by Greg Gutfeld
Yeah, right. The media saw the whole thing as comical. Who were these funny old people, and where did they come from? Some of them look like stunt doubles from late-night Hoveround commercials.
It became clear that tolerance for speaking truth to power only exists if it’s the power the media dislikes. Sure, you can laugh when an Iraqi throws a shoe at President Bush, but you’d better not call a Democratic congressman on the carpet. And worse, you’d better not question the imperatives of President Obama—the media’s Jesus, whose religion, of course, is big government. It’s the only religion the media seems to really fear (besides Islam).
Which is why, on some networks, you’d find a mocking smirk play on the faces of those reporting on the events. When these protests grew into Tea Party events, so did the media’s disdain for them. Remember CNN’s Susan Roesgen at a Chicago Tea Party back in 2009, accusing the crowd of hating her network, and interrupting the very people she came to interview? After getting nailed for it, CNN was forced to respond. A spokesperson named Christa Robinson said of Susan, “She was doing her job, and called it like she saw it.”
Yeah, that’s the problem. To quote Madge the manicurist describing how Palmolive softens your hands as you do the dishes, you don’t notice the bias, because, “you’re soaking in it.”
Why were the media so hard on the Tea Parties and the folks at the town halls? Well, the media loves it when a story matches their assumptions perfectly. And that story always starts and ends with race.
Fact is, the moment you bothered to question Obama, simply by questioning the bill, you were a hater—of black presidents, old people, infants, and ferrets. The health care bill was supposed to be good for us, and we refused to see it because of our unconscious hatred for anything different.
Or black.
And so if you didn’t support Obama’s massive health care overhaul, you were pretty much rejecting peace, love, and understanding. The idea of tolerance only applies to those who blindly follow the new agenda. But even more vile, your right to critically ask questions became inextricably linked to an undercurrent of bigotry: you hate health care reform because Obama is black. After all, most of these protests were filled with older white folk—certainly they must hate a black man. By using repressive tolerance as a weapon, many in the media were effectively trying to silence those who simply were expressing themselves over a messy, horrible bill that even liberals like Nancy Pelosi admit they didn’t read (can’t say I blame her—hard to move those eyes when they’re stuck in one position). These were the most benign protesters in the history of protesting, yet they were portrayed as an army of Archie Bunkers.
So if you want to see intolerance masked as tolerance, witness how the media treated the first real protest movement in years. If that uprising had been a liberal one, it would have garnered complete, slavish coverage, complete with tears, embedded reporters, and over-the-top documentaries. There would have been analogies to the sixties, profiles of the participants, celebrity visits, and journalistic defectors.
And it did. That uprising did take place a few years later, in the form of Occupy Wall Street. The media took to it like basmati on rice. Hilariously, the media identified with the protests, and were more than willing to pay them the respect they refused to afford the health care protesters or those folks at the Tea Party events. But because the Tea Partiers were not young leftists, not under or over grads, or completely ignorant of the entire Rage Against the Machine discography, they were mocked.
Probably the most insidious part of all this is that the Tea Partiers were new to the world of political agitprop. Unlike those who agitated for animal rights, or at the WTO protests, these folks worked for a living. Amazingly, the media chose to mock those who for the first time in their lives left their living rooms to carry a sign. Meanwhile, they backed the clichéd establishment protester, the career sign-carrier, the one who protests for anything or everything as long as its motto somehow denigrates America. You would think the media would have been more tolerant to the newbies, and would have grown tired of the sameness of the predictable hacks that came before. Not on your life.
It’s why, to this day, in movies, you will never find an academic portrayed as a socialist propagandist. It’s why in any TV series, you will never find a journalist portrayed as a left-wing hack with preconceived notions about the innate badness of our country. You will never ever see a conservative who isn’t batshit crazy. You will never see a Christian who doesn’t want to jail gays (or isn’t secretly gay himself). Even though all of those examples are far more real than anything you’ll find being pumped out of Hollywood, or what Andrew Breitbart accurately called “the complex.”
