Unfortunately, Calling Him A Pathetic Wanker Will Make Me Worse Than Pol Pot
Shorter Verbatim Daniel Henninger: “The Obama campaign’s resurrection of “liar” as a political tool is odious because it has such a repellent pedigree. It dates to the sleazy world of fascist and totalitarian propaganda in the 1930s. It was part of the milieu of stooges, show trials and dupes. These were people willing to say anything to defeat their opposition. Denouncing people as liars was at the center of it.”
Calling people CommieNazis for pointing out that untrue things aren’t true, of course, is the highest refinement of political discourse.
I just hope Republicans never do for murder what they’ve done for racism and lying.
I refer you to the Second Amendment movement, and the Right to Bear Arms in the middle of a Starbucks.
Could we add Stand Your Ground laws to your list as well? At least the Zimmerman version of SYG?
You know, Hitler had a dog, and so does Obama…
Also too – Hitler was a vegetarian, and what is that Michelle grows in her WH garden?
ZOMG!!!
We can’t say “lie?”
Oh well, then, we have to give up the fight – ’cause we’re screwed.
We can’t use “prevarification,” or “mendacity” – those have more than one syllable, so the rubes in the this country won’t know what they mean.
They’ll think the former is something you need to do before ‘varification,” and the latter is a city where the chicks aren’t allowed in.
“Hey, Paulie, you start ‘varificating’ yet, or you wanna join me and go to the ‘men-dacity’ for a few cold ones, and watch the big game?”
Well, but on the authority of Mr. Henninger, we know that we can’t call them liars, but its perfectly okay to call them fascists and totalitarians.
Henninger is, it would seem, unconcerned about John Sununu, or the Romney Campaign’s stated strategies. Not to mention Joe Wilson, and the type of unprincipled attacks the Republicans have been making against President Obama pretty much since he entered the primary campaign back in 2007.
Henninger is, it would seem, unconcerned about John Sununu… Not to mention Joe Wilson
If you merge them, do you get Joe Isuzu?
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
i used to be of the class of wall street journal reader who simply skipped the op-ed section and otherwise enjoyed the paper (murdoch put paid to that, but i digress).
but, you know, i fly a lot on business and especially pre-digital media i would always bring a stack of papers to read, and every now and then, in a desperate moment, i would, in fact, go to the wsj op-ed section.
and even by the standards of the usual gang of clods and idiots on those pages, henninger was completely deranged. glad to see nothing has changed since i’ve stopped reading the journal.
p.s. the extra-special, super-delicious irony here is that there was no media outlet – not even fox – more frothing at the mouth upon the importance of impeaching, convicting, and removing from office bill clinton because he was a “liar” than the wsj.
Criticizing conservatives for things they actually, do, say or believe is always worse than Hitler and Stalin combined! Labeling liberals with base canards is the height of civility.
Remember when it was just accepted that Al Gore was scumbag liar who said he invented the internet? And remember when even implying that George Bush lied about the Iraq war was maybe treason and certainly a sign of godless communist fascism?
Some things just don’t change I guess.
I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends… that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them. – Adlai Stevenson
You can really tell that these people are desperate for this election. Was this how they acted in 2000 too?
I am tempted to say that this is because they feel like this is their last and best chance to turn this country into the plutocracy they’ve always longed for, but we all know they’ll never quit.
Also, if they weren’t so blinded by hating Obama they should recognize he will give them plenty of chances.
He isn’t exactly shifting plutocracy out of reach.
Much like how FDR handled the plutocrats when you think about it.
They hated him for it too.
I’m getting bored with Hitler as the apotheosis of evil. Stalin and Pol Pot too. Can’t we get someone new? Vlad the Impaler, maybe? I like Vlad the Impaler.
I much prefer St. Ronnie Raygunz.
At least as far as LGM is concerned, I think Jewel’s pretty much got it sewn up in perpetuity.
Jewel has only made people wish for the sweet release of death.
Maybe if Jewell had a child with Derek Jeter.
Jewel, that is.
Or a centaur with ARod.
Or A-Rod with Ayn Rand.
I’m voting for Tomás de Torquemada or Arnaud Amalric.
Rachel Carson, duh.
A guy who used to get paid to shill for the cigarette companies told me she killed more people than Stalin.
