Welcome all, to the first installment of Wingnut Watch. A diary series of as yet undetermined frequency, it will focus on exposing the day-to-day ravings of this great nation’s most prominent, frightening, entertaining, whackadoodle Rightwing crazies. Hat tip to John, who came up with the idea for the series.
Follow me, my Moosey friends…
From The Raw Story this morning comes this gem:
As if Americans needed any more reminders of how closely aligned with the Republican party the Fox News network is, New Year’s Eve brings us this new tidbit.
During it’s broadcast from New York City, the network encouraged viewers to send in text messages which, if approved by moderators, would scroll across the Fox ticker at the bottom of the screen.
Moderators, however, let this one slip: “HAPPY NEW YEAR AND LET’S HOPE THE MAGIC NEGRO DOES A GOOD JOB. LOVE JEN AND JOHN C.”
I realize that it was a viewer comment that “slipped by” a moderator, but still… c’mon, guys. Way to perpetuate your own stereotype!
From Dana Milbank at the Washington Post comes a disturbing, if not unsurprising, report:
The reception had been better in Clearwater, where Palin, speaking to a sea of “Palin Power” and “Sarahcuda” T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. “One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers,” she said. (“Boooo!” said the crowd.) “And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,’ ” she continued. (“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.)
“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.
Oh ho, and it gets even better!
cross-posted at Clintonistas for Obama and Obama–Criticism and Support
That’s what I call my paternal grandmother. Before I was born, my grandparents each chose what they wanted me to call them. My dad’s mom picked “Honey” because she said she’d never been called anything sweet before. That wasn’t strictly true, but she did have a difficult upbringing and an overbearing husband. She grew up as “poor white trash,” and why my grandfather married her, I’ll never know. Honey taught me a lot of things, as a kid and as an adult, but I don’t know that any of the lessons were good.
Sheltered though I was, I learned about sexism when I was a child, and my first experience with it was probably the most hurtful – though not the most damaging in terms of academic or professional advancement – because it was the most personal. When I was a young girl, I slowly began noticing that my paternal grandparents treated me rather differently than they treated my brother. He was cooed over and treasured in a way I hadn’t been, he was given attention and praise in a way I wasn’t. The differences seemed stark. At first, I couldn’t figure out why it should be so – why would I be treated differently when I was so pretty, so intelligent, far kinder, and more polite? What had I done wrong? Hurt and uncomprehending, I finally thought to ask my mother, who I could always trust to answer my naïve, innocent questions in the same way: Truthfully. Gently but bluntly, she explained that my father’s parents were children of the Depression and had been raised with an old Southern mentality that men were more valuable. My brother was more cherished, more loved, and more important in the eyes of my grandparents because he was the male heir, and because he would carry on the family name, whereas I, as a woman, would lose it when I married (in the old South, marriage was a question of when, not if). This was a difficult truth for a young overachiever to understand because it was something which had to be accepted rather than overcome; no amount of success on my part would ever make me equal.