Janeane Garofolo Explains America

Actress and liberal political activist Janeane Garofalo said, in all seriousness, that the hundreds of thousands of people across the nation who attended the Wednesday "tea party" protests are racists with dysfunctional brains.

"Let's be very honest about what this is about. This is not about bashing Democrats. It's not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea Party was about. They don't know their history at all. It's about hating a black man in the White House," she said on MSNBC's "The Countdown" with Keith Olbermann on Thursday evening.

"This is racism straight up and is nothing but a bunch
of teabagging rednecks. There is no way around that," she
insisted.

On the radio this morning I heard some people saying they were going to quit watching 24, where Garofolo plays a minor role, because of her offensive comments.

I don’t feel that way myself on general principles. For one thing, I’m not going to start vetting every show I watch for the political outlook of the actors. If I did I'd have nothing left to watch but Walker, Texas Ranger, and old Law & Order episodes with Angie Harmon.

As to Garofolo being on 24, I’ve wondered how she ended up there, as her part could have been played by many other actresses equally suitable. My guess is that Joel Sarnow was trying to make a point that he’ll hire actors regardless of their politics, in contrast to the kind of Hollywood purging that, some believe, keeps outspoken conservatives from getting work on liberal sets. He also may have had an evangelistic motive, thinking Garafolo might benefit from working outside her Air America bubble for a while.

Based on her Olbermann apperance, it hasn’t worked so far.

'Bush 7, Terrorists 0'

Bush 7, Terrorists 0

Ann Coulter
Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Morose that there hasn't been another terrorist attack on American soil for seven long years, liberals were ecstatic when Hurricane Gustav was headed toward New Orleans during the Republican National Convention last week. The networks gave the hurricane plenty of breaking-news coverage -- but unfortunately it was Hurricane Katrina from 2005 they were covering.
On Keith Olbermann's Aug. 29 show on MSNBC, Michael Moore said the possibility of a Category 3 hurricane hitting the United States "is proof that there is a God in heaven." Olbermann responded: "A supremely good point."

Actually, Olbermann said that a few minutes later to some other idiotic point Moore had made, but that's how Moore would have edited the interview for one of his "documentaries," so I will, too. I would only add that Michael Moore's morbid obesity is proof that there is a Buddha.
Hurricane Gustav came and went without a hitch. What a difference a Republican governor makes!

As many have pointed out, the reason elected officials tend to neglect infrastructure projects, like reinforcing levees in New Orleans and bridges in Minneapolis, is that there's no glory when a bridge doesn't collapse. There are no round-the-clock news specials when the levees hold. You can't even name an overpass retrofitting project after yourself -- it just looks too silly. But everyone's taxes go up to pay for the reinforcements.

Preventing another terrorist attack is like that. There is no media coverage when another 9/11 doesn't happen. We can thank God that President George Bush didn't care about doing the safe thing for himself; he cared about keeping Americans safe. And he has, for seven years.

If Bush's only concern were about his approval ratings, like a certain impeached president I could name, he would not have fought for the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. He would not have resisted the howling ninnies demanding that we withdraw from Iraq, year after year. By liberals' own standard, Bush's war on terrorism has been a smashing, unimaginable success.

A year after the 9/11 attack, The New York Times' Frank Rich was carping about Bush's national security plans, saying we could judge Bush's war on terror by whether there was a major al-Qaida attack in 2003, which -- according to Rich -- would have been on al-Qaida's normal schedule.

Rich wrote: "Since major al-Qaida attacks are planned well in advance and have historically been separated by intervals of 12 to 24 months, we will find out how much we've been distracted soon enough." ("Never Forget What?" New York Times, Sept. 14, 2002.)

There wasn't a major al-Qaida attack in 2003. Nor in 2004, 2005, 2006 or 2007. Manifestly, liberals thought there would be: They announced a standard of success that they expected Bush to fail.

As Bush has said, we have to be right 100 percent of the time, the terrorists only have to be right one time. Bush has been right 100 percent of the time for seven years -- so much so that Americans have completely forgotten about the threat of Islamic terrorism.