I often wonder whether these anti-environmentalist nitwits can truly be so ignorant as not to be aware that DDT was never banned where it could serve a vital public-health function, and indeed is still used in malaria control to this day. DDT was banned in most circumstances, especially those we see in the wealthy temperate world, but never where it could save lives from malaria.
Or that Rachel Carson listed among her reasons for opposing the widespread use of DDT in agriculture the danger that it could lead to DDT-resistance mosquitoes, rending DDT useless for domestic application.
The particular individual I’m talking about – Ron Bailey of Reason Magazine – knows these things perfectly well.
Genghis Khan. Scariest dude ever. Killed way more than Hitler.
Columbus. OK, that one’s a stretch. Well, Cortez or Pizarro then. Or fucking Pedro de Alvarado.
Cecil Rhodes.
King Leopold.
Genghis Khan certainly killed more people personally than Hitler (would Hitler have killed anybody personally? He was a messenger during the war, so he probably wouldn’t have, right?). I don’t see how it’s even vaguely possible that he was directly responsible for more deaths.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/11/06/opinion/06atrocities_timeline.html
Genghis Khan: 40 million
WWII: 66 million. Including the Pacific and Asian parts. Doubt that Hitler is 2/3 of that.
Khan certainly wins proportionally.
No Hitler, no WWII as we recognize it. You can certainly argue that a similarly scaled war or collection of wars was inevitable – Germany was spoiling for a fight after the humiliation of Versailles, Imperial Japan wanted at least economic domination of everything from the Indian Ocean to Hawai’i and believed force of arms was the way to go, Stalin wanted Eastern Europe and global renown – but then, I have no idea what the Mongols might have done without Genghis Khan, either.
But you have at least 2 other supervillians running things in WWII, 2.1 if you count Mussolini. If you grant shares of 6, 2, 1, 0.5 of the blame, Hitler ties Genghis Khan in absolute numbers. And as a proportion of world population, it’s no contest.
Where on earth is this 40 million number coming from?
From a quick look over the Internet, the 40 million represents the number of people killed over the entire century plus history of the Mongol Empire, not just in Genghis’s reign.
An infographic on the internet. Totally reliable.
The totally reliable estimates of the literate people who were attacked by the illiterate Mongols. I mean, those Chinese and Muslim authorities had no reason to lie, right?
I thought the Mongols whole M.O. was to only kill those who resisted their rule (i.e. giving cities a chance to submit, or else the entire town be put to death or enslaved), and were more interested in tribute than in actually running the place (in Russia, they often left local leaders in place to run the day to day, but they had to pay up when the Mongols demanded it). Feel free to correct.
Hilter was very much about totally destroying a couple of groups of people, and enslaving other groups.
So in outright evil-ness, you could argue Hilter was more evil, but Genghis and his crew certainly personally killed more than Hitler did.
Bitch all you want, but Mongol was one of the most kick-ass movies ever.
Pizarro always struck me as clearly more evil than Cortes. Pizarro’s behavior with respect to Atahualpa was clearly in bad faith, and more or less the kind of thing that a James Bond villain would do. Cortes was no prize, either, but he never acted like a cackling movie villain.
Which is why I replaced Cortez with Pedro de Alvarado. He’s the cackling villain of the Mexican conquest.
I always assumed Cortez was just dumb and really lucky with his impeccable timing and well-played political tactics. Pretty sure the other Natives were just using him to advance their means, but man did they ever misjudge the white man.
No love (hate?) for Tamerlane?
Picking on the handicapped would be in poor taste.
Mao.
I think the numbers are on his side, ie he killed the most (according to some prof at the U of Hawaii whose name eludes me and btw I forgot to pay my monthly google account bill so i can’t look it up).
Why not Stalin, you may be wondering? Well, we RWingers see his use as a sort of dogwhistle. “Stalin was evil” is a way for lefties to avoid saying Communism was. So I don’t want to provide you with the out.
Mao still commands some respect, so he’s a more cutting rebuke to the left. I’m open to Lenin. Big Byrd too.
“Mao still commands some respect” – where, pray tell? Between the Cultural Revolution and the scheme to put a horrifically inefficient and polluting iron smelter in every backyard, Mao’s record is antithetical to the ambitions of every part of the liberal ooalition that I can think of. Indeed, the people demanding self-criticism and enforcing ideological unanimity are the aptly named Dittoheads, not the people grooving to the professorial demeanor of Rachel Maddow.
