Five Before Chaos

There’s a good bit over at Big Evil Orange that takes a look at the claims floating around about how many attended the Gathering of the Pasty, Privileged and Dumb in DC last weekend. Seems the 87,000 number  floating around is a helluva lot more accurate than the corpsefucking Glenn Beck’s numbers of a half million, which he probably got beamed to him from that crazy planet the Mormons believe in.

To recap:

* CBS low-end (78k): 13 sq. ft. per person
* CBS high-end (96k): 10 sq. ft. per person
* Beck low-end (300k): 3.3 sq. ft. per person
* Beck high-end (600k): 1.7 sq. ft. per person

What would those numbers mean in real life? Let’s look at it a couple of different ways. First, let’s assume each person was was in standing in the middle of a perfect square and that nobody else was inside of their square. What would the dimensions be of each person’s square?

* CBS low-end (78k): 43 inches by 43 inches
* CBS high-end (96k): 38 inches by 38 inches
* Beck low-end (300k): 22 inches by 22 inches
* Beck high-end (600k): 16 inches by 16 inches

Now let’s translate this to something most of us have experience with: airline seats. An airline seat is typically about 19 inches wide and there’s about 31 or 32 inches between each row. Roughly, that’s about 600 square inches or 4 square feet. So given that, how much area, in terms of airline seats, was the average person occupying according to these estimates?

* CBS low-end (78k): 3.1 airline seats of area per person
* CBS high-end (96k): 2.4 airline seats of area per person
* Beck low-end (300k): 0.8 airline seats of area per person
* Beck high-end (600k): 0.4 airline seats of area per person

I fully expect this to be rejected by any and all teabaggers because a) it’s at a liberal blog, so it couldn’t possibly be true, and b) it has actual statistics, numbers and evidence to back up its claims, which are anathema to teabaggers. Remember, Reagan said “Facts are stupid things.” Evidence and proof are elitist, dontcha know? Fuzzy math!! Reality is really only what the crazy voice in their heads (or on FOX news) sez it is. Anything else is soshalizm.

… for giving 87,000 morons something to do yesterday. I guess there wasn’t anything good on the teevee and there were no big sales at Wal-mart that day.

I’m increasingly convinced now that one of the favorite pastimes of the right is necrophilia. But not just necrophilia… it’s necrophiliac sodomy. Conservatives love to sodomize the corpse of Ronald Reagan ad nauseum, and by all accounts, yesterday Beck gleefully and repeatedly sodomized the corpse of MLK, Jr., as the pasty white masses gathered on the National Mall to, get this, “take back” the civil rights movement from all those gays, blacks and others who were really just using the civil rights movement as an excuse to take jobs from straight white men and in some cases, have sex with their women.

Ever consistent, the Teabaggers who showed up (as they are all part of Glenn Beck’s Dumbfuck Nation®) didn’t seem to cry “censorship” when they were asked to leave their “Obama is an Islamofascisocialist” signs home, and gladly curtailed their freedom of speech for Mr. Beck. It’s not surprising, as as much as they fetishize the Constitution, few of ‘em have actually read it, let alone understand it. Nevertheless, some had no problem expressing themeselves, whether it be through the wearing of super-tacky (dare I say “drag-queenesque”) Chinese-made “patriotic” attire, or in the case of this fine upstanding citizen, simple t-shirts (h/t Gawker):

Keeping with the teabagger theme, I never said it was coherent. Is “Mauitania” some sort of Hawaiian breakaway republic?  But is anything they do coherent? It was funny. Not ha-ha funny, more like the “funny” you feel after you’ve eaten some bad clams or something. As C&L points out in this great bit, Glenn Beck really does remind us of the Civil Rights Era — that is, the people who hated Martin Luther King.

August, as usual seems to be Celebrate Dumb America® month.  A few more bits for you on America’s latest poutrage:

This is an affront to Christians, 9-11 families that eat, New Yorkers oh, whoever the fuck is whining about all this stuff:

One thing I haven’t seen anyone write about is the presence of Muslim food carts MUCH closer to Ground Zero. There are at least two, depending on the time of day, along West Broadway between Vesey and Park Place. One is practically on top of the Ground Zero construction site, outside the Path station. Aren’t they an “affront,” a “provocation”? Muslims engaging in in-your-face commerce on sacred ground, with the word HALAL prominently displayed on their carts! Where’s Palin when we need her??

You’ll rarely hear me agreeing with Ron Paul, but he’s right on this one:

Is the controversy over building a mosque near ground zero a grand distraction or a grand opportunity? Or is it, once again, grandiose demagoguery?

