By Ebbtide
Just as an introduction: an apple is NOT an orange—nor is it a Porterhouse steak or a pork chop.
OK—now that we have established that fact, we can proceed
with a look at some of the truly ridiculous (and often despicable) comparisons
the Right Wing has been using lately to illustrate their often specious claims.
I’m going to start with the least offensive and build to the most offensive.
IF I ONLY HAD A BRAIN
Incorrectly using terms is a minor offense, but would
somebody PLEASE tell Paul Ryan that a “straw man” is:
A straw man
or straw person… is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an
opponent's position. To "attack a
straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by
replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the
"straw man"), and to refute it, without ever having actually refuted
the original position.
Now right wingers are famous for invoking straw man
arguments on everything from the War
on Christmas to Abortion,
but Paul Ryan apparently can’t even get the concept of what a straw man is,
utilizing the reverse-double-flip-I’m-rubber-you’re-glue accusation format,
which makes as much sense as most of his political ramblings.
President Obama frames
the debate this way because, here again, it’s the only kind of debate he can
win – against straw-man arguments.
Ryan then went on to explain his point by—you guessed it,
setting up a straw man argument.
The President is given
to lectures on all that we owe to government, as if anyone who opposes his
reckless expansion of federal power is guilty of ingratitude and rank
individualism.
Fast-forward to Ryan’s poutrage after the President’s
inaugural address.
House
Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) accused President Obama of attacking “straw
men” on the issue of entitlements in his second inaugural address. “No one
is suggesting that what we call our earned entitlements — entitlements you pay
for, like payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security — are putting you in a
‘taker’ category,” Ryan said in an interview. He added: “It’s kind of a
convenient twist of terms to try and shadowbox a straw man in order to win an
argument by default.”
Will Ryan get the message? It's doubtful.
THE WHEELS ON THE BUS GO
CUKOO—CUKOO
Who said, "There will
come a time when the gun owners of America, the law-abiding gun owners of
America, will be the Rosa Parks and we will sit down on the front seat of the
bus, case closed." (Three guesses—first two don’t count.)
I will continue to incorporate this photo into any
post where I can possibly find a connection
because I just love it
Former
NRA president Marion Hammer chimed in,
"Banning people and things because of the way they look went out a
long time ago," Hammer said. "But here they are again. The color of a
gun. The way it looks. It's just bad politics."
Yes, those poor gun-owning wingnuts are so totally
oppressed, so thoroughly discriminated against. They face so many of the same
obstacles that those involved in the battle for civil rights faced. It’s such
an apt comparison.
NO, IT’S NOT.
John
Fugelsang provided an excellent comparison of Nugent and Rosa Parks, ending
with, “Because Rosa Parks refused to budge when asked to give up her seat. And
Ted Nugent refuses to budge when asked to give up his ignorance.”
The wingers also invoke Martin Luther King, Jr. in their defence
of gun insanity, like Larry
Ward, Chairman of Gun Appreciation Day, who not only claimed that King
would have been “honored” by the event, but went so far as to posit that
“I think Martin Luther King would agree with me, if he were
alive today, that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear
arms from day one of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have
been a chapter in our history.”
 |
Forgive me, but I still believe this man looks like the
love-child of Scott Walker and Sean Hannity.
|
Right
wing “historian,” David Barton, who pretty much makes up history to suit
whatever his current viewpoint might be (Think 1984—We have always been at war
with Eastasia) went full metal wingnut with his “fact” that the National Rifle
Association (NRA) was formed to protect freed slaves from the Ku Klux Klan.
CHRISTIANS ARE THE NEW
BLACKS.
A subset of the “gun-nuts are the civil rights workers” is
the “poor, put-upon, discriminated against Christians, particularly white male
Christians” are the true sufferers today.
Fischer’s mother-ship parent organization, The
American Family Association sees things just getting worse and worse for
Christians, predicting
in a new email that by 2060:
- Conservative Christians will be treated as second class citizens, much like African Americans were prior to civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
- Cities with a name from the Bible such as St. Petersburg, Bethlehem, etc. will be forced to change their name due to separation of church and state.
And
according to Cal Thomas, “The
real "war" in this country is not only against the supposed civil
right of non-traditional marriage. It is a war against conservative Christians
and a denial of the same rights the LGBT community claims for itself.”
