Kingdom of the Stupid

As Atrios is fond of saying, "The stupid, it buuuurrrns!"

You may or may not have heard of the current meme circulating around Wingnuttia and led by the waddling figure of Andrew Breitbart at its vanguard. Yesterday at a rally, Teamsters head James Hoffa, Jr. said, "Everybody here's got to vote. If we go back & keep the eye on the prize, let's take these sons of bitches out."

Yet on a Fox "News" report, there was no video of the speech for Breitbart to creatively edit but Ed Henry quoted only the second sentence out of context: "If we go back & keep the eye on the prize, let's take these sons of bitches out." Without saying it, Fox, putting the "lied" in "implied", implied that Hoffa was advocating violence against right wingers. Obviously, Hoffa was talking about Election Day, voting out the aforementioned sons of bitches.

In a rare spirit of fairness, Ed Henry, who's no liberal bastion of journalism, went on his Twitter account 20 minutes after the broadcast and provided people with the full quote:


Later, Henry was bewildered that his viewership that was whipped into a frenzy by his employer would take him to task for fairly and accurately quoting Hoffa in full when he said,


Since Henry wasn't actually inside the building when Hoffa made those remarks in Detroit, it's quite possible, knowing Fox, that they deliberately didn't give him context and when he found out what Hoffa had said, he felt obliged to set the record straight on his far less-followed Twitter account.

So enter yours truly, anxious to get his toes wet and dying to once more take on my old Twitter sparring partner Andrew Breitbart and his new sidekick, Dana Loesch.

Well, within no time flat, my less-than-respectful tweets got retweeted by seemingly every right wing mouth-breathing Tea Bagger and Breitbart apologist, which were immediately supplanted by all sorts of vicious and ignorant insults. One guy started stalking me and threatened to publish my address and phone number (Note to my dedicated but incompetent stalker: There's no 910 area code in Massachusetts). It didn't matter that the President wasn't even in the building when Hoffa put his fictional fatwa out on Republicans, it didn't matter that Hoffa's remarks were relayed second and third hand completely out of context and it certainly didn't even matter to them that Henry soon set the record straight by giving us the exact content of Hoffa's sentence.

They were so whipped up into a frenzy (and they wanted to lynch the President alive for not refudiating comments that weren't even made) that the truth, even when it was staring them in the face, no longer mattered. To these peckerheaded knuckledraggers, Fox said Hoffa said it, they believed it and that settled it. In no time flat, it became a steaming mudpit of ad hominems and insults on Media Matters and resurrected Anthony Weiner jokes...

...because someone allegedly threatened Congressional Republicans.

I'm sorry, I didn't hear Mr. Hoffa over the echo of Tom Coburn wishing he could bring guns to the floor of the Senate. My ears were still ringing over Sharron Angle calling for "2nd Amendment remedies" and I was also blinded by Sarah Palin's crosshairs over those 20 Democratic districts, including Gabrielle Giffords'.

I was also too busy reading with Schadenfreude Hal Turner's conviction for threatening the lives of three federal judges and Glenn Beck openly wondering if he could murder Michael Moore.

When these racist asswipes lost their minds when a black guy got elected to run the country, their sense of irony was also lost. Hypocrisy may be the political crime for which there's no punishment but why should we allow the same level of impunity when these people, supposedly sentient, carbon-based life forms, persist and insist on remaining ignorant of the facts so they can keep chewing their hind legs off?