Chutzpah:
Chutzpah amounts to a total denial of personal responsibility, that renders others speechless and incredulous, one cannot quite believe that another person totally lacks common human traits like remorse, regret, guilt, sympathy and insight.
Is it that one can’t believe or one doesn’t want to believe? Denial is not the exclusive property of the Right, although they’re really, really good at it. Amazingly good.
“...a total denial of personal responsibility,...totally lacks common human traits like remorse, regret, guilt, sympathy and insight.” That sounds like a capsule description of the Party of Donald Trump.
The party that doesn’t care if the globe burns up. The party that blames the poor for the crime of being poor. The party that is just fine with Russia screwing with our elections as long as it gives them victory. The party working in secret to turn healthcare for millions into tax cuts for the rich. The party that says true racism is talking about racism. A party lead by serial adulterers, con men, sanctimonious hypocrites, and worse, who claims to be the party of “Traditional Values”. The party that has screwed up time after time on everything they touch is the party with all the answers. The party that has decided to ride Donald Trump as far as they can take him.
And it’s all the fault of liberals when things go wrong. Just ask them.
In the wake of the shooting at which a LIBERAL* finally took up arms against a tyrannical government — OOOPS! Sorry. Only Conservatives are allowed to do that — there have been pious calls from the right to end all this divisiveness, this unseemly partisan LIBERAL hatred. The party that controls all three branches of the Federal government and most of the state governments, the party that has its own propaganda media empire is playing the victim card for all it’s worth.
*Ever notice that right wing shooters are always crazed lone wolves, while this one left wing shooter is representative of the entire left wing, who hates Trump and America?
Via TPM, Kelleyanne Conway was complaining on Fox & Friends “Look at Twitter,” Conway said. “If I were shot and killed tomorrow, half of Twitter would explode in applause and excitement. This is the world we live in now.”
Only half? Who helped make it that kind of world, MS. Conway? Who systematically worked to spread the rhetoric of hate?
Ann Coulter in a 2012 interview:
Ann Coulter:: Was I amazed to see liberals being liars, hypocrites, and historical revisionists? No. Were you?
John Hawkins:: One of the many things you’ve said that really cheeses off liberals is,
“When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors”.
Do you regret saying that?
Ann Coulter:: Only that I didn’t say it loud enough and in a large enough public forum. And when I said we should “execute” John Walker Lindh, I mis-spoke. What I meant to say was “We should burn John Walker Lindh alive and televise it on prime-time network TV”. My apologies for any misunderstanding that might have occurred.
This has been going in for a long time. Here’s the same Ann Coulter in a 2004 interview with Sean Hannity on her book "How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).”:
COULTER: Right. It's rule number three. You must outrage the enemy. If you don't leave liberals in a sputtering impotent rage, you're not doing it right.
You have to read the book. No, I mean, the way Republicans and conservatives have fought, basically, up until, you know, 10 minutes ago, was to concede, you know, all the liberals' points. Maybe say, oh, we have a little caveat here, and, oh, please like us, and we're not anti-Semitic. I mean, every week Bill Buckley was running another National Review (search) on conservatives are not anti-Semitic.
Why are we being defensive? We should be on the offense.
If we’re not in a war, why does Coulter refer to us as “the enemy” above? Here’s 25 quotes from the book in case that’s not enough. These are the ‘best’ quotes according to the website. When conservatives get called on this kind of speech, they fall back on the old “It’s all for entertainment — You shouldn’t take it seriously” defense. Well, words, as it happens, can have consequences.
You want to talk about the politics of hate, uncivil discourse, partisanship? The GOP uses it for their business model. Coulter is just one of a horde of conservative media mercenaries peddling division for power and profit. It’s what you do when your party has no ideas that actually work in the real world. It’s what you do when you want to make life miserable for your fellow citizens because it’s a cheap way of getting votes on the backs on the powerless. It’s what you do for the crazy rich people who are using their money as a weapon of mass destruction to buy the government they want. It’s what you do when you literally can’t defend your actions.
The mass media seems to have decided the American people can’t be exposed to this; to even talk about it is called class warfare or worse. The mass media also seems to be rather ignorant about history when they buy GOP claims that violence in politics is something new in America. Charles P. Pierce has a little history lesson on that which should be a must-read.
Political violence has been a way of life in this country for most of its existence, reaching a kind of peak in the years between 1850 and 1865, but continuing in many forms for most of the next century. (Just recently, New Orleans took down a monument to an act of outright seditious political violence.) Lynchings were acts of political violence. In the 1920s, anti-lynching bills couldn't even get out of committee in the Congress because the political power in the South needed lynchings to sustain itself. The destruction of thriving African-American communities in Greenwood in Tulsa and in Rosewood in Florida were both acts of political violence.
Right now the GOP controls all the branches of the Federal government, most of the states — and they’re playing the victim card for all its worth. Well Boo F***ing Hoo.
All of a sudden 8 years of total hostility, obstruction, and outright sabotage by the GOP is down the memory hole? The people showing up at Democratic events with handguns and rifles? The stand off at the Bundy Ranch? The Flint Water Crisis? There is violence being done in America every day, but the only time it seems to matter is when the GOP has some of their own in the crosshairs. All their outrage is about is silencing the victims. It is sanctimonious hypocrisy on steroids.
Conservatives have had no qualms about how to Make America Great Again — it’s always been about driving liberals out of power — or worse — and if that means eliminationism, they’re already on record in favor of it. David Neiwert looks at Rush Limbaugh in action, back in 2009
“The threat that people in this country who want to be free face is now within our own borders. That's the stark reality. We'll be back.”
Obama and the liberals are, in the land of the Limbaughst, the True Enemies of America.
If only Limbaugh really were "just an entertainer." Then we could dismiss him as a clown. But "entertainers" don't have audiences of "dittohead" acolytes who absorb their every word as gospel truth. "Entertainers" don't make condemnations of half the country as being the "enemy within" and actually stand -- and actually stand a chance of the other half nodding its head in agreement.
This, of course, is how you whip up violence: You scapegoat, you demonize, you dehumanize, and most of all, you paint a target on people's backs and say they're they Enemy. And you can't help but suspect Limbaugh is perfectly aware of this.
I devote a fair amount of space in The Eliminationists to Limbaugh. For a lot of reasons. Obviously, he's been doing this for awhile. But he's also stepping it up quite bit.
emphasis added
I will not be silenced. I will not apologize. I will not pull my punches. All I need to do to be a ‘dangerous angry liberal’ is to speak truth. If Republicans can’t deal with it, GOOD. If Republicans are in fear of their lives now, what did they expect when they declared war on liberals? They paint us as weak and ineffectual. Well to borrow a line from Donald Trump, it’s time for them to stop laughing at us.
Resist.
If you want a visual metaphor for how the GOP really regards America, here it is, all wrapped up in red, white and blue.
Frank Vyan Walton has a front-page piece up on this same topic: The state of my dangerous liberal rhetoric will remain strong and loud. Share and enjoy.