PAY CLOSE ATTENTION, WINGNUTS
You are NOT Rosa Parks. You are NOT Martin Luther King, Jr.
You are NOT being lynched. You are NOT having fire
hoses turned on you for having the audacity to want to go to school. You
are NOT having your head bashed in for walking on a bridge. You are NOT being
set upon by attack
dogs for peacefully marching. Nor are you being kidnapped and murdered
for advancing your ideas.
Your gun fetishes and hate-mongering fundamentalists bear no
resemblance to the struggle of people who were (and, in many cases still
are) fighting to be treated as equal human beings. Your “suffering” from the
fear that you will not be able to stockpile rocket launchers is NOT comparable
to what Emmett Till
suffered for admiring a white woman.
I want to first establish that I am not a tweeter (although,
I have, at some points in my life, been called a twit.) I understand that
Twitter can be an effective means of communication and expression, but from
where I sit, I think that about 80% of everything I’ve seen in the Twitterverse
would be more at home in a junior high school cafeteria. No offense meant to
Politicalgates Tweeters—It’s just that I have seen many politicians and
others hoisted by their own Tweetards, (Grassley, Brown) and it seems there is so much mindless
twattle being tweeted that it often can do more harm than good.
Which leads me to TWITTER GULAG!!!! I won’t go into much
depth about this (extremely shallow) phenomenon. From what I can gather, it
began with a bunch of right wing tweeters spamming other peoples’ Twitter
accounts, in violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service, and having their accounts
temporarily blocked.
That’s right, Twitter—a private enterprise offering a free
service, exercised their ability to make users follow the rules. Period.
Enter Michelle
Malkin’s Twitchy (could she be any more melodramatic?)
"The Left wants to wear
down conservatives until they crawl away defeated, tails between their battered and bloody legs.
Silencing the Right is not enough; they want conservatives to disappear from
the public sphere. We hope these Twitter vigilantes aren’t holding their
breath—conservatives don’t retreat, we reload." (Hmmm, where have we heard THAT before?)
Suddenly, this became the biggest infringement on human
rights the world had ever known. Suddenly, right wing tweeters were being
persecuted and tortured beyond anything previously known to man.
Twitter Gulag prompted dramatic tweets like:
Free @mark85nh from #twittergulag . A Great Conservative that is targeted by the twitter nazis.
Inside the most extreme #Gulag in the #TwitterGulag where
not freedom of expression applies, is our @twitter friend @BranceLong #TGDN10
#Evil
And of course, messages such as:
In honor of #truth warrior just taken down to #twittergulag
@charlewar YES OBAMA IS A #MUSLIM LIAR! There, reply on record.
They even have a website
devoted to addressing the horrors suffered by Twitter Gulag residents, that
features, I kid you not, this graphic:
They seem to mostly blame Charles Johnson of Little Green
Footballs (they “gathered intel” and everything!) for this dastardly plot,
although it appears to me that Charles spends most of his time laughing at
them. Some of the comments at that site:
Mutual Assured
Destruction kept the peace in the Cold War; it will work in the Twitter Wars.
I'm back in the Gulag!
I sent a couple of sarcastic tweets toward @Toure, Now I'm in Siberia.
I was just speaking
with another about how we might begin to play by their rules--draw first blood,
implement first strike
They have a Twitter Gulag Daily website, which I will not
even honor with a link…
And then came #TGDN—The TWITTER GULAG DEFENCE NETWORK.
Started by slick operative,
Todd Kincannon, a former South Carolina (of course) Republican Party
Executive Director, who had famously posted such humorous tweets as:
@ToddKincannon: “The Crabby Cunt from the California Coast”?
#NancyPelosi
@ToddKincannon: Or how about “The Botox Bitch from
Buggeryland”? That seems to work for Nancy Pelosi too.
@ToddKincannon: Would you prefer Nancy the Crooked Whore?
More accurate, but also more words.
Kincannon and his
band of merry madmen decided to fight hashtags with hashtags (or some such
nonsense) by following each other in mass numbers to avoid the Twitter Gulag.
(I confess, I don’t understand half of what these people say or do, so forgive
me if my explanations are not quite on the mark.)
This TGDN nonsense goes on and on at a frenzied pace, and
now Kincannon is soliciting funds to hire an assistant because it has become
impossible for him to keep up with all the work. (I request that someone in
comments please explain to me what costs are involved in having a hashtag—I truly
don’t understand.)