This is because all of these examples—all representing a make-believe world where common sense reigns—cannot be tolerated. The town hall protesters and the Tea Partiers represented everything that the media had been ridiculing for the last forty years. They were their parents. These virgin protesters represented the media’s narrow-minded stereotypes of idiot Americans previously fabricated in classrooms. The Tea Party was just another example of the racist, closed-minded asshole. Now he’s off the recliner and in the street. And God and Abbie Hoffman help us—there are a lot of them. A flabby, gray army.
Compare that to how the media portrayed the union protesters in Wisconsin, where ghoulish signs and aggressive behavior were “tolerated,” because they were up against those who hate the “working man.” Never mind that those who were up against the unions were also “working men,” who grossly outnumber the sliver of the population belonging to public unions. They were deemed offensive because they were taking food, health care, and paychecks from struggling teachers. Teachers who have the whole summer off. It’s an intriguing contrast: As long as you’re on the side of those deemed most tolerant, you can pretty much act any way you want. If only I had known this earlier, I would have fully embraced leftism and become a protester, and I’d probably be having sex right now in a tent with a girl named after a flower. Or a guy. I’m sure, at that point, it won’t matter. I’ll have already ingested the bath salts.
THE VAGINA DEMAGOGUES
HERE’S A JOKE: Why did the feminist cross the road? Because the pedestrian light turned green and opposing traffic had stopped, making the distance traveled perfectly safe. (By law, all feminist jokes cannot be funny.)
Anyway, as you probably already know, feminists demand apologies over insults to women they like, but drag their heels if the victim herself isn’t part of the feminist brood. In a strange kind of mental contortionism, the concept of tolerance demands that you accept intolerant slander.
And this slander is spewing from people who, by proclaiming themselves feminists, get the FFP from the media. The Feminist Free Pass is the most insidious form of tolerance: as long as you toe the progressive line, you can be a FOP (a Full-On Pig). The most obvious offender was Bill Clinton, who proved that as long as you accept all the feminist tenets, you can treat women who aren’t your wife as receptacles for your errant, undisciplined sperm. If you’re a progressive, you can be the Johnny Appleseed of sexual conquest—from randy politicians like Teddy Kennedy, to celebrities who speak about women’s rights while banging drugged-up teens in hot tubs (see Roman Polanski). But what I find most entertaining, of course, is how celebrities, talking heads, and assorted brainless activists can unload vicious vitriol on anyone who may not fall in line with their political assumptions—and get away with it.
Let us not forget America’s favorite rapist, Mike Tyson, who on ESPN radio brought down the house one day with his cogent analysis of what it would be like to manhandle Sarah Palin.
We won’t quote the maniac in full, because it’s gross. On the program, the hosts nimbly brought up a rumor about Palin. The conversation turned toward the wholesome, as Tyson figured Palin needed a stronger lover. He’s like a therapist! With a rape conviction!
My point: imagine, if you will, a conservative athlete had said the same thing about, say, Miche
lle Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, or Hillary Clinton. Everyone at ESPN would have been fired. Especially since most of them were guffawing like pimply-faced teens in homeroom. But we can forgive them, for their hearts are in the right place. They’re libs. And so, instead, here in the primordial slime that spawned Keith Olbermann, they got a pass. Modern tolerance dictates that a liberal—even one that was convicted of rape like Tyson—gets away with this muck because his target is so reviled for being who she is. And who is she? Just a conservative chick who dared to challenge their anointed flag-bearer, Barack Obama.
