Ugh. Then again, knowing some of the people who have written opinion pieces for my alma mater's newspaper in the past, this may just be a form of trolling. It's hard to tell, though.
Nope. He runs the conservative/libertarian paper.
Ah... Yeah... They've had that since I was there too. On the flip side, there also was the Socialist Worker paper. There are wackos of all stripes down in Providence.
The right has Limbaugh and the left has Stewart. Both of them showed skewed realities to their viewers. The thing with Stewart is that he is often the only one asking the hard questions and I wonder how much of his audience knows when he is being serious from when he is not.
Well, comparing Limbaugh to Stewart, I honestly think that Stewart is a far better representation of reality. It's sad when comedians have to ask the hard stuff because our politicians won't. Stewart has been booed for criticizing Obama. I dunno if Limbaugh has had a similar experience.
I think Bill Maher is still too reality based to be an anti-Limbaugh. With Michael Moore you may be onto something.
What's getting under my skin is how the Right is yelling about facts, fact checking, economic experience, knowledge based solutions, etc etc but then claiming all those things support Republican policy. Is it all just complete bullshit? I think it is, but now I'm getting nervous. :-)
Yeah, if you're looking for the left equivalent of "scream and lie," I don't think Stewart's your best bet. Michael Moore is, lying or not, incredibly loud and obnoxious, so there's that.
I remember the days when, to calculate my federal tax refund, all I had to do was look at my final paystub for the year in the "federal taxes withheld" column.
Olbermann was the closest the left ever got to Limbaugh. It's pretty hard to find someone that fat, crazy, and addicted to Oxycontin who is not right-wing, but goddamn it, we tried.
I wouldn't worry, it's a difference of perspective, my dad is hyper focused on the deficit and Foreign policy for example, so no end of arguments about how Austerity measure in a weak economy will do more harm then good will get through to him. He's unwilling to meet halfway and views everyone who doesn't have the same level of single minded concern as betraying the country and it's future. Pretty much it's a black and white mindset of the ideological right and left, where the left pretty much ignores it's fringe left, for some reason the right decided to embrace it. As for reactions after the election, it's just the normal butthurt of the party who didn't end up kicking out an incumbent they viewed as "evil" The left has this trouble in 2004 and the right is feeling it in 2012.
Stewart is a comedian. Never forget that. He doesn't attempt to pass himself off as a "legitimate" journalist/pundit. Moore is just an advocate. Olbermann is the better comparison.
Now, if Michael Moore ran "Crossfire," I'd agree with the comparison.
Yeah, if you're looking for the left equivalent of "scream and lie," I don't think Stewart's your best bet. Michael Moore is, lying or not, incredibly loud and obnoxious, so there's that.
I wouldn't say Lying exactly - well, most of the time, he's far from clean when it comes to telling outright lies - but it's the hypocrisy, the bending and colouring of the truth, and presenting facts with a context that he chooses to tell the story he wants it to tell, without that story necessarily being the whole truth, or the actual situation.
Now, if Michael Moore ran "Crossfire," I'd agree with the comparison.
I disagree. Moore is a filmmaker, that's true, but I think it's more about the way he operates, and what they're trying to do with their audience, ie, trying to push them into thinking a particular way using similar techniques.
President Barack Obama was not re-elected by people who want to "take." The president was re-elected by people who want to work -- and who were convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the president's policies were more likely to create work than were the policies advocated by my party.
The United States did not vote for socialism. It could not do so, because neither party offers socialism. Both parties champion a free enterprise economy cushioned by a certain amount of social insurance. The Democrats (mostly) want more social insurance, the Republicans want less. National politics is a contest to move the line of scrimmage, in a game where there's no such thing as a forward pass, only a straight charge ahead at the defensive line. To gain three yards is a big play.
I think Ed Schultz who runs "The Ed Show" on MSNBC is the closest the left has to a Rush Limbaugh, at least from the limited exposure I have had to Schultz. Olbermann is more the left's pendent to O'Reilly. Schultz and Limbaugh are a bit more crass.
So, I found myself in a conversation with an older Republican gentleman yesterday, and he said something kind of weird. Apparently there's a line about "13 impeachable offenses" that Obama has supposedly committed. This is the first I'm hearing about it, and unfortunately he couldn't give me any specifics about them.
I believe he's referring to this (or possibly this), but I can't find information on it anywhere besides crazy-rightwing blogs (no snopes, politifact, etc). What's the deal here?
It's the latter. It's stupid and crazy, and all of these things are just ludicrous idiocy that are not actually impeachable offenses, it's just "Thirteen things I don't like, which may or may not be completely made up, with the language made to sound smart and pretty."
It's just conspiracy theory nonsense, utter delusional wankery. If even ONE of those was actually an impeachable offense, the republican party would be all over it, not a bunch of infowars freemen whackjobs.
