In this era of internet journalism and, I dunno, social networking and stuff, it’s easy to just get one side of a story. Were it not for my ironic readings of Tea Party Nation newsletters, Ross “Defense of Racism” Douthat and World Net Daily, my understanding of world events would be entirely dictated by the New York Times and Andrew Sullivan. That’s hardly a balanced scale, and I suspect that my weighing of certain issues has been less than accurate as a result. But say what you will about the internet—seriously, say whatever the hell you want—a little digging will usually give you the mirror image of what you just learned. This Friday’s link roundup is chock full of instances when the internet refutes itself, exposing the stupidity of the self-published and smugly answering the rhetorical questions of the stupid. We’ve also got Juggalos so, you know, buckle up.
If you haven’t gotten enough white ladies saying stupid stuff about racism, you’ll be glad to know that Sarah Palin has leapt to her defense via Twitter. I’ve said it before, but Twitter is to Sarah Palin as the
aphorism is to Friedrich Nietzsche.* In a tone-deaf display of cultural solidarity, Palin wrote:
Dr.Laura:don’t retreat…reload! (Steps aside bc her 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence”isn’t American,not fair”)
My favorite Palin tweets are the ones that degenerate into spaceless gobbledygook at the end. Pretty much every idea in this statement is hilarious, beginning with her bizarre shoehorning of the “don’t retreat…reload!” catchphrase. In this context, her advice seems to be that Dr. Laura should get another radio show and say the n-word a bunch of times on that one, too. I also question Palin’s assertion that her First Amendment rights have “ceased 2exist” just because we’re asking people to take responsibility for their public statements. I take it that’s supposed to be my voice inside the quotation marks.
For once, though, actual Republicans are criticizing Palin for her stupidity. Guy-who-gives-his-business-card-to-your-girlfriend-at-a-party John Avlon has compiled a handy roundup of black Republican backlash—blackla$h!—at Palin’s knee-jerk defense of the racist white person. Michael Faulkner, of all people—he’s the former NFL player angling for Charlie Rangel’s House seat in Harlem—puts it most cleanly. “It says that a leading voice among conservatives has joined the ranks of the entertainers—trying to shock us each day with more and more outlandish commentary,” he told Avlon. “And at that moment that person is no longer fit to lead.”
The political wing of the conservative moment has no patience for crackpot commentary and intellectually dishonest arguments. And I am Marie of Romania. Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, published this essay at World Net Daily, in which he demands to know why liberals have been “falling all over themselves” to defend the Ground Zero Mosque when St. Nicholas Church still hasn’t been rebuilt. That particular house of worship, destroyed when the towers collapsed, has become a favored counterexample of the anti-mosque crowd. Phillips asks:
Why is Mayor Bloomberg so anxious to build this mosque, which will probably be filled with people who hate America, and yet this tiny church, which flew the American flag right to the end, cannot be rebuilt? Someone please explain this to me. I simply don’t get it.
Your wish is granted, asshole. The Port Authority gave St. Nicholas $20 million to build another, bigger church nearby, but the deal foundered when church leaders tacked on a series of additional demands. America-hatin’ liberal Mike Bloomberg didn’t so much favor a mosque over a church as he gave the church millions of dollars and simply allowed the construction of the mosque, but whatever. It’s a clear instance of liberal elite bias in favor of organizations that agree to sign their building contracts.
I don’t know about you, but all this hypocrisy has irritated the fudge out of me.*
I need some culture to unwind, and not just any culture will do. I need American culture: specifically, two opposite ends of the spectrum of American culture that, paradoxically, seem to converge in their retardedness. Fortunately, Tila Tequila has been attacked by juggalos. I still don’t understand why she is famous—she had a bunch of Myspace friends, right? and then she posed in Playboy? and then there was a reality show, and now apparently she is a singer?—but somehow her agent booked her to play the Gathering of the Juggalos, not realizing that she is the girl who personally tormented pretty much every one of those people in high school. The results were predictable, in that A) juggalos threw stuff at Tila Tequila and B) she tried to win back the crowd by taking her shirt off. Seriously.
My initial response was that Tila Tequila is an idiot, but she didn’t deserve to pelted with water bottles and, by some reports, urine balloons. Then I read Nathan Rabin’s firsthand account in The AV Club, and I’m not so sure. Rabin’s contention that Tequila “might be the worst woman in the world” seems extreme until you scroll down to the video of the event, which features her rapping. By “rapping” I mean her yelling “what?” and “bitch!” and talking about having sex with DJs while some horribly tinny beat plays in the background. Again, I do not support the urine-ballooning of women by clowns. If it is ever implemented, though, this behavior should be the crime covered in the statute.