Mao had some good slogans about nationalistic popular revolt, insights that were probably not novel but were pithy and remain important considerations to this day. If only the Bushies had read them before they decided it would be nifty to occupy Iraq! But I doubt the parts of Mao that you oppose are his advocacy for popular nationalist revolt against foreign-backed corrupt kleptomaniacal autocracies and direct foreign occupation.
“Mao still commands some respect” – where, pray tell?
If you lack any sense of irony, here.
Or, if you insist on wallowing in the 1960s, which I know Manju would never ever do, you can find a bunch of New Left types insisting Mao was a Third Way innovator.
Something something International A.N.S.W.E.R. something something anti-war rallies something something.
Never mind that International A.N.S.W.E.R. hijacked the anti-war movement, they didn’t represent it.
Foxconn, of course, has a clientele consisting entirely of addled leftist trust-fund babies who hate American business and don’t understand it at all.
I believe that the current Chinese regime contends that Mao was correct 70% of the time.
I should perhaps clarify that I meant among American liberals, which I might be willing to expand to Canadian or even Western liberals (I believe, without knowing any details, that there are or perhaps were rather more florid and extreme leftist groups popular, mostly among students, in the UK and some European countries, groups that lack any remotely popular parallels in the US in the last four decades).
In Manju’s fevered and hallucinatory imagination, just like everything else he posts about.
Anita Dunn
Wow, Manju’s quoting noted poop scholar Glen Beck.
To traduce Anita Dunn – who was making an obvious joke that she turned out to have stolen from noted leftist Lee Atwater.
Clueless Manju, trying to throw mud in the place of ‘scholarship’:
Why do you have to be such a speciesist. I’m going with The Black Plague. Think of all the rats that killed along with some people.
La peste noire as they said in France or la nigra pesto in Esperanto. The Republicans will know what you are talking about
Yeah, i must admit, that one will throw my peeps off. Even the ones in the know might wonder why Pesto sauce is bad.
You keep serving it with arugula…
The Black Death was awful, but if we’re going to start assessing the moral turpitude of bacilli we’re going to have to get into theology and start blaming God. Don’t get me wrong: were God to exist, he’d be a thoroughgoing stinker. But do we really want to go down that path?
Well, I’ll tell ya, lemme give you a little inside information about God. God likes to watch. He’s a prankster. Think about it. He gives man instincts! He gives this extraordinary gift and then–what does he do? I swear–for his own amusement–his own private cosmic gag reel–he sets the rules in opposition. It’s the goof of all time! Look. But don’t touch! Touch. But don’t taste! Taste. Don’t swallow! And while you’re jumping from one foot to the next, he’s laughing his sick fucking ass off!! He’s a tight ass, he’s a sadist, he’s an absentee landlord!!
Y’know, it’d be courteous to provide a hyperlink. I recognized it was probably a quote, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the film.
that was central to my point
Over the course of human history, tuberculosis has killed more people than the Black Death, and it’s not close.
but what about the rats man? The dirty rats and the fleas and the gut bacteria. They all died and I’m gutted. especially for the bacteria
Malaria gets no love. :(
it killed people, while the plague turned them black, you follow the color wheel
Are there no popes available?
John Paul II, because apparently I heard on CBS that he inspired Paul Ryan’s approach to generosity.
Abdul Alhazred, writer of the Necronomicon? He even sounds Islamic, though Pam Geller thinks his actual religion was not as bad as Islam.
Nobody’s mentioned Acorn yet.
Nor the tubesock holocaust. And will no-one think of the kittens?
Future Daniel Henninger, next time a Republican president is running for re-election:
In fact, unfortunately, the most an Obama official has said is that Romney lied — that’s different from calling someone a liar. For inspiration, Obama advisers should look to Republicans like Bob Dornan, who called Bill Clinton a “pathological liar” or William Safire, who called Hillary a “congenital liar,” or, of course, Joe Wilson, who called Obama a liar during the State of the Union. Now that’s how you do it.
When it comes to calling opponents liars, Democrats, as usual, are mere pikers compared to Republicans.
Remember when conservatives hated moral relativism? Now it’s all they have, as there is no such thing as objective truth. And Godwin of course, he’ll always be there. Just like the Third Reich.
