Category: Awards

"She is a product of our narcissistic celebrity culture. Instead of doing the heavy (and unglamorous) political lifting required of a national leader, she is embracing the luxurious life of a TV talking head. She has abandoned the very basis of her populist legitimacy: her outsider status. … Rather than going rogue, she has gone establishment," – Jeffrey T. Kuhner, Washington Times columnist and president of the Edmund Burke Institute.

“This will play right into Obama’s hands — humanitarian, compassionate. They’ll use this to burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the black community — the both the light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It’s made to order for them," – Limbaugh, on Haiti.

"Lott's comment implied that the country would have been better off keeping segregation and enforced white supremacy. What Reid said isn't within a lightyear of that," – Ramesh Ponnuru.

"[Neither the] Secretary of Homeland Security, nor can the department, act on anything until they get the information. … And the Department of Homeland Security could not have revoked the visa. The Department of Homeland Security could not have put this name on the National Counterterrorism Center. … So while there is obviously some criticism pointed in the department’s direction and at the Secretary, I think by and large it is misplaced," – Tom Ridge.

"President Obama is leading an extreme, left wing crusade to bankrupt America," – John McCain.

A reader writes:

“What the Jews were to the right in the 1920s, the gays are in the 2010s. Unpleasant, dispensable, and if possible, wiped out.” This comment should put you in a position for today’s Moore Award. Come off it, Andrew, you are once again stereotyping everyone on the Right based on the truly deplorable legal actions going on Uganda. You truly believe that there is a majority of people and Christians on the right side of the political spectrum who want nothing more than to literally round up gays and kill them?  Really?

I go to a very fundamentalist bible church where the word is taken literally, one of my best friends is a New Testament Greek scholar.  For you to suggest that I, or my Christian friends would condone such a law and desire to exterminate gay people makes me wonder if you even know or have ever associated with a true Christian. We can disagree about the politics of gay marriage without having to refer to our political opponent as fanatical, death-seeking hatemongers such as the German Nazis, surely.

I’d urge readers to check out the full post, review its context and make up their own minds. And perhaps I engaged in a tired bit of hyperbole (it happens). So let me restate what I was trying to say: The campaigners for the anti-gay pogrom in Uganda are extremely well known in the anti-gay Christianist movement in the US, and the institutional and cultural clout they have in that country has been deeply affected by the Bush administration’s use of PEPFAR money to subsidize Christianist political movements in Africa. The rhetoric used by Lively and his colleagues is no different in Africa than it is in America. It’s just that in Africa, there is no real gay rights movement, no constitutional protections for a tiny, already persecuted minority, and thereby we have a revelation of what the eliminationist rhetoric around evil homosexual plots would aim for in America if it could.

Do I believe that a majority of those who oppose marriage equality are similarly eliminationist with respect to gays? Not at all. Do I believe that many are nonetheless naive about the radicalism of many in the anti-gay movement, whose virulent rhetoric against homosexuals is almost never countered by defenses of homosexuals within the GOP? You bet I do. Do I think that the long-term rhetorical imbalance has helped shift the GOP to a more radically anti-gay stance than almost anywhere else in the Western world? You bet I do. These eliminationists are not typical; but Republican tolerance and appeasement of them is.

“If you are an 18 to 28-year-old Muslim man then you should be strip searched. And if we don’t do that, there’s a very high probability we’re going to lose an airliner," – retired Lt Gen Tom McInerney, on Fox News.

I'm always a little leery of retired generals wanting to rummage through young men's junk myself.

“Our country is being destroyed. Every generation has had to fight the fight for freedom… Terrorism? Yes. That’s not the big battle. The big battle is in D.C. with the radicals. They aren’t liberals. They are radicals. Obama, Pelosi, Walz: They’re not liberals, they’re radicals. They are destroying our country … This [health insurance bill] is the most insidious, evil piece of legislation I have ever seen in my life… Every one of us has to be totally committed to killing this travesty… I have to kill this bill,” – congressional candidate Allan Quist.

"Walz" is the poor schmuck this fundamentalist is running against.