Just think of what might (not) have happened if the whole issue had been ignored and the national debate stuck with war, peace, and prosperity. There certainly would have been a lot less emotionalism on both sides. The fact that so much attention has been given the mosque debate, raises the question of just why and driven by whom?

In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it.

They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill conceived preventative wars. A select quote from soldiers from in Afghanistan and Iraq expressing concern over the mosque is pure propaganda and an affront to their bravery and sacrifice.

And the AP gets it right, too (that gawdam librul media – slurp… droool… ack!):

The controversial proposed New York City mosque and Islamic center is not the “ground zero mosque” and its location two blocks away is “near” – not “at”— ground zero of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, The Associated Press’ style arbiter told staffers in a memo Thursday.

Finally, a video of New York’s not-best and not-brightest. At a protest against said not-a-mosque-not-at-Ground-Zero, a person of color wearing a skull cap and wandering through the crowd was targeted with insults and nearly attacked by protesters for the offense of looking vaguely Muslim. He’s actually a construction worker at Ground Zero, who aptly observes “All you dumb motherfuckers don’t even know my opinion.” If you look real hard, you may see FBC commenter and token outraged-victimized-white-Christian-male W.R. Chandler in the crowd, as I’m sure he’d fly to NYC from Sacramento for something like this. It’s that important. Nothing less than one’s own sense of self-importance the future of the nation is at stake.

I love the guy in the muscle shirt going, “Oh, did the media get that on camera? They’re gonna say we’re racist.” Shoulda thought of that before they opened their mouths, no? (h/t to TP)

Dumb motherfuckers, indeed.

This anti-mosque thing has me on a rip lately. So, it seems most Americans realize they have the right to build it, yet don’t believe they should. Great. Now kindly shut the fuck up* and stop making America look like some backwards redneck piece of shit town down south, please. You’re okay with the titty bars and porn store nearby, and apparently have no problem building a new office on it that’s going to house a bunch of Wall Street shitheads who will continue to dick over the rest of us.

“Hallowed ground”, kiss my pucker.

For your perusal, a bit on a library that’s going to be built next to Sarah Palin. Apparently, this is a major affront to people who read:

Plans to build a state-of-the-art library next to Republican catastrophe Sarah Palin are causing outrage across mainstream America. Almost 40% of Americans still support the idea of books. Campaigners have described the project as insensitive and a deliberate act of provocation by people with brains. The issue is forming a dividing line in advance of November’s mid-term congressional elections with candidates being forced to declare whether they have ever been to a library or spoken to someone who has books in their home. Meanwhile President Obama has caused unease within his own Democratic party by endorsing the library and claiming that not everyone who reads books is responsible for calling Mrs Palin a fuckwit nutjob nightmare of a human being.

*clarification for the mentally challenged… no, I don’t mean “suppress your idiotic speech”, I mean, “get over it and find something useful to be angry about. Hey! Look at this shiny new penny!”

Listen to this idiot from Texas (where else?) rant on about “terror babies”. No evidence, of course.

… at least if you’re conservative, that is.

I’ve said numerous times that one of the enduring characteristics of modern-day conservatives is the ability to construct their own reality/history/science when the conventionally accepted ones don’t fit their worldview. Hence, we have Conservapedia, creationist museums, intelligent design, climate change denial,  “The Founding Fathers wanted this to be a Christian Nation” and proud homophobia of numerous permutations. What made Judge Walker’s smackdown of Prop 8 so important was the fact that it illustrated how, when not on talk radio, pulpits or right-wing blogs, these idiots’ “evidence” crumbles when it has to do crazy things such as, you know, prove itself. Jason Rosenhouse has a good bit on it:

Hard-core right-wingers live in a fantasy world of their own creation. It is a world in which creationism and ID are legitimate science and evolution is not. It is also a world in which gay couples pose some sort of threat to heterosexual marriage, or are too morally suspect to raise children. When thundered from a stage or a pulpit to a generally supportive audience, such notions play very well. But put them in a forum with rules of evidence and a sober, nonemotional tone, and they crumble. Judge Walker in this case was absolutely scathing towards the defense, just as Judge Jones was in the Dover case. When forced to defend their ideas rationally, the right-wingers always come off looking like fools.

It’s just a pity they aren’t forced to do it more often.

Yes, a pity that those people whose patron St. Reagan once said “Facts are stupid things,” aren’t forced to confront their ignorance more often. So instead, we have people taking Teabaggers seriously, where “I heard it on Glenn Beck” carries more weight than the empirical evidence of a thousand researchers.

We are a stupid, stupid country.