Now, it’s hard to find someone who’s lower than Mike Tyson on the food chain. In fact, you’d have to venture into the animal world. I’d vote for maybe a mole, or perhaps some kind of hermaphroditic worm—so luckily there’s Larry Flynt. If Larry were a conservative, it would be perfectly acceptable to make light of his paralysis—he was shot, and now gets around town sunk in an expensive electric wheelchair. But since the man—famous for a cover featuring a nude woman dropped in a blender—is for women’s rights (I’m fairly certain that boils down to letting chicks degrade themselves in Hustler), he’s now a folk hero with an Oscar-nominated movie about him. The great thing about tolerance: You can create the most vile pornography on the planet, and Hollywood will fall at your feet—in the name of … tolerance! Hence, he can get away with saying this about Palin and her disabled child:
[Palin] did a disservice to every woman in America. She knew from the first month of pregnancy that kid was going to be Down’s syndrome. It’s brain-dead. A virtual vegetable. She carries it to all these different political events against abortion; she did it just because she didn’t want to say she’d had an abortion. How long is it going to live? Another twelve, fifteen years? Doesn’t even know it’s in this world. So what kind of compassionate conservative is she? I don’t think anybody will want her near the White House.
You have to admit, it’s staggering seeing a vegetable calling someone else a vegetable. If Larry Flynt had come across Larry Flynt after the shooting, he would have smothered him with a pillow. So why does a legendary pervert who once had sex with a chicken (it’s in his memoir) see fit to say such things? Because he can. A champion of FFP and a victim of LBSS (or Liberal Blind Spot Syndrome), he has lost all context of what’s considered appropriate language about women or children. I suppose if I said I’d love to wheel him off a cliff because his life is not worth living, I’d have to retract that statement and apologize quickly. So I won’t.
We’ve gotten to a place where a well-respected columnist can fabricate the most elaborate fantasies about Sarah Palin, because, well, he can. While we ridicule (and by “we” I mean myself and my slew of honeygliders that live in a cage under my bed) the birther conspiracies about President Obama or 9/11 truthers, the same cannot be said for the insanity spewing from Daily Beast columnist Andrew Sullivan’s addled brain. He was once a promising writer but he got comfortable. After surrounding himself with Palin-haters, he threw his hairy body full force into the craziest of theories—the kind that would get you institutionalized if you didn’t have a famous byline. To recap, here is Sullivan’s take on her baby Trig:
The medical term for Down syndrome is Trisomy-21 or Trisomy-g. It is often shortened in medical slang to Tri-g. Is it not perfectly possible that the very name given to this poor child, being reared by Bristol, is another form of mockery of his condition, along with the retarded baby tag? And does the way in which this poor child was hauled around the country on a book tour, being dragged out in front of flash photographs in the middle of the night, barely clothed, suggest someone who actually cares for children with special needs, or rather sees them as a way to keep the spotlight on her?
Um, so wait. It’s not just you mocking the child, it’s actually the parents! Well, that gets you off the hook, uh, I guess. Worse than this quivering analysis (almost joyous in its brutality) is that it’s excusable by the usually sensitive left. You can tolerate everything I suppose, including not tolerating a mom who decides to give birth and raise a child with challenges. Don’t you think this is slightly weird coming from a gay man? I mean, given the fact that homosexuals were some of the first to be exterminated in any attempt at a “pure race,” you’d think he’d support Palin for sticking to her own beliefs about all life being sacred. Guess not, especially if all your tolerant friends just find the whole damn thing perfectly hysterical. And by “friends,” I mean the Greek chorus of liberal blog-readers who echo your every synaptic spasm when they should be doing their freshman English homework. I’ve only met Sullivan once, but I’m kinda certain he’s off his rocker, although I’m sure he’d tell you he’s damned if he’s not tolerant. And Obama describes his analysis as brilliant.
Which brings me to Keith Olbermann, the most tolerant man in the universe, provided you agree with his own intolerant idiocy. There may be no man on the planet more filled with joyous adolescent hate for women. The things he’s said about Michelle Malkin (a lipsticked pig, as he so fondly called her) alone qualify him for the Douchebag Hall of Fame.
But for some odd reason he focused on a not-so-famous writer who’s appeared on my show countless times, S. E. Cupp. Here’s what he had to say about Ms. Cupp, a truly awful, reprehensible, doesn’t-deserve-to-live person (I kid the Cupp—she wears really cute glasses).
On so many levels [S. E. Cupp’s] a perfect demonstration of the necessity of the work Planned Parenthood does.
