There are horrible, awful, no-good people everywhere who are doing wretched things and making the world a worse place. Let’s catch up with a few of them.
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James O’Keefe, still lying for a living. The fraud was caught trying to make another video in which he pretends he’s someone he is not, in this case, he tried to commit election fraud to ‘prove’ it is a serious problem. It isn’t. Unsurprisingly, he was immediately caught trying to fake his identity in Michigan. This is a succinct summary of O’Keefe’s entire career.
“James O’Keefe is a professional liar,” Dickerson said. “He just isn’t very good at it.”
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Do you know of the all-time horrible person, Mike Cernovich? He’s an MRA and general Twitter troll, a conspiracy theorist and racist, and an advocate for rape. Not a nice guy at all. But he got invited to appear on a Fox News show called Red Eye, which prompted howls of outrage, not from lefty liberals, but from far right wingnuts who have their own reputation for looniness.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. He’s a nutcase,” said right-wing author and radio host Ben Shapiro. “Granting any legitimacy to a fringe kook like Mike Cernovich, and all of the attendant nastiness and problems, is close to insane by any cable network.”
“Are you serious?” asked Ben Howe, a writer and editor of the conservative blog RedState, when informed of Cernovich’s Fox News appearance. “He was a guest on fucking Red Eye? They’re giving this motherfucker legitimacy? Oh my god!”
Shapiro is a former editor at Breitbart, and fan of the Tea Party. When you’re so extreme that you’re getting repudiated by the likes of Shapiro and Howe, just say goodbye.
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And finally, of course, Donald Trump. Digby writes about the time he pointed his finger at a woman reporter, opened his mouth, and screamed…I mean, told a crowd of fans that she was a liar, and the Secret Service had to act to protect her from the mob.
He knows very well what he’s doing. He’s intimidating people, especially women, into going easy on him by threatening to sic his violent cretins on them. There was no other reason to publicly name her.
Pure, vicious demagoguery. Now he’s also primed his thugs in Pennsylvania by declaring that the only way he can lose that state is if there is cheating. This is unadulterated bullshit, of course; he’s currently substantially behind Clinton in the Pennsylvania polls. But you all know what fun we’re going to have the day after the election when Trump makes excuses for his defeat by telling his lackeys to riot.
Also, why is CNN calling Trump’s lie a “bombshell”? It’s not. It is just an open fabrication.
Additions to your list: fraudulent shill for the NRA and gun fondlers everywhere, John Lott is back, and tea party doctor Jane Orient is busy spreading the idea that Ms. Clinton is on death’s doorstep.
assnuggets — the cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast!
I run a polling place, so now I have to worry that some nutjob is gonna go all Second Amendment on us in November. Even in my sleepy little precinct there’s been the occasional paranoid wingnut lately (so far nobody we can’t convince we’re on the up and up); it’s urban (in both the literal sense, and the euphemistic sense of “largely black”), so that effect is gonna get worse.
Fuck you, Trump.
Kudos to the Secret Service.
Who also, I note and applaud, insured there were no guns at the thugs’s orgy and, so reports have it, had a talk
withat the trum-prat and members of teh eejit’s campaign about calling for assassination / insurrection.Fixed?
Isn’t it just adorable that Shapiro thinks appearing on Red Eye confers legitimacy?
re 6:
“legitimacy”, hmmm, when specifically defined to mean “given a louder voice”.
Giving this ape a voice on a national network broadcast, however ugly the show, still gives the ape a louder voice.
Which could be called “legitimacy”, even if not “legitimate” (either way).
ugh
in summary: Thanks Trump. for making asshats seem legitimate opinion, and Thanks CNN etc for giving (at no cost) Trump a voice to saturate us.
There don’t seem to be any entries for either James O’Keefe or Mike Cernovich at The Encyclopedia of American Loons, but there is for Ben Shapiro (Oct-2012):
I do not understand the reaction here of saying that so and so is crazy when they are clearly delusional and worse or they are just acting out , posing as it were, lying for political power which would make them evil.
the effect on society is bad either way.
uncle frogy
re 9:
I’ve seen memes on FB reminding people that calling Trump “c~~z~” denigrates people who actually suffer mental disorders, by association. Trump is simply an asshole. [implying, obviously, that neither are causal of the other]
I’ve assumed all along that “crazy” is often used simply as an insult, not a diagnosis. That ‘Cray’ is used to mean “the reason he holds that attitude is incomprehensible (to me)”.
ooooh, I see, it is an able-ist, arrogant, slur which is said to imply that the person using the slur is the gold standard of rationality.
What can’t be conveyed through alt-spelling is ‘tone of voice’ that can be used to emphasize what is really intended when using the cray word about someone.
Regardless. Drumph can hold whatever delusional views he wants. The problem is that so many people listen to him as leader and enabler of their own assholish attitudes and actions. yukk
PA voting machines were shit not long ago, likely rigged to help the GOP. I lost a vote to one. I haven’t read whether they’ve been fixed since; my guess is not.
I’ve been coding for over 40 years. I’m sure other programmers can verify that I could write a program to run a voting machine that would skew the vote any way you wanted and be virtually impossible to detect.
Cross posted from the Moments of Political Madness thread.
Donald Trump’s call for Republican voters to go around to all the precincts in Pennsylvania to keep Clinton supporters from committing voter fraud is against the law.