Blogger General JC Christian at Jesus’ General has an excellent idea:

A pseudonymous liberal blogger in Washington state hopes that progressives across the country will show up to tea party rallies on September 12 and — if it’s legal — light up a confederate flag so tea partiers can watch it burn…

General JC Christian says he hopes Burn The Confederate Flag Day will expose what he says are the racial motivations of the tea party movement. The logistics are simple: protesters are urged to show up to the rallies and, if local laws allow a fire to be set, light a Confederate flag (or whatever approximation of one they can get their hands on — the blogger told me he’s not picky.) If laws don’t allow the flag to be burned in a public place, the protesters are urged to show up with a singed flag they burned at home and display it prominently.

I would love to see the reactions of certain people when this happens, especially at Teabagger rallies north of the Mason-Dixon line. Are those people going to decry an “attack on southern heritage”? Shockingly as it may seem, when driving on the many fine backroads of Vermont, occasionally I’ll see a house with a Confederate flag.

Unshockingly, the house usually looks like this:

JC’s BaCFD page can be seen here.

The only thing surprising about right-wing lunatic spittlemonger Andrew Breitbart’s fabricated smear against Shirley Sherrod is how DC and the media actually vindicated her. Usually, the typical thing goes “right-winger fabricates something through the noise machine, where it is soon amplified and becomes conventional wisdom, and any contradictory evidence is forgotten.” See “ACORN pimp video” for more on that one.

Aside from the fact that it’s the only way cons can stay in the news, it’s bigger than that. I think the typical winger views “truth” in such a gray way, that the people at the top know they can peddle this shit uncritically.

Now, Dems lie a lot, too. Shit like “hope and change”, that kinda stuff, and a lot of  ‘em peddled Bush’s Iraq/WMD nonsense for whatever reason. But by and large, it’s lying about vague policy stuff, which politicians of all stripes have done since the beginning of time (and I’m not talking about personal stuff, whether it be Strom Thurmond’s love child or Bill Clinton’s blow job). Today’s krazy cons just pull shit out of thin air, precisely because they know they have a huge following of mouthbreathers who don’t question, and even when they are confronted with facts, they deny it any way.

Before you accuse me of shilling for Dems (although I will shill for lefties in general, but you already know that, and that ain’t necessarily Dems), think real hard if there’s any real equivalent on the left (like some people compare Biden’s crazy-uncle gaffes to Palin’s perpetual proud stupidity). As much as I loathe them, I don’t see mainstream Dems out there fabricating videos to smear people or peddling horrendous conspiracy theories. And no, Alan Grayson is not the left wing equivalent of Glenn Beck, so spare me ahead of time. So please, by all means, please show me the leftist equivalent of this:

Death panels. Shirley Sherrod. ACORN pimp videos. Vince Foster. The Rapture. Anything Michele Bachmann says and anything you read on WorldNutDaily. Where’s the birth certificate? The War on Christmas. Mission Accomplished.

Am I forgetting anything? Oh, yes.

Illegal immigrants beheading lots of Arizonans. One can be a Nazi, socialist, communist, athiest and Muslim all at once. If left alone, the free market will do what’s right for the country. Anything Glenn Beck says. Forced abortions. And so on.

Now recently, I was criticized here by an ally that instead of just mocking, perhaps I should delve into the causes of why a pecan-size brained dolt like Sarah Palin can be so popular. Fair enough. It’s easier, though, to look at the things that aren’t the cause.

It’s not poverty; many of these people who believe this crap are quite comfortable. It’s not education; I read somewhere that Rush’s demographic seems, oddly enough, to have a sizable college-educated demographic.

Now that’s not to say that there aren’t a bunch of uneducated saps out there; there most certainly are. One can be highly educated, too, and have incredibly poor judgment. Just look at my marriages, fer chrissake.

The long answer probably has something to do with a combination of factors such as disenfranchisement, educated but lacking critical thinking skills, entrenched in the bullshit of American exceptionalism at a very early age, religiosity, white privilege, fear of an ever-changing world and not having the skills to deal with it, the need to scapegoat someone or something for one’s own miserable existence, and so on, mental illness in some cases, and in some cases, people knowing better but playing along since it benefits them (that last one mostly applies to the people spreading the shit).

The short answer? Lots of idiots and assholes in this country, and the origins of the idiotry and assholery (I can make up words too, like Shakespeare! Yay!) are so complex and diverse, that it’s nothing you’re going to see me sum up in some post on a shitty blog.

The latest from America’s favorite Retardican…

Ha ha! Have the grammatical skills of a slow-performing kindergartner? CELEBRATE IT!

Yes, she almost makes Dubya look like Einstein. It’s that bad. What’s worse is how many people love this vacuous waste of oxygen. What keeps her head from caving in on itself, we will never know. But of course, she’s not anti-intellectual, right, W.R.?

and having to listen to douchebags whine about the so-called “death tax”.

(link fixed)