For his thanks, President Bush has been the target of almost unimaginable calumnies -- the sort of invective liberals usually reserve for seniors who don't separate their recyclables properly. Compared to liberals' anger at Bush, there has always been something vaguely impersonal about their "anger" toward the terrorists.

By my count, roughly one in four books in print in the world at this very moment have the words "Bush" and "Lie" in their title. Barnes & Noble has been forced to add an "I Hate Bush" section. I don't believe there are as many anti-Hitler books.

Despite the fact that Hitler brought "change," promoted clean, energy-efficient mass transit by making the trains run on time, supported abortion for the non-master races, vastly expanded the power of the national government and was uniformly adored by college students and their professors, I gather that liberals don't like Hitler because they're constantly comparing him to Bush.

The ferocity of the left's attacks on Bush even scared many of his conservative allies into turning on him over the war in Iraq.

George Bush is Gary Cooper in the classic western "High Noon." The sheriff is about to leave office when a marauding gang is coming to town. He could leave, but he waits to face the killers as all his friends and all the townspeople, who supported him during his years of keeping them safe, slowly abandon him. In the end, he walks alone to meet the killers, because someone has to.
That's Bush. Name one other person in Washington who would be willing to stand alone if he had to, because someone had to.

OK, there is one, but she's not in Washington yet. Appropriately, at the end of "High Noon," Cooper is surrounded by the last two highwaymen when, suddenly, his wife (Grace Kelly) appears out of nowhere and blows away one of the killers! The aging sheriff is saved by a beautiful, gun-toting woman.

How Obama Spun O’Reilly

“I think history will show [that Iraq’s] the wrong battlefield, okay? And I think that you were perspicacious in your original assessment of the battlefield.” -- Bill O’Reilly during his interview with Barack Obama. (3:41.)

Right after Governor Palin’s shots heard ‘round the world on Wednesday, Barack Obama decided to relent in his boycott of Fox News and sit for an interview with Bill O’Reilly.

Some accused Barack of doing it when he did to bogart John McCain’s acceptance speech on Thursday. I don’t believe so, as the interview ran more than 90 minutes before McCain spoke, and Obama’s advisors would have known that.

But I do believe Barack made the decision in direct response to being so badly exposed by the Axis of Cheerful on Wednesday night (Giuliani--Thompson--Palin) as a man whose election would be as effective a guarantee of foreign and domestic policy disaster as the country can imagine.

I also believe that Barack knew that he had little to fear from O’Reilly. I’m sure Barack’s decision to grant a mutual audience with O’Reilly had been vetted long before he finally agreed to face him, with full reassurances from his crack political analysts that O’Reilly--in spite of being the figurehead of all the fascist lineup at Fox News--had plenty enough blind spots to allow Obama to escape serious damage. There simply are things that O’Reilly doesn’t get, and Iraq is one of them.

As seen above from O’Reilly’s words when he raised the topic of Iraq, it turns out that the most powerful man at Fox News holds the identical opinion that Iraq is “the wrong war at the wrong time” as Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Nancy Pelosi. How could O’Reilly possibly confront Obama effectively about the latter’s policy judgments on Iraq when he shares the same errors himself? Obama knew all this about O'Reilly in advance, because O'Reilly's been repeating his "wrong battlefield" opinions for a couple years now. Obama had no fears that on the one foreign policy issue on which he is most vulnerable, he would risk nothing by facing O’Reilly.

Can you imagine anyone who understands the peril we face from global Islamic jihadism describing Barack Obama as “perspicacious”? Did I really hear O'Reilly say that after all the sturm und drang our country has been through over Iraq, Barack Obama was the only one who got it right?

O’Reilly also blew it when he let go unchallenged Obama’s statement that Iran was not part of the same network of Islamic enemies that America has been trying to respond to since 9/11--merely because there are differences between Shia and Sunni. Nor did he slap down Obama’s ridiculous contention that the Bush administration hasn’t been working hard enough with the Europeans when it comes to Iran. Both statements were demonstrably false, and they went by unchallenged.

World Upside Down?

Now we can’t talk about the Kennedy assassinations?

I have to say I’m just not getting it about Hillary’s reference to Bobby Kennedy, even though she’s getting criticized for it from both left and right.