This is from a discussion of a consent decree that bars the Republican National Committee from engaging in activities like the ones Trump described. The discussion is from 2013:
Link
Here is an excerpt from the decree itself:
Here’s is just a part of Trump’s rant:
Trump is in love with the love he gets from his enthusiastic rally attendees. He thinks that his rallies are more indicative of his popularity than the polls, and more indicative of his popularity than what the vote count in Pennsylvania will turn out to be in November. He is delusional.
I’m not so sure Trump is delusional. Maybe he is,if you will, delusional like a fox. (You know what I mean) Clearly he is very narcissistic but he is intelligent and he may not think, as you say, ” that his rallies are more indicative of his popularity than the polls”. He may be trying to rouse his supporters to get out the vote for him. Also to have an explanation if he loses that doesn’t reflect badly on him. His recent bad behavior, which has resulted in a dive in the polls for him, may be a result of an inability to restrain himself, as many in the media have suggested. Whatever the case, these phenomena are very scary. Some of his followers are likely to do anything.
Off topic, what does OM MEAN in people’s names here. I’ve see it twice. Not the yoga chant surely?
hotspurphd:
I’ll dispute the claim that Trump is intelligent. Being a manipulative asshole with ulterior motives isn’t enough to qualify. I don’t know about delusional, but let’s just say that he’s not an especially lucid and well-informed thinker, and it lands him (or others) into a lot of trouble. He’s arrogant enough to think he’s intelligent and that “I have the best words” — that might count as delusional in my book, if there was any way to figure out what the fuck it means.
OM stands for “Order of Molly,” in honor of the writer Molly Ivins. It’s an order of some of the disorderly rabble around here, although some aren’t around anymore. It could be a mantra too, if you like. Way back when, people on pharyngula voted semi-regularly to recognize valued commenters, and some have attached it to their ‘nyms. I’ve thought about going with CROM, CROMulent or something that’s easy to type. But “CR” is short and people do use that, so I don’t bother.
I think “bombshell” is pretty apt. Indiscriminate. Uncaring. Loud. Ruins lives.
JoeBuddha@12: the machines that PA had, for sure. You need multiple checks and balances, a paper trail, reviews, etc, to avoid the problem.
PZ: The original report that Digby doesn’t link to is a good read: http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a21997/donald-trump-katy-tur/
slithey tove@10: It’s interesting how people can share words but not their meanings. To me, saying that “that person is crazy” (or “nuts”) is a short-hand for something like “that person’s opinions or behaviour make no sense to me and I don’t care to undergo the effort to try to understand them”. It doesn’t carry any implications of mental illness, substance abuse, or anything else (unlike claims that someone is “delusional” or is “smoking something”).
On the other hand, to me, “asshole” is a term that is only applied to men; the closest equivalents to be applied to women would be “b—h” or “c–t”. Literally speaking, it is a claim that the target is homosexual, which itself is implied to be bad. Do I still use the term? Yes, for lack of anything better (I generally avoid “b—h” since the people I tend to interact with object more strongly to that word). Do I actually mean that the target is homosexual or that that would be bad? No.
(Likewise, I see “douchebag” as a term to be mostly applied to men which literally means that the target is sexually submissive towards women. A rough equivalent to be applied to women is “jizzrag”, which I have seldom seen used as an insult.)
Also, making fun of someone’s name, which was not chosen by that person, is really no different than making fun of that person’s appearance, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or anything else that that person over which that person has little or no control. (It’s not like Trump changed his name to that in order to better stroke his ego; the family name change was made by an ancestor in or before the 19th century.) No matter how objectionable the target is, making fun of a person’s name is rude and reflects poorly on the speaker. To use a different objectionable term, it’s something that only an asshole would do.
fakeemailaddress #19
.
srsly?
Where are you from and what is your first language?
chigau@20: I’ve spent time in atlantic Canada, western Canada, and the northwestern US. My first language is English. I also have an unusual name, for which I caught a lot of grief during grade school.
To further elaborate on one of my above comments, the main failing in the use of “crazy” or “nuts” to describe someone is that the imply that that a failure on the part of the speaker is in fact a failure on the part of the target. But that’s no worse than any other insult of put-down; it’s essentially the definition of ad hominem.
#21, fakeemailaddress
Not long enough to pick up the meaning or usage of insults, it would appear.
anym@22: Congratulations, you know how to be insulting without referencing gender, ethnicity, or sexuality! Have a brown star. It’s scratch-n-sniff!
fakeemailaddress, I agree with you that making fun of someone’s name is shitty, but the rest of your comment is ridiculous.
No, asshole doesn’t “literally” mean homosexual. It means anus. It also doesn’t have a connotation of referring to homosexuality, except by the fairly tenuous link of the association of gay men with anal sex – which is a pretty stupid association, as gay men aren’t the only or even the majority of people having anal sex.
And no, “douchebag” doesn’t have any sort of connotation of sexual submissiveness that I’ve ever come across. Douches are not sexual. They are a misogynistic tool imposed on women by a sexist society, that actually harm women – which seems a pretty good analogy for sexist men.
I’d always understood that calling someone an arse or an arsehole implies they’re full of shit. Horse’s arse suggests ugly too, so I try to avoid it.
Douches seem to be more of a US thing; but they were always explained to me as something unneccesary, unpleasant, and unhealthy, but pushed on women by body-loathing and cultural pressure. I’ve met guys like that, and seen a lot of behaviours it describes very nicely.
I vote by mail, so precinct shenanigans won’t bother me, but I do worry about the actual polling locations. Maybe I should see what it takes to volunteer for a day.