“On so many levels”? What a delightful way of denigrating women! Essentially, it boils down to this: I hate the fact that you’re a conservative female so much that you should have been aborted! So where does this vitriol come from, in Olby’s case?
It’s pretty simple: Cupp is a very smart and very capable person who would never sleep with something as grotesque as Olbermann. If you asked Cupp, my guess is she’d rather sleep with a mummified sea urchin. And who can blame her? This could explain why Olby is almost always alone, looking lost, sad, and angry. But did he get any grief for what he said? Not at all, because he picked on a conservative woman. And they are fair game. See, if you’re pro-life, then clearly you’re already against women, so even pigs like Keith can say vicious things about you. You don’t tolerate abortion as birth control, therefore you shall not be tolerated—or viewed as a human being.
At a certain point you’d think this kind of crap would get old. But in the world of tolerance, intolerance flourishes, for acceptance of different points of view is wholly unacceptable. God bless them for their monumental hypocrisy. I only hope Keith finally does have offspring and it eats him.
Sounds over-the-top? I don’t know. One thing I’ve learned about tolerance is that you can’t tolerate a fetus. They’re just so damn annoying. They just lie there and make your life difficult. A fetus takes up room in your body, puts off your career, and all in all is a drain on your finances. They keep you home from protests. They keep you from running off to Catalina with your cute philosophy professor (he’s so tortured). And worst of all, unless you’re a Hollywood celebrity who can pay for round-the-clock nannies, they make you grow the fuck up. Frankly, how fetuses convinced us to let them into our exclusive club called society is beyond me. It is the best club in the world, and needs someone stronger working the door. I have an idea: why not Democrat Gwen Moore?
Here’s what she had to say about unborn kids.
I just want to tell you a little bit about what it’s like to not have Planned Parenthood. You have to add water to the formula to make it stretch. You have to give your kids ramen noodles at the end of the month to fill up their little bellies so they won’t cry.
So true. These selfish little piles of protoplasm—if they are allowed to grow, they need to be watered, and that water is expensive. Filling up bellies is both time-consuming and a strain on your wallet, especially if you like to go clubbing. Buy a new smartphone. What Gwen is talking about reminds me of the philosophy of Casey Anthony: you can’t let a baby get in the way of a girls’ night out.
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br /> If anything, the real victims of repressive tolerance are the unborn. In the name of choice—or rather, tolerating the choice—we cannot tolerate that inconvenience. When feminists see what Palin did, to them, it reminds them that there is a universal tolerance that dwarfs their own narrow definition. It makes them feel small and selfish.
And extermination is always the go-to place for the tolerant when they find someone they cannot tolerate. Remember Chris Titus? Of course you don’t. He was a comedian who had a short-lived TV show, based on his own troubled life. It was god-awful, but we tolerated it anyway, because it came from a place of pain. Yeah, we had to tolerate his bad jokes and self-absorbed meanderings because he “hurt” inside. But knowing pain doesn’t mean he cannot inflict it on others. When faced with the idea of a Palin presidency, Titus said:
You know what, man? I am going to literally—if [Palin] gets elected president, I am going to hang out on the grassy knoll all the time, just loaded and ready—because you know what? It’s for my country. It’s for my country. If I got to sacrifice myself, it’s for my country.
What country is he talking about, exactly? The United States of Paranoid Has-Beens? Well, it’s a country shaped, in his mind, by LBSS. With Liberal Blind Spot Syndrome, it’s perfectly okay to say you’re going to kill Palin, because in the tolerant worldview, she’s exempt. Consider the crimes she’s committed: she’s pro-life, she’s from Alaska, and she doesn’t adhere to the typical mindset you find among the pathetic comic groupies that Titus plies his wares on when he’s sulking through various shitholes he’s been forced to perform in. She is not one of them, so he can imagine her killed. He did this schtick on The Adam Carolla Show. I love Carolla, and I get his gig: he lets comedians talk and doesn’t correct their idiocy. Or maybe that level of idiocy was just too much to correct in one show.