When Dianne Sawyer interviewed Obama, her questions reminded me of what Nixon said regarding her; “That smart girl from Ron Ziegler’s office”
Yes, the liars need their lies promulgated with regularity. But, this latest gambit is one of desperation. It’s almost like they believe we are lying, but can’t stand to see us do it better. The truth has become something akin to ‘white lies’, or lesser lies from their perspective; neutered, ineffective in moving the chess piece while your opponent takes a potty break. We can fact-check each of the supposed lies to throw it back in their faces, but it doesn’t matter when their brains exist primarily to justify what they’ve already decided.
Ben Franklin
It is really upsetting. Thank god no Republican has ever called Obama a liar.
It’s disturbing that in the midst of calling Obama a bad person for saying someone has lied, he in fact lied about the lying on the Right.
I’m still holding out on Obama campaigning to give everyone free Unicorns, and when the Right claims he’s lying we can just tell them they’re commies! The media would be totally okay with that, right?
I still remember the time the Republican Congressperson stood up during the State of the Union address, and yelled, “You prevaricator!”
Was that before or after Joe Wilson had a note discreetly delivered to the podium declaring “I find a number of your conclusions insufficiently rigorous”?
I seem to have made it my personal mission to remind everyone every time Daniel Henninger’s name comes up that he’s the one that blamed the 2008 financial collapse on Jews and secularists because we don’t say Merry Christmas anymore: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122714101083742715.html
That was some weapons-grade stupid, that was. Jonah Goldberg would be entitled to mock the stupidity of that.
My belief in Poe’s Law has never been more sorely tested. Yet it came through the ordeal, walking away from the billowing explosion stronger and more virile than ever.
You lie!
Thank goodness no one ever wrote a book called ‘Liberal Fascism’. Of course if someone wrote such a book it would only sell one or two copies.
I seem to recall an anorexic makes her living doing just that :)
An anorexic and a doughy pantload are not opposites. The pantload, like the anorexic, is overcompensating for his own shame at his fatness. Unlike her, he lashes out at others, not at himself.
The problem isn’t the fat, it’s the reaction to it.
Feeding the anorexic is cheaper, though.
Do we know she’s not bulimic?
Well, just be glad they don’t know what DW-Nominate is. I mean, really, they don’t. Even when they stumble across it:
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/06/be-careful-when-it-comes-to-polarization-claims/
And protest:
I was going to pop in and explain, but I think it best we keep this stuff amongst ourselves.
So that means that Perry in Tx is an extremist, because he’s against affirmative action?
Not necessarily. The AEI’s interpretation of the graph is wrong.
How would you know?
Take a look at this sentence:
Now, lets take every Senator from the 88th Congress whose DW Nominate score is to the right of the (then) most rightwing Democrat, Strom Thurmond.
[R] 0.680 N SIMPSON
[R] 0.675 N GOLDWATER
[R] 0.610 Y WILLIAMS J
[R] 0.553 N MECHEM
[R] 0.506 Y CURTIS
[R] 0.474 N TOWER
[R] 0.464 Y HRUSKA
[R] 0.460 Y BENNETT
[R] 0.412 N COTTON
[R] 0.384 N HICKENLOOPE
[R] 0.377 Y JORDAN L.
[R] 0.376 Y DOMINICK
[R] 0.336 Y MILLER
[R] 0.328 Y DIRKSEN
I’ve included their vote on the 64cra. 8 Y’s and 6 N’s.
(Thurmond pops in at 0.321)
The voices in his head tell him, which is a good thing since he obviously has the reading comprehension of a backward third grader.
…. These were people willing to say anything to defeat their opposition …
Is Henninger talking about the Nazis here, or Romney and Ryan?
Henninger actually says this thing: “This Obama campaign is saying, We don’t want to compete with Mitt Romney. We want to obliterate him.” Because it’s all just a friendly game of cards, of course.
Yeah and Republicans would never state after 2008 that their goal was to make Obama a one-term President because that would be declasse
OK – let’s just say that Mitt has a rather, ahem, casual relationship with the truth.
Pathetic wanker?
Danny’s justifiably proud of his wanking skills.
What’s the pedigree of using “shit for brains”? Because that’s what Henninger’s obviously got.
You flatter him by assuming that he has any kind of brains at all.