The Daily Show.
Last night.
Oh my goodness (following the link, b/c every damn thing from Comedy Central auto-starts whether I want it to or not.)
They will never get over the War of Northern Aggression because their horrible ideology does not permit them to get over it. But at least most charter members of the Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair are usually bright enough to keep their lodge tyled and to avoid taking their feculent pompadours out for a stroll among decent people in all its reeking glory.
Usually.
And while it is always richly entertaining to see Fox News goofs like Andrew Napolitano trip over their own dicks every time they wander off the back lot of Roger Ailes' Pandemonium Carnival and into traffic, Talking Points Memo gets one crucial fact about this story completely wrong:
...Sorry, TPM, but in Conservatism's Long War against Fact-Based Reality, it is never "game over".
Slowly but surely, the scholars debunked Napolitano's arguments, from the idea that slavery was dying to the claim that the government could have purchased all slaves from the South.
"[The South] shot first," quipped James Oakes of the City University of New York, "and you don't mess with Lincoln."
Finally, it was game over when Napolitano tried to claim Lincoln himself used federal marshals to chase down escaped slaves.
...
5 comments:
Just as an aside, the hysterical ninnies at dailykos.com are putting themselves through yet another round of purges.
The set that not six months ago was merrily burning witches and hounding leftie wrong thinkers with charges of PAID NSA SHILL REPUBLICAN AUTHORITARIAN INFILTRATOR!!!@!a!1 now finds itself with the shoe on the other foot, and it pinches.
Having insisted, for months on end, that THERE IS NO BULLYING ON THE DAILY KOS!!!!! they suddenly find it convenient to launch thoughtful discussions about bullying. In the sense that they are being bullied by the admins who at long last have started saying "knock it off, your stupid conspiracy theories make us all look bad."
One especially ineffectual pseudo radical glibbertarian has fallen on his sword in a manner inadvertently calculated to invoke the French Revolution: the guillotiners going to the guillotine.
On the one hand, if you wait long enough on the riverbank the body of your enemy will float by.
On the other hand, your tears are delicious. Cry, motherfucker, cry.
Spot on. It's a wonderful segment, but as usual, when it comes to true conservatives, facts will never convince them. The segment may win over those who are undecided and sane, but unfortunately, its main usefulness is yet another litmus test for determining the stupid, evil and crazy.
(But we've rarely been lacking for litmus tests… It’ll be mildly interesting but not surprising to see the conservative spin on this, to the extent they acknowledge it at all. Changing the subject? Splitting hairs and pedantry? Outright denial? Rage? All of the above?)
(Hmm, whose knitted brow is that in the banner? It looks a bit like Nathan Fillion's.)
That treatment of the subject still among my favorite DG writings. Thx for staying with it--makes way too much sense.
I had to watch this to believe that "Napolitano tried to claim Lincoln himself used federal marshals to chase down escaped slaves."
I read online that Napolitano went to Princeton, which happens to be where Prof. James M. McPherson teaches history. Civil War history is one of my hobbies and when the Professor's acclaimed single treatise ob the war, Battle Cry of Freedom came out in 1988 I devoured it.
Nowhere in this work, which really takes a penetrating look at slavery as the issue at the heart of the war, is there the slightest suggestion that Lincoln did anything even remotely like what Napolitano claims.
So, I have to ask myself, is Napolitano (1) a lying sack of sh*t who will say anything in support the current neo-confederate infatuation of the Right, no matter how hopelessly wrong and ridiculous it is as a matter of fact; or (2) a f*cking ignoramus who is delusional into the bargain?
I now put Napolitano in the same class as Antonin Scalia: a lunatic right wing shitbag who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near our justice system.
I think that's one of the most perfect paragraphs I've read in a long time.
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