Lie With Dogs, Rise With Fleas

Not quite an hour ago, The Huffington Post ran an AP story that begins thus:

A flower company is the seventh advertiser to pull its ads from conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh’s radio program in reaction to his derogatory comments about a law student who testified about birth control policy.

ProFlowers said Sunday on its Facebook page that it has suspended advertising on Limbaugh’s program because his comments about Georgetown University student Sandra Fluke “went beyond political discourse to a personal attack and do not reflect our values as a company. ”

The six other advertisers that say they have pulled ads from his show are mortgage lender Quicken Loans, mattress retailers Sleep Train and Sleep Number, software maker Citrix Systems Inc., online data backup service provider Carbonite and online legal document services company LegalZoom.

ProFlowers had said on Twitter that posts it received about Limbaugh’s remarks affected its advertising strategy. ProFlowers is an online flower delivery service.

(Read the entire article here.)

Interestingly, just moments before I came upon that article, I found this in my e-mail, from ProFlowers Customer Care, in response, I assume, to one of the petitions I had signed in the previous couple of days:

Thank you for your feedback. We spend our advertising dollars across a wide spectrum of media channels. The views and opinions of the media outlets and personalities we advertise with are not necessarily those of our company.

 

We simply wish to delight our customers with fresh and unique gifting products, and that will continue to happen to the best of our abilities.

 

Best Regards,

Yolanda D. 

Customer Care 

ProFlowers

It’s interesting to note that ProFlowers’ e-mail, which apparently was sent late last night (Saturday, March 3), has all of the familiar signs of a kiss-off: Oh, we advertise all over the place and don’t really pay any attention to any of it. We don’t know or care what’s being said in the media we support with our advertising dollars. We just like flowers!

Sometime between last night and this afternoon, it seems, someone at ProFlowers woke up to the fact that it really does matter where they advertise, it really does matter when they spend money to support odious, hate-filled rhetoric, it really true that we’re known by the company we keep. (Mom was right.)

Points for wising up, albeit late. Kudos to those advertisers who pulled their dollars away early on, though, rather than waiting till they got both eyes blackened.

It would be nice to think that Limbaugh has at last come to his Lonesome Rhodes moment, though I am too much the pessimist to really believe it. But perhaps some people, like ProFlowers, will now belatedly come to see what a truly hateful and hate-filled little man he is.

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Reading Materials

I composed this as e-mail to my friend Jerry, with the warning that he should expect it to show up here at some point.

He replied, "Blog, hell, you should submit the piece to the National Review."

Nevertheless, here it is. If you're with the National Review, we can discuss reprint rights.

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Now, this is interesting: "O'Reilly, Savage, Hannity on accused church shooter's reading list" (see below), the gist of which is that the guy who shot up a UUC children's program in Tennessee had in his personal library such classics as "Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder by radio talk show host Michael Savage, Let Freedom Ring by talk show host Sean Hannity, and The O'Reilly Factor, by television talk show host Bill O'Reilly."

Adkisson targeted the church, Still [Bad editing on the part of TRS: "Still" is a Knoxville cop who is never ID'd in the story] wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10, "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets."

[The complete article is here]

Now, I put it to you this way: From time to time, you may have noticed, our right-wingnut friends will get all frothy on the subject of pornography (which they know when they see it). Despite any number of studies which might cause thinking people to question the existence of any causal link between the consumption of pornography and the commission of crimes, sexual or otherwise (and indeed I've read of studies that seem to indicate such misdeeds occur in greater frequency at times and in places where pornography has been tightly censored), our right-wingnut chums know--with that deep and unshakable and frighteningly single-mindedness which only they can master--that pornography will compel its consumer to act out that which he sees on the page or the screen.

After all, they will and have argued, there is agreement that people are positively influenced by "good" material like the Bible and other inspirational or motivational works. It is, then, only logical that they would be negatively influenced by "bad" material.

(I know plenty of people who have vast libraries of "Christian" books, CDs, DVDs, and bumper-stickers and who are, in practice, shits, which tends to belie the idea that reading/viewing/listening = behavior, but let's leave that for another time.)

So if we accept the "logic" expressed by the right-wingnuts who are on the prowl for every opportunity to scuttle the First Amendment, then we have to conclude that the works of Savage, Hannity, O'Reilly, et al., must be suppressed!

They are, after all, slanderous hatemongering tracts, which have, demonstrably, incited violence.

This sort of mentality--"they" are all bad; "they" are responsible for everything that has gone wrong; "they" are ruining "our" country; it's "us" against "them"--sounds dangerously familiar, does it not? Just replace the word liberals with the word Jews.

We would not, as a society, tolerate the mass production of books, television programs, radio broadcasts, and websites that suggest that Jews are responsible for everything bad in the world, Judaism is a mental disorder, Jews are godless sub-humans who need to be wiped out by any means. (Such things exist in the shadows, of course, but not on the bestseller lists.) Why would we not so tolerate? Because of the fear that such incendiary hatemongering might lead the mentally imbalanced to conclude that they must "do something"--burn something, blow something up, kill someone--in order to "solve" the "problem."

Well, golly...look what's happened in Tennessee.