Not to mention, these people are kinda absolute fuckholes. "Oh, the president stopped Arizona from enforcing national immigration law!" Bullshit, you whiny, racist shitsack, what he stopped Arizona from doing was enforcing what amounted to "Whites only" laws.
God damnit. I try to be a nice person and not really let things like this get under my skin, and I try to just let Republicans' whining and whatever go unanswered.. but holy fuck. This fucker has the audacity to implicate God in his greed and sloth. Instead of taking the time to understand a changing energy infrastructure need and attempt to make his company more agile to be better equipped to face the next energy need.. instead he is focusing on the fact that his guy lost and is letting Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and the 700 Club dictate his opinions about society.
Fuck him, and fuck his dragging of religion into his abysmal pits of a soul.
Also, as an aside, I listened to a good part of Limbaugh's broadcast after the election, where he was lambasting the left for attempting to villify him. Holy crap, that man cannot understand irony in the slightest.
Why do we hate Limbaugh so much? According to him, it has to be that we simply want to hate him and Republicans because we simply want to hate him. It's not the fact that he's spent the past several years being a sexist pig who spouts thoughtless platitudes to masses of willing rubes. That sack of human shit needs to be off the air. Maybe then we'll actually see some significant dialog in Washington, that isn't just "I am right and you are bad."
I really want to think that Republicans just believe differently than me, but I'm having a really hard time actually accepting that. I mean, I genuinely want to like people, but holy fuck. Republicans make it hard to love them. They pushed forward several candidates in the Primary (Where they didn't have to moderate themselves to try to appeal to me, hence providing an interesting view into their thoughts and opinions) who thought that some people (gays) were seriously second class citizens and don't deserve equal protection under the law. Then they ran a guy for president who honestly thought that a significant percentage of Americans (maybe not 47% but a significant percentage) were lazy and JUST want hand outs rather than help up.
There is now "speculation" that the White House knew about the Petraeus affair and essentially black mailed Petraeus into following the "it was a YouTube video" line before Congress.
I find this very hard to believe. Blackmailing a CIA director is a far more damaging action to a reelection campaign than what happened in Libya.
"I don’t usually buy into right wing conspiracy theories, but it’s obvious Petraeus started an affair a year ago so he wouldn’t have to testify about Benghazi."
"I don’t usually buy into right wing conspiracy theories, but it’s obvious Petraeus started an affair a year ago so he wouldn’t have to testify about Benghazi."
Andy Borowitz.
This. This is what makes it impossible for me to trust someone. "I don't buy into conspiracy theories, but I'm going to support this outlandish objectively stupid idea because it feels right.".
Oh wait, I thought that quote was being sarcastic.
It may be but too often these sorts of false correlations end up being believed to be true and valid counters to arguments. All false logic should be called out for what it is.
Comments
What's getting under my skin is how the Right is yelling about facts, fact checking, economic experience, knowledge based solutions, etc etc but then claiming all those things support Republican policy. Is it all just complete bullshit? I think it is, but now I'm getting nervous. :-)
Now, if Michael Moore ran "Crossfire," I'd agree with the comparison.
I believe he's referring to this (or possibly this), but I can't find information on it anywhere besides crazy-rightwing blogs (no snopes, politifact, etc). What's the deal here?
It's just conspiracy theory nonsense, utter delusional wankery. If even ONE of those was actually an impeachable offense, the republican party would be all over it, not a bunch of infowars freemen whackjobs.
Not to mention, these people are kinda absolute fuckholes. "Oh, the president stopped Arizona from enforcing national immigration law!" Bullshit, you whiny, racist shitsack, what he stopped Arizona from doing was enforcing what amounted to "Whites only" laws.
Fuck him, and fuck his dragging of religion into his abysmal pits of a soul.
Also, as an aside, I listened to a good part of Limbaugh's broadcast after the election, where he was lambasting the left for attempting to villify him. Holy crap, that man cannot understand irony in the slightest.
Why do we hate Limbaugh so much? According to him, it has to be that we simply want to hate him and Republicans because we simply want to hate him. It's not the fact that he's spent the past several years being a sexist pig who spouts thoughtless platitudes to masses of willing rubes. That sack of human shit needs to be off the air. Maybe then we'll actually see some significant dialog in Washington, that isn't just "I am right and you are bad."
I really want to think that Republicans just believe differently than me, but I'm having a really hard time actually accepting that. I mean, I genuinely want to like people, but holy fuck. Republicans make it hard to love them. They pushed forward several candidates in the Primary (Where they didn't have to moderate themselves to try to appeal to me, hence providing an interesting view into their thoughts and opinions) who thought that some people (gays) were seriously second class citizens and don't deserve equal protection under the law. Then they ran a guy for president who honestly thought that a significant percentage of Americans (maybe not 47% but a significant percentage) were lazy and JUST want hand outs rather than help up.
I find this very hard to believe. Blackmailing a CIA director is a far more damaging action to a reelection campaign than what happened in Libya.
Andy Borowitz.
Says something about us that we can't tell parody from reality anymore.