Sadly, No!

ABOVE: John Hawkins. Double the pleasure, double the fun.

The first sentence of John Hawkins’s latest post — There Will Be No Apologies — is perhaps one of the quintessential “oh-my-god-he-didn’t-really-say-that-did-he?” moments in the history of the wingnutosphere:

If irony was made out of ice cream, we’d all be eating Banana Splits right now.

And, no, I’m not talking about his failure to use the subjunctive mood where required — “if irony were” — but rather, well, you know exactly what I mean. Admit it. Do I have to Photoshop a sammich in there too?

The irony to which Hawkins is referring is that CNN apologized for the use of the word “crosshairs.” “Ha, wussies,” Hawkins harumphs:

Just for the record, we here at Right Wing News don’t apologize for using the word “crosshairs.” Other words we don’t apologize for include job killing, kneecapping, firepower, shotgun, cut, campaign, brass knuckles, slaughter, eviscerate, obliterate, fire, snipe, carve, kill, reload, targeting, gut, bombed, terminate, axe, attack, and of course, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious murder-go-round. We also don’t apologize for calling CNN an embarrassing bunch of weenies who should man up, try to develop some testicular fortitude, and stop acting like such a bunch of little girls.

And, just for the record, we here at Sadly, No! don’t apologize for using the word whale, leviathan, behemoth, hippo, big fat candyass and, of course, mother-fricking ginormous. We also don’t apologize for calling Hawkins an embarrassing mound of man-boobed lard who should back away from the fried food buffet, lace up some tennis shoes, and take a run around the block, particularly so that he could become aware that almost any “bunch of little girls” could outrun him in heels and without breaking a sweat .

Indeed, irony does seem to be made out of ice cream.

Shorter Bryan Fischer,
Renew America
‘Change of venue for Loughner: perfectly terrible and unbiblical idea’

• How awesome* would it be if our justice system more closely resembled that of a Bronze Age patriarchal backwater?**

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

*On the other hand, maybe if Fischer had his way, we could rewrite the 2nd Amendment to read: ‘A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear the jawbone of an ass shall not be infringed.’

**Aficionados of MLK appropriation by wingers will especially enjoy this stunner from Fischer to conclude the above column:

Let’s hope the trials for these murders takes place in Tucson, that the perpetrator is swiftly sentenced to death, and that the sentence is carried out without delay. As Martin Luther King, Jr. would say, borrowing the words of the ancient prophet Amos, ‘Let justice roll down (in Tucson) like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:24).

We’d already learned from Glenn Beck et. al. that King was a big fan of white grievance but who knew he also had a huge hard-on for capital punishment?

Above: IRL evil Frylock, less animated but more cartoonish.

Shorter Daniel Pipes
The Moonington Slimes
“Turmoil in Tunisia'”

• All across the world, filthy Mooooslims are watching Tunisia and thinking, ‘hey, we could do that.’ But I really hope they don’t do that cuz, I mean, blarg.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

ABOVE: St. Kathryn of Bologna

Shorter K-Lo, America’s Shittiest Website™
Tucson and Us

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Roy, writing about wingnuts writing about Paul Krugman:

“A devastating knockout of the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman,” cried Peter Wehner of Commentary. Wehner’s colleague John Steele Gordon added that Krugman was “intellectually lazy” and “intellectually dishonest,” and even called him “the Joe McCarthy of our times,” echoing William Kristol — which probably confused both Commentary‘s and Kristol’s readers, as most of them probably think McCarthy was a great American hero.

Above: Kristol fils.

They do but they can’t say it. Their elders however could say it, albeit in a weaselly way. Here’s William’s dad, Irving, the late high priest of Kristol Methodism:

“There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy. He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.”

Above: Kristol pere.

Above: Best pornstar name for a non-pornstar since Randy Johnson.

Shorter Roger Hedgecock
Subhumans Venting Online
“Gettin’ Fat, Gamblin’, And Cruisin’ On Food Stamps'”

• What happened to the good old days when poor people had to use food stamps in supermarkets, revealin’ themselves to all as the freeloadin’ scumbags we always knew they were? Now they are given cards, which they can use in many places includin’ restaurants and OMG farmers’ markets, and cash, which they can use anywhere, just as I do and — holy shit how can we tell them from normal people now?!?!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Shorter David Brooks
The New York Times
“Tree of Failure'”

• The President’s wonderful speech in Tuscon was for decent, sensible, moderate people like me, not for indecent, immoderate, hippie freaks who can fuck right off and just deal with the awesome rightwing “bipartisan” tax proposals soon to come, bitchez.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

ABOVE: Paul Mirengoff

Shorter Paul Mirengoff, Powerwhite Blog
An Evening in Tucson — The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

UPDATE: Well, as commenter Mark F. points out, Mirengoff pulled the post and issued this apology:

In a post last night, I criticized the use of a Yaqui prayer as the invocation to the memorial service in Tucson. In doing so, I failed to give the prayer the respect it deserves. Although I did not intend this as a slight to the religion or to the Yaqui tribe, it can clearly be interpreted as one. For this, I sincerely apologize to my readers, to the Yaqui tribe, to all tribal leaders and Indian people, and, specifically, to Carlos Gonzales who delivered the prayer. I regret my poor choice of words, and I have removed the post.

Now I ask you does that sound like a sincere apology? Or does that sound like something coming from a kid who was hauled down to the principal’s office and forced to apologize for slapping someone on the playground?