The phrase "accessories before the fact" keeps percolating to mind...

Look for this to show up on the blog sooner or later...

Conservatives' Hatred

Note that that's Conservatives' with an apostrophe on the end, making it possessive, 'cause the question is about their bottomless and abiding hatred for certain people, a hatred that burns with a cold and permanent flame.

I appreciate the irony of such people, who spend a lot of time crowing about what fabulous "Christians" they are and insisting that they represent family values and moral superiority and blah-blah-blah, being stuck in permanent-hate mode, contrary to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, whom they purport to think highly of, but that's neither here nor there.

The springboard for my musings is the would-be-comical-if-it-weren't-so-dangerous outpouring of bile and vitriol from right-wingnuts in the wake of Al Gore's winning the Nobel Prize. I commented the other day on the by-now-typical ramping up of the Conservative Smear Machine to not only hurl mud in the direction of the former vice-president but also, and mainly, to try to discredit the Nobel Prize itself. Imagine! You take an organization that for decades has been honored and revered for promoting peace (and science and literature and all that other crap) by itself recognizing people and institutions that are, you know, trying to help people...and you denigrate and ridicule and smear it when they honor the contribution of someone you don't like.

Rather, someone you hate.

What is this--junior high?

In the course of it, you (via your mouthpiece, Faux News) also take advantage of the opportunity to smear a former President of the United States and Nobel Prize recipient as "that crazy Jimmy Carter," which shows great depth of character and carefully reasoned political analysis.

(An aside: This summer, at one of my kids' events, I overheard another dad complaining to his teenager about Al Franken. He was feigning disgust over Franken's having written a book called Rush Limbaugh Is an Idiot, and pretending to be morally outraged that Franken (read: a liberal) would say something so hurtful about another human being (read: a conservative), and generally indicating that that proved liberals were evil and conservatives were high-road victims. I was tempted to turn around and point out two things: First, the title of the book is Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (and Other Political Observations); and, second, that Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot. But I resisted the urge, remembering the advice of my father: "Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.")

Where was I? Oh, yes--morally superior "Christians'" hatred for, well, all kinds of people.

A year or so ago when Emilio Estevez's film Bobby was in release, my wife mentioned in conversation to a friend that she would like to see it. "Not me," the friend snapped. "Those Kennedys are a completely corrupt family." Yikes! Not "I never liked that Bobby Kennedy" or "I think Bobby Kennedy was a phony"; nope the whole family gets tarred as "corrupt."

And why? See, that's what I keep puzzling over--not that right-wingnut "Christians" carry these bucketloads of hatred and venom with them everywhere they go--but why they hate so much, and so deeply, and so widely, and so everlastingly.

They hate FDR. They hate JFK, of course, and RFK, and, apparently, the whole famn-damily, including, I presume, Kennedys who haven't even been born yet. They hate Clinton, both Clintons, all three Clintons (and I recall some truly repugnant things a certain Big Fat Idiot had to say about then-teenager Chelsea Clinton back in the day--a warm-up, apparently, for the right-wingnut "Christians'" current smear campaign against a twelve-year-old kid). Apparently they've begun to hate Jimmy Carter.

And they hate Al Gore like you wouldn't believe.

I've always suspected there was a certain element of jealousy at play, coupled with a subconscious, even subliminal suspicion that the object of vitriol might, just might, have a few things right and thus is to be reviled all the more. Jonathan Chait, writing in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, has a good handle on the Gore thing:

You might wonder why they care so much -- Gore, after all, is obviously not going to run for president, and even some conservatives now concede that global warming is real. The answer is that Gore's triumph is a measure of George W. Bush's disrepute.

Ah, yes--a certain element of jealousy, as I had always suspected. But Chait does an excellent job of measuring conservatives' hatred of Gore against the obvious failure of their darling, George W. Bush:

It's not an accident that the current celebrations of Gore come at a time when Bush's popularity has cratered. Once conservatives mocked Gore as the radical tribune of a tiny political fringe; now it is they who represent the fringe.

Their argument with Gore over global warming is a telling indicator of their weakened position. Suddenly, open debate looks better than absolute clarity. Steven F. Hayward, a global warming skeptic at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, sniffed: "The Nobel will be one more quiver in Gore's arsenal of intransigent moral authority by which he refuses to debate any aspect of the subject and declares the entire matter 'settled.' It's never a good sign when politicians declare a scientific matter settled; we all remember how well that worked out for the Vatican when they told Galileo 400 years ago that astronomy was settled."

So Gore can't declare that any scientific matter is settled? (What about the Earth revolves around the sun -- would that offend conservatives?) Funny what happens when it's your views that are out of the mainstream.

The defensiveness of Gore's critics comes because he is the ultimate rebuke to Bush. Gore, obviously, is the great historic counter-factual, the man who would have been president if Florida had a functioning ballot system. More than that, he is the anti-Bush. He is intellectual and introverted, while Bush is simplistic and backslapping.

Read the whole editorial here.