Here's what she said in an interview:

Asked if her continuing fight for the nomination against Senator Obama hurts the Democratic party, Sen. Hillary Clinton replied, "I don't. Because again, I've been around long enough. You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know, I just don't understand it. You know, there's lots of speculation about why it is. "

Keith Olbermann, never hinged enough to now call unhinged, used Hillary’s foo poo as an opportunity to restate the ever-narrowing limits on free speech that we American’s are required to respect:

"The politics of this nation is steeped enough in blood, Senator Clinton, you cannot and must not invoke that imagery! Anywhere! At any time!"

Sounds reasonable. I know I’m always glad to update my Index of Forbidden Speech with the latest image, word, phrase, allusion, or historical event that I’m not allowed to use, Anywhere! At Any Time!

(Here in Detroit they had a very moving funeral for the n-word--never again anywhere! at any time!-- it was presided over by the embattled Mayor--except he dug up the term 2 months later when he needed it to throw around at his State of the City address.)

It's not only Obama's surrogates who are trying to turn Hillary's remark into a Big Deal. At Hot Air, they’re skeptical about Clinton’s defense that she was only referring to the historical fact that previous Democratic primaries have extended into June. If that's the case, they wonder, then “Why didn’t she use Teddy’s run at Jimmy Carter in 1980 instead?” (Here's one answer: maybe because no one remembers Teddy’s 1980 campaign, while all liberals recognize RFK in 1968 as an Icon).

Then Michelle Malkin says “Stick a fork in her. She may, at long last, be done.”

Chris Wallace told Terry McAullife on Sunday the remarks were “tasteless and ghoulish...even to use the word ‘assassination.’” Ghoulish? Even to use the word? Between the two, McAullife made more sense.

Which, of course, is The World Turned Upside Down!

No, I’m afraid I just don’t get this one.

I learned the hard way in chat room debates that once you have to start diagramming declarative sentences, all hope for rational discussion is gone. I also figured out that 90% of intellectual errors in this country are caused by poor reading comprehension.

Suffice it to say I’ve read Hillary’s statement several times, and watched the video, and I find no place that she ever “invoked” RFK’s assassination, (“mention” and “invoke” are not synonyms). Nor did I see where she either threatened Obama with assassination, nor expressed a hope that he be murdered.

Hell, I can’t even find where she said anything clumsy, stupid, or ghoulish. RFK was still in the California primary in June 1968, wasn’t he? (That is, until you-know-what happened. Or am I still allowed to say that?)

I just don’t see the offensiveness in this. But I admit I’m out of touch these days. Maybe this really was the most horrible thing anyone’s said, since, say, “God damn America.”

Apparently, a lot of us are willing to accept the Left’s extra-low threshold for imputing malevolent meaning into remarks that only tangentially touch upon a subject someone's willing to be hypersensitive about. Maybe conservatives are jumping on this too because they’ve got a version of the same derangement about Hillary the Left has had about George W. Bush the last 7 years: give us something, anything, and we'll use it to prove her diabolical pedigree.

But when did “assassination” become off limits? Who exactly is the victim group here? On whose behalf must Sharpton obtain an apology? The Kennedys?

Besides, liberals have been openly advocating Bush’s and Cheney's assassinations for years.

My complaint is that by granting to the Left, and through them the media, the power to impute malevolent meaning into neutral words, the heavier the control of free thought they can exercise. And controlling thought means a lot more to them than merely controlling free speech. You’ll never dare say what you don’t dare think.

When this power was granted to the Left in regards to race, they promptly used it to forbid white Americans from discussing race, even amongst themselves, except under the strict rules laid down by a civil-rights priesthood ordained, and carefully controlled, by the Left.

(And that's why we still can’t have a conversation about race, in spite of Obama’s ad hoc suggestion that we must have one: because a conversation is impossible when one side is forbidden to speak on the subject matter).

The Left has seized power in a similar way to limit thought about homosexuality, about abortion, and now, about the science fiction of global warming.

I have no interest in defending Hillary or her campaign. I see this as defending myself, and all the rest of us who still value what’s left of our right to free speech. And my right to not have any obstreperous son of a bitch telling me what I can and cannot say, Anywhere! At Any Time!