The Most Assholish Thing You Could Possibly Do Right Now

It is this: Out of spite and frustration and petty, intellectually dishonest inclinations, be a Democrat yet vote for a Bush-style candidate who endorses the Republican Party’s platform. Either you believe what you said you believed while Hillary Clinton was running, or you were full of shit the whole time. If you were full of shit the whole time, Sen. Clinton wasn’t worthy of your vote, and I feel sorry for her that she had supporters like you.

There is an enormous difference between parties. What happened to all the vitriol against the GOP, and the rhetoric of taking back our country? I guess now, because you’re sore losers, you like the Patriot Act and the way the Supreme Court has been shaping up. This is the legacy of my mother’s women’s movement? Dear god, I hope not. I wasn’t brought up this way.

Granted, there are very few of these people, but the media is making major hay out of them. From Rebecca Traister via Salon:

“This is where you see the civil war!” burbled Chris Matthews, experiencing near-asphyxiatory pleasure on an outdoor stage in the sweltering Denver heat, while behind him two competing groups, Obama supporters and the PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) backers of Hillary Clinton, chanted “Obama! Obama!” and “Hillary! Hillary!” at each other. Matthews looked as though he might wet himself as a camera panned the crowd, and he declared, “We’re at ground zero!”

Actually, he was about six blocks away from the Pepsi Center, the crowd behind him was probably no more than a hundred strong, and at least one of them was dressed as a toilet, (a gesture that seemed to have nothing to do with Clinton or Obama). But this is how media fantasy gets made, a miniature tableau of political discord, played out in front of a couple of well-placed television cameras and a television host who finds fetishistic, hyperbolic meaning in everything having to do with the defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her still-sore supporters.

… Next to them, a man in an Obama hat shouted, “You’re all irrelevant! Jesus!”

But irrelevant is not how the protesters will be portrayed by a media that has been salivating over the possible disruption of the Democratic convention — by angry, broom-riding succubi! — for weeks. Never mind that there were probably no more than 50 shouting PUMAs. Never mind that every national political convention in modern history becomes a locus for vocal agitators. Never mind that over the weekend, antiwar protests had been larger. Never mind that in three days in Denver I had not spotted a single PUMA or Hillary protester until I found where Chris Matthews was broadcasting. Never mind the guy in the toilet outfit. To hear Matthews, and the talking heads at CNN tell it, these demonstrators were “ground zero” in a rift that could potentially destroy the Democratic Party and ruin its national convention.

But at the same time, there are very real decisions being made right now as a result of the concern over Clinton’s sore losers, like whether to have the roll call publicly, as Traister goes on to discuss. It’s ridiculous because the majority of Clinton supporters are not fringy assholes like the PUMA folks. They’re reasonably proud of their candidate for getting this far and want to honor her. Now they might not be able to because the DNC is pussy-whipped by fear. And yes, I did use that term on purpose.

Ah. I feel better now. A good rant is always cleansing.

For more on these outer-limits people, click here.

liz | 2:34 PM | Uncategorized