Of course, Chait's essay still leaves me with the question of why these morally superior "Christians" hate so many other people (see above in re). But I suspect the answers are probably much the same--they hate Clinton and Carter and everyone with the name Kennedy and FDR and probably Fala, too, because they have some vague inkling, some uncomfortable twinge in the brain-stem, that reminds them that maybe, just maybe someone from the "wrong" side of the spectrum has something of value to contribute, has something helpful to say, has an idea that might be--gulp!--right.

And that threatens them. In their small-minded, fear-driven world, everything is and must always be black or white, right or wrong, yes or no. There can be no ambiguities, no compromise: that makes things gray and gray is scary. And so if you disagree with them--even if you're only twelve years old--then you're the devil and must be destroyed at all costs.

This, I think, is part of the reason you don't detect this kind of hatemongering on the left end of the political spectrum. It's fair to say that we lefties have certain individuals whom we love to hate--the current tenant on Pennsylvania Avenue being one of them; Karl Rove, Ken Starr, Richard Nixon being a few others--but our list is pretty short, and pretty narrow (we might have hated Nixon, for instance, but we didn't extend that to Pat and Tricia and Julie, branding the whole clan as "corrupt"), and awfully watery (we may have hated Nixon at the time, but by his death it had degenerated into a strong dislike; certainly none of us will be ranting about him 40 years after his demise, and right-wingnuts continue to do about JFK).

So our brand of "hatred" is pretty thin compared to our morally superior family-values "Christian" friends on the right.

And--hmmm--we liberals tend not to go around trumpeting what swell "Christians" we are, either--even those of us who actually believe in God and try to follow Jesus' teachings and go to church and so on (and, yes, we do exist, as do conservative atheists). Interesting, no? Stay tuned for a future musing on my observations on that score, tentatively titled, "Dear Jesus, Save Us from Your Followers."

Take THAT, You Scoundrel!

Last week I got this e-mail, ostensibly from Senator Harry Reid, via the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (whose motto is Send Us Money-- oh, no wait, it's Committed to Electing a Democratic Senate. Sorry. The constant click-here-to-send-us-more-money-to-make-TV-ads-that-no-one-watches links threw me):

Subject: Rush Limbaugh

Dear William,

I normally ignore Rush Limbaugh, but his comments last Wednesday went too far for me to remain silent. It's one thing to call me "Dingy Harry" - it's another to insult our men and women in uniform, calling those who oppose the war "phony soldiers" as Rush did during his Sept. 26 broadcast.

Of course, Rush continued his tirade Monday by denying he had said anything wrong and attacking John Murtha, who served 37 years in the Marines.

This week, 41 Democrats signed a letter to Clear Channel CEO Mark Mays, demanding that Rush apologize.

You can send your own letter to Mays by clicking here.

In December 2006, a poll run by the Military Times found that only 35 percent of service members approved of President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq. Would Rush consider every other Soldier, Sailor, Airman and Marine to be phony? What about General John Batiste who retired from active duty in order to speak out against this war?

Rush has the courage to sit behind a microphone and lash out at those who oppose George Bush's misadventure in Iraq - yet when it was his time to serve, he received a deferment and has never worn a uniform.

Limbaugh's show is broadcast on Armed Forces Radio, and therefore service members around the world heard his insults. It's time for Clear Channel to make Rush apologize.

Demand that Clear Channel CEO Mark Mays take action by clicking here. Rush certainly has the right to say whatever he wants - but we have an obligation to speak out when he goes too far.

Thank you,

Harry Reid

Wow. Pretty hard-hitting stuff, huh? I mean, all these Democratic Senators ganging up on the poor defenseless CEO of Clear Channel and--gulp!--demanding an apology! Jeepers. And then, their bloodlust running high, they further demand he make Limbaugh apologize too! It's almost hard to watch, isn't it? Have these Senators no mercy? Can't they find it in their hearts to let these poor schmucks up off the mat?

Well, look, I like an insincere apology as much as the next guy, but I'd really much rather see the Democrats in Congress try, you know, doing something for a change, and so I sent the following reply to Senator Reid, or whoever actually reads these things, if in fact anyone does:

Dear Senator Reid,

I would rather see the Democrats in the Senate put their weight behind taking Limbaugh off of Armed Forces Radio. For years now I have listened to conservatives complain about being "forced" to contribute, via taxes, to the National Endowment for the Arts, which sometimes has funded projects and artists they consider "offensive." Well, I consider the poisonous, hatemongering lies spewed by Rush Limbaugh to be "offensive," and, borrowing from our conservative friends' playbook, I'm annoyed that my tax dollars are being used to support his insults against American soldiers.

I encourage you and the other Democratic members of Congress to, instead of trying to wring empty apologies out of corporate toadies, cut to the heart of things and do something about Limbaugh, namely, kick him off of Armed Forces Radio.

Sincerely,
William J Reynolds

Of course, any such saber-rattling on the part of the Democrats in Congress would produce exactly the same effect as all their saber-rattling over the war in Iraq, the president's various abuses of power, the torture of political prisoners, the vetoing of SCHIP, etc.--viz., nothing at all--but at least it's a higher level of saber-rattling, no? Demanding apologies...good grief. Apologize or what--a duel? Get real.

Anyhow, no word yet from the DSCC or Senator Reid. Any minute now, though, I'm sure.