signs as always, but something about this one just really gets my attention, probably the racist undercurrent combined with general Beckian (Comma Glennian) batshittery.
“We have waken[sic] up to your evil plans to destroy our country.”
Now honestly, I’ve never been a fan of say, GW. But I don’t remember people in such large, visible numbers declaring he had evil plans to destroy the country. Was he fucking up? Sure. Were members of his administration war profiteers? You bet. But did he have an “evil plan to destroy the country”? No, he really didn’t. He just was shitty at the job.
Now how in the world have people come to the conclusion Obama’s got active, malevolent intent? What would be the point, even, of actively destroying the US if he even had that ability?
I hear a lot of “take the country back.” From what? Who? I heard a claim of Obama’s secret government, and cries of socialism (and frankly, as someone who’s just fine with some socialism, we’re nowhere close to it anyway, seeing as the government doesn’t control any means of production).
Let’s just visit the next piece of the quote.
“Take your racist, un-American *ACORN* group and arrogent[sic] wife back to your own country and strip their rights away.”
Oh.
I guess that fits with the self-contradictory “Muslim Marxist” claim. Not that Marxism and religion match, or that Obama is Muslim. Or that ACORN is un-American, even. I’d dare say any group which gets more voters to the polls is pretty damn American on either side. But, since ACORN has a tendency to push minorities to the polls, they helped change the balance of power. And as for his arrogant wife and own country…well, if the scary black man really is from Kenya (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary), we can send him away! It’ll be okay, and take his wife too, she’s another negro. Obviously that means she’s not American, because if she was, she wouldn’t be getting uppity, because let’s face it, that’s the word they’re wanting to use.
Oh, and the whole of ACORN. We don’t need those darkies in the US either. I used to wonder why the hatred for an organization that encourages voting. I don’t now.
Just what rights have been stripped away, anyway? Over the last eight years old white conservative men have given us DHS, the PATRIOT act, warrant-less wire tapping, torture, and a suspension of habeus corpus. That was all under the watch of George W. Bush. Some of those programs have ended already, thus restoring our rights since President Obama’s election.
The nasty underbelly has shown itself, and it’s racism, plain and simple. From claims the president isn’t born in the US (A claim that people had the decency to leave alone when it came to John McCain, despite having been born to US parents in Panama because they understood a US parent makes him a natural born citizen), to that he’s a Muslim (fine if he is, we don’t have a religious test to hold office, but he’s not), to overtly racist propaganda.
This one came from Doctor David McKalip. A Tea Party activist, Beckian extraordinaire, and member of American Medical Association’s house of delegates. I’m sticking this one under a thumbnail because holy shit, it’s vitriolic, racist, and pretty damn shocking.
This is where we are as a nation. A group that’s had power for 30 years, effectively, has finally been totally put out of power and has shown its true colors. Ad hominem attack, overt racism, panic and lies.
When Barack got elected, I thought “wow, we really HAVE made it somewhere. Racism is still there, but I think it really might not be the problem it used to be.”
I was wrong.
Am I saying everyone against health care reform is racist? Absolutely not. Am I saying everyone who was against the stimulus package, or other policies from the administration is racist? Certainly not.
But it’s become very, very clear a large amount of the people fighting are, even in congress, where you can’t get most of the Republicans to say “Barack Obama is constitutionally eligible to be president” even. At best, they’re playing to an extremist base. At worst, they are that base, and this shit has to end. Now.