If you guessed the the second choice, you would be right! Mr. Mirengoff is a partner at the DC law firm of Akin, Gump, Hauer & Feld. And it would appear that the law firm has a significant practice representing native American tribes. I’m sure that when Paul finished blogging and wandered into his office this morning, the management committee, after being inundated by outraged calls from clients of the firm’s native American practice, was camped out in his office. They no doubt delivered to him, in no uncertain terms, an ultimatum that he apologize and take down the post. In fact, they probably wrote the apology for him to make sure it wasn’t a typical wingnut apology, you know, like those that go “I’m sorry if Al Sharpton was offended by my calling him a n**ger. I didn’t mean to insult him.” We may soon see some personnel changes at either Powerwhite Blog, or Akin, Gump, or both. Forgive me this brief moment of schadenfreude.

For those who missed the original post, the relevant parts are quoted here.

Shorter Sarah Palin, Facebook
America’s Enduring Strength

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

At the very least, the planned protest by the Westboro Baptist Church of the funeral for nine-year-old Tucson shooting victim Christina Green is something that is likely to be regarded as equally disagreeable by both sides on the perhaps-not-so-inexplicably deeper partisan divide that has emerged following an atrocious act of violence that some of us naifs believed should have brought all of us reasonable folk closer together in a national spasm of comity, if only for a few news cycles.

Alas, as Roy has documented, it’s partisan turtles all the way down and always shall be, at least amongst a certain set — and that should long ago have ceased to be a surprise to any of us who’ve been following the whole process for a week or longer.

None of which is to say that they’re worse or we’re worse (SPOILER: they’re worse) in all of this nonsense. But rather that it’s possible for emerging facts from an event of this nature to not fit perfectly into one’s preferred (perhaps instinctive) narrative — and that it is graceful to first challenge oneself as to whether that is the case and, more difficult and meritorious still, to ‘fess up publicly that you may have got it wrong initially if that proves to be true.

Which is a rather long way of saying that, no, it does not appear that Sarah Palin’s gunsight map or Rush Limbaugh’s daily leakages or Glenn Beck’s crocodile tears had any influence whatsoever on the muddled mindset of the Tucson gunman who attempted, over the weekend, to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords along with several other unfortunate people who happened to be in a particular Safeway parking lot on a particularly unlucky morning where she held her rally to meet constituents during the Congressional recess.

(Also not an easily demonstrated influence on the gunman — Sudden Jihad Syndrome or Bush Derangement Syndrome or Liberal Fascism or any other catch-all political theory of recent vintage that seeks to update Mencken’s famous three-legged ‘clear, simple and wrong’ construction by removing the clear and simple portions.)

So for those who leaped out of the gates to declare loud and wide that Tea Party rhetoric was to blame for this, I say, it’s time to dial back the finger-pointing and admit, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, that there is no clear through-line from right-wing rhetoric to the shooter’s motives. Tough as that can be, because it’s difficult to step back from the ledge that potent indignation has built for you, but you must do it or risk losing one of the more important assets you have in navigating a difficult world — sobriety and humility in the face of the facts.

Though one thing you mightn’t dial back is the fact that so many people’s first instinct was to assume in the initial hours of learning that a Democratic congressperson had been shot that Tea Party rage was the likeliest factor behind the crime. That is also a real thing, though it may in this case have proven to be wrong — and it ought to give Tea Partiers pause when they ponder why so many of their fellow Americans thought on first blush so poorly of them upon hearing of this terrible crime and initially measuring who might be culpable of it.

That is what the the current right-wing whinge-fest (and, just to pick on her, Sarah Palin’s own deafening silence) so willfully ignores — that the vindication of specific innocence in this particular incident does not mean that the larger questions about the debased tenor of our current national dialogue do not have merit in their own right.

Whether a disturbed individual might or might not have committed a heinous act all the same if only bombastic radio hosts, politicians and pundits had said or written different things is not really the important take-away from the last 72 hours. The important lesson, in addition to the tales of human tragedy and heroism from the shooting itself, is the glimpse of possible common ground that this latest national gun atrocity may have offered us via these initial knee-jerk (and yes, almost certainly wrong) reactions — the lesson that the political atmosphere of the past several years hasn’t been all that helpful for us sane folks either.

‘Never let a crisis go to waste.’ There has been a lot of referencing of that Rahm Emanuel quote by the Right in the wake of the Tucson massacre and the blame-game tumult that has emerged from it. Their interpretation of the saying, of course, has been to assign it a purely Machiavellian intent. That is not an unfair thing to do — after all, political opportunism was certainly the broad intent behind Emanuel’s coining of the quote in the first place.

But like so many memorable phrases, that quote is not necessarily limited by the intent of its coiner. One might just as easily turn it towards the side of our better angels. Not letting a crisis go to waste does not have to only mean selfishly gaining from it. It could also mean taking advantage of the natural, if temporary togetherness that a crisis can engender — to further noble, difficult goals that have to that point been sidelined by people’s natural ennui towards tough endeavors during easier times. It could mean appealing to people’s crisis-tuned alertness to the stuff that really matters — even if that stuff is only tangentially related to the proximate causes of the actual crisis.

If two neighbors begin building a friendship, does it really matter if their initial point of contact was a dispute over fences? There is an opportunity for more reasonable (if still hotly contested) political discourse still to be had from this national trauma. Sadly, it seems that our political class just doesn’t know how to get to there from here, so deeply ingrained is their reflex towards a horse-race view of the world. I blame the cult of marketing, Sean Hannity and Keith Olbermann, in that order.

Still, Pollyanna that I am, I do hold out hope that maybe this time we’ll successfully tell the higher-profile reactionaries to shut the fuck up and it’ll stick, that starting tonight stone-cold retarded won’t turn up on my evening news feed every goddamn night without fail, and that tomorrow I’ll finally be able to begin my 900,000-word novelization of Josh Trevino’s first clumsy attempts at l’amour without the assistance of a light saber.

Also, POOP.