Reince, standing up for the 'rightwing' everywhere
You ... you're kidding me, right? I think we have all gotten very, very used to the supposedly tough-as-nails, suck-it-up right melting down over someone saying something
mean in their general direction, but this one's a little tough to swallow even with all the grains of salt
in the ol' salt shaker.
RNC chairman Reince Priebus said in a memo Thursday that he's demanding an apology from MSNBC president Phil Griffin after a controversial tweet from the liberal cable news channel's account. [...]
"Until [Griffin] takes internal corrective action and personally apologizes—not just to the RNC but to all right-of-center Americans—I’m banning all RNC staff from appearing on, associating with, or booking any RNC surrogates on MSNBC," Priebus said in the memo.
Oh. Oh noes—Reince Priebus will withhold
all of the wares from his amply stocked pawn shop of political horrors. Surely, how will the news organization survive? How will the bullshit quota be properly met? However will we know what the howls from the monkey house
mean, if we are reduced to listening to them only on every other goddamn outlet invented by mankind? It is a dilemma.
So what was the tweet that sent the 10 plagues of Egypt a'shooting out of Reince's mouth-hole? It's been deleted now lest it do even more damage to sensitive righty egos, but I urge sensitive viewers to look away as we reproduce it here:
Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww: the adorable new #Cheerios ad w/ biracial family. on.msnbc.com/1dPgQEU
Yes. There is a new Cheerios ad featuring a biracial family, and some snarky MSNBC tweet-putter-putter noted that the "rightwing" wouldn't like that. There is damn good evidence for this, I will point out for the amnesiacs among us, in that Cheerios put out an ad featuring a biracial family last year and
the frothing rightwing did not goddamn like it.
General Mills is standing by a new Cheerios ad that features an inter-racial family, in spite of some negative Internet backlash. [...]
Within days of the upload, the video had drawn negative reactions on YouTube—including references to Nazis, “troglodytes” and even “racial genocide,” according to AdWeek—prompting General Mills to disable the commenting feature.
Now, I suppose we could pretend that the cries of "racial genocide" were not coming from "rightwing" people but from, say, invisible bears—that would explain the frequent typos—but there is only one group of people in America still worried, in the years 2013-2014, about biracial "troglodytes" or "racial genocide" and we have a pretty damn good understanding of their place on the political spectrum. It is not a mystery. It may, mind you, all come down to what you consider
rightwing: Reince Priebus thinks it's him and the RNC, and if he thinks that then perhaps we should all take his word on that. He is the expert, after all.
So here is the situation: Someone from MSNBC tweeted their supposition that the new Cheerios ad would likely peeve "rightwing" Americans based on our knowledge that the past Cheerios ad peeved the rightwing so much the backlash made nationwide headlines. A large collection of internet right-wingers, all the names you know, all the folks whose loathing of Muslims and poor people and "urban blacks" and the like comes a-frothing out of their keyboards week after week, the people who went to great lengths to demonstrate that well maybe Trayvon Martin had it coming, took deep exception to someone pointing out Recent Fucking History, upon which the ferret-faced Reince felt he needed to jump into the fray, largely because he does whatever random people on the internet tell him to do, in order to defend the "rightwing," which he now considers to be all "right-of-center Americans" (and really, I wonder how many right-of-center Americans would now agree with Reince that they were "rightwing," now, but again—his word), and promises that no more of his own "rightwing" will grace the network with their professionally calibrated bullshit unless the president of the network himself gets down on one knee and begs forgiveness for the Twitter crime. Which he will do, because nothing wilts as reliably as a multibillion-dollar television network, not when they are facing the wrath of Reince Priebus, destroyer of networks.
Did I miss anything? No, I think that's it. And like Sean Hannity's wounded maybe-flight from New York over some politician saying that the extreme right would not do well in his state, tsk, the right thing to do would be to help them pack their bags and go. Can you imagine—and I want you to honestly picture this, not just humor me on this one—a network without the contra-factual bullshit of paid RNC staffers wafting over it like the ghost of Bullshit Past? It sounds like a dream. It sounds like something you'd have to pay extra for. Sweet Jeebus, networks, if you insult these people enough me might be able to be free of them on all the channels, save the Fox cubbyhole, and that would free up time to book, say, subject matter experts instead of political bullshit artists. There is no downside here.
1:32 PM PT: And with impressive speed, Griffin genuflects.