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Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Savage Stupidity



I had a friend.  For the sake of protecting his privacy I’ll call him “Mark Pond.”  I liked Mark.  We had a lot in common.  We both loved science fiction.  We both still read comic books.  We both had cute kids (mine are totally cuter, though!).  And then I started paying attention to politics.

As I’ve mentioned before, my political awakening only came in the last few years.  Early 2008 to be precise.  I had quit my awful, short lived, management position at Blockbuster a few months before the birth of my first child and my wife and I had decided that I would work part time and be a stay at home dad.  She was making enough money for us to afford it and we had discussed it during the pregnancy.  Why work full time and pay most of my paycheck to have someone else raise my child?

As anyone with children of their own knows, newborns don’t do much other than sleep and eat (and poop and pee) so I found myself with a fair amount of down time.  So I started to read political websites.  A lot of political websites. 



I started reading political threads where very nasty battles were being waged and I noticed a trend: conservative were terrible at debating an issue but were very good at attacking their opponent.  I also noticed that this extended to the professional political arena as well. Republicans are awesome at breezing over an issue and launching attacks directly against the reputation of Democrats.

I became very familiar with the phrase “ad hominem”, which is undermining an argument by delegitimizing the person making it.  Sound familiar?  It’s the entire game plan of the GOP.  Obama is a scary secret Muslim who was illegally elected President so anything he says is suspect.  It’s like a Jedi mind trick; it only works on the weak-minded.  “This is not the health care reform you are looking for…”

The more I learned about conservatives and their lies, the more irritated I got that such a thing should be allowed to work in our Democracy.  So I started to post articles on my FB page in protest. 

Some of my family and friends are conservatives (poor bastards) and they took offense to some of what I said.  Some of them responded.  Mind you, I was still getting a grip on conservative positions and what they actually meant.  They’re so heavily coded and misleading that it takes some time to wade through the bullshit.  My early responses were sloppy and heavy handed.  Meh.  Have to start somewhere, right?

But then there was Mark.  Mark was super conservative.  Something I had been previously unaware of.  He mercilessly battered me about for a while.  It was annoying but useful.  I honed my arguing skills (on line at least) and better understood the issues.  He caught me good one time by asking if a President lying to Congress should be more than enough to impeach them. 

We had been discussing Bush and Iraq so I agreed.  He, of course, pounced on this as a Clinton bashing and “both sides do bad things” moment.  I was totally thrown off guard.  It occurred to me much later than equating lying about blow jobs with lying a country into a war that has caused the death of thousands of American soldier and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Iraqi civilians was quite possibly the stupidest version of the “both sides” meme argument I’ve ever heard.  But, like I said, I was learning.

About this time the Fat Smug Bastard started to chime in on my threads with Mark.  Being a liberal himself, the FSB felt it was incumbent upon him to lend a hand at debunking conservative garbage.  That was a nice surprise, I hadn’t know he was a hard core liberal.  Although, according to the Smug One, he had discussed politics with me on several occasions, during all of which I rolled my eyes and tuned him out.  Entirely plausible but unsubstantiated. 

It was also somewhat relieving.  Arguing with the FSB is a tiresome exercise, there’s a reason he’s called “smug” and a “bastard”.  Further, it was extremely convenient because the FSB is also a committed Catholic.  While I am familiar with the major religions (and some of the minor), he could quote chapter and verse.  Watching him dissect a follower of Republican Jesus™ is funny as hell.  Mark, unfortunately, was such a person.  Also something I had been unaware of.

So we went on for a while in the following pattern:  I, or the FSB, would post a liberal article or comment and Mark would complain.  One of us would rebut and he would start taking offense.  Did I mention conservatives LIVE to take offense to a perceived liberal insult? 

It’s a classic tactic designed to make you apologize for hurting their feelings and concede ground.  That works on the fluffy bunny “let’s all get along” crowd.  I am not one of those.  Neither is the FSB.  We’re more of the rabid wolverine “lie to me and I’ll gut you like a fish” crowd.  Mark started getting “insulted” a whole lot and quitting the conversation on a regular basis.  Then he would be back on a different post complaining about something new.  Rinse, repeat.

Then, in June of 2009, I read a Media Matters post about Michael “I’m ashamed to be Jewish” Savage, nee Michael Alan Weiner.  The day before, Mr. Weiner stated that “The white Christian heterosexual married male is the epitome of everything right with America” Oddly enough, I was disgusted by this.  And yet, Mark actually defended this piece of filth.  I believe his words were “What did he say that was wrong or untrue?”

My mouth was literally hanging open that someone I was friends with could not immediately denounce this as one of the most offensive things a person could say.  I confronted him, with a great deal of hostility, about the underlying premise of the statement.  If the white Christian heterosexual married male is the epitome of everything right with America then anything not fitting that description was automatically lesser. 

With me being an atheist of Puerto Rican and Jewish descent, I asked him, did he think he was better than me?  And how, exactly, was he better?  He was instantly offended and avoided answering the question.  When pressed on the point he became hostile and abandoned the thread.

“Wow.  I can’t believe I’m friends with an honest to goodness bigot” I thought.

Not one to let such a thing go, my engagements with Mark became uglier.  Now that I had a good solid peek under the hood, so to speak, I understood what he was about.  I kept pushing until he also coughed up a gem of stupidity that I “should get a real job.”  Because raising children and keeping house apparently doesn’t count in the world of manly conservatism. 

When I asked him if his wife knew how little he valued her contributions to the family, he got offended and dropped the thread.  Satisfied I had made my point I defriended him.  There didn’t seem to be any point in continuing to associate with someone so filled with hate who thought I was inferior.

The Fat Smug Bastard hung in there for another six months, though.  He had known Mark longer than I had and was less willing to walk away from their friendship, mutually antagonistic as it was.  He also held onto the vain hope that Mark was not lost.  It was like watching a car crash in slow motion or watching a friend develop a mental illness and be powerless to stop it. 

Mike became nastier and nastier, more dedicated to Fox News’ brand of paranoia and hate.  The FSB finally threw the towel in when Mark signed a petition against gay marriage and the FSB, being gay, lost it.  I was not privy to that conversation but I’m to understand it ended about the time Mark started to claim he was the superior believer because he went forth and multiplied as the Lord commanded and the FSB could never do that. 

Or something imbecilic along those lines.  The FSB was so offended that a friend of his could relegate him to the status of a second class citizen based on his cherry picked understanding of the Bible he defriended him as well.

I knew it was coming but the FSB hadn’t wanted to believe Mark had fallen so far.  It was blindingly obvious to me that anyone so drunk on Fox News would eventually denounce homosexuality.  It’s all part and parcel of the Culture Wars and if you swallow part of it, you have to swallow all of it or risk the foundation of your sand castle ideology collapsing.

Sometimes I feel bad for Mark’s wife and kids since he promised to brainwash them into being conservatives so they couldn’t grow up to be liberals (his words, not mine).  It’s a perfect example of hate being passed on to the next generation. 

Really, it’s a form of child abuse and, yes, that is precisely what I mean.  Teaching your children to despise the poor, the gay, the nonwhite, those of another faith or even different political ideology IS abuse.  The more offended you are by that statement, the more likely it is that that is exactly what you are doing.  You should be ashamed of yourself.

The moral of this story?  Friends don’t let friends watch Fox News.

Author Justin Rosario is a filthy liberal scum who enjoys making hate filled right wingers cry. Follow him on twitter @FilthyLbrlScum or on Facebook at Left Wing Nation