There’s a “counter group” now called #uniteblue. By now, it’s all so hyperbolic that I can only shake my head and say, “People—it’s TWITTER, for crying out loud. It’s a means of expressing your deepest thoughts in 140 characters or less—similar to passing notes during gym class in the 8th grade.”
There’s a “counter group” now called #uniteblue. By now, it’s all so hyperbolic that I can only shake my head and say, “People—it’s TWITTER, for crying out loud. It’s a means of expressing your deepest thoughts in 140 characters or less—similar to passing notes during gym class in the 8th grade.”
Being temporarily unable to
convey banal comments and snarky insults is NOT tantamount to being a prisoner
in a forced labor camp under
Stalin, and is an insult to those who were.
According to a 1993 study of
archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934
to 1953 However, taking into account that it was common practice to release
prisoners who were either suffering from incurable diseases or on the point of
death, the actual Gulag death toll was somewhat higher, amounting to 1,258,537
in 1934-53, or 1.6 million deaths during the whole period from 1929 to 1953.
Some estimates for total number deaths in the Gulag go beyond 10 million.
So just stop it, please.
The Holocaust is NOT Analogous
with Gun Control…
Nor with Freedom of Choice
(and Obama is NOT Hitler)
There have been Hitler analogies around for a long time.
Yes, even some on the left used them when talking about Bush. But the explosion
of Nazi references from the right, particularly in relationship to Obama’s rather
(in my mind, anyway) temperate and sane ideas about reforming gun laws is so
ridiculously over the top, it would be funny if it were not so very sad.
Former
Major League pitcher John Rocker wrote on WorldNetDaily.com (NOTE FROM ME: What a great pairing, Doofus
John Rocker and WND—it’s like peanut butter and jelly) about what he described
as "...the undeniable fact that the Holocaust would never have taken place
had the Jewish citizenry of Hitler's Germany had the right to bear arms and
defend themselves with those arms" (Jan. 15).
During an interview on the Fox News Channel, Lars
Larson suggested that, "...if the president does it that way,
everybody in America will be required to go in and give fingerprints.... It will be 'your papers, please' like Nazi
Germany" (Jan. 9).
Fox
News' Dr. Keith Ablow insisted history's filled with examples of leaders
who confiscated guns as a precursor to "catastrophic abuses" of
power: "One need look no further than Nazi Germany." Fox's
Judge Andrew Napolitano made the same connection, while a Kentucky radio
host compared firearm regulations to Nazi "yellow star" laws.
And brain-trusts like Bradlee
Dean (he’s Michele--one l-- Bachmann’s little loony buddy) wrote on Wingnut Daily
When the
"fire" is started, these government gun banners are right there to
strip away your rights in an attempt to gain control under the guise of
"putting out the fire."
Adolf Hitler was
responsible for attacking his own Reichstag to start a world war. Hitler was
also responsible for sending his brownshirts to incite the people so he could
play the role of solving their problems. No one believed Hitler was guilty of
these crimes until after the fact.
Then it was too late.
NO—Just NO.
Trying to come up with methods to decrease gun carnage is
NOT analogous with Hitler and the Nazis. First of all, most of the quotes,
statistics and stories cited by the right wing are historically inaccurate, and
second of all, it is horribly insensitive to even bring it up as a comparison.
The
Anti-Defamation League explains it thusly, “"The idea that supporters
of gun control are doing something akin to what Hitler's Germany did to strip
citizens of guns in the run-up to the Second World War is historically
inaccurate and offensive, especially to Holocaust survivors and their families."
Oh, and about comparing abortion to the Holocaust?
New York, NY, November 9, 2011 … The Anti-Defamation League
(ADL) today derided as "cynical and
perverse" a movie that unequivocally compares the murder of millions
of Jews and others in the Holocaust to women having abortions in the United
States, calling the film "one of the most offensive and outrageous abuses
of the memory of the Holocaust we have seen in years."
That Is All...(except for this)
UPDATE
Apparently Todd Kincannon’s need for an assistant didn’t prompt sufficient contributions. He now claims that someone has gone to the Columbia, SC police department to try to have him arrested and that they “swatted” his old office address or something. So he’s NOW looking for donations to his legal defense fund—sound familiar?
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