This weekend the Senate repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell
-- the 17-year-old policy that allowed gays to serve in the U.S.
military only if they could conceal their sexual orientation. The bill
awaits Obama's signature.
You might expect rightbloggers to be angry about it, and some of them
are -- hilariously so. But homophobia isn't what it used to be (that is,
it's not as popular) so some have gotten with the new gay wave, while
others resort to a softer, more passive-aggressive approach.
Their behavior gives a little clue as to who's really running the right-wing show these days.
Merry War on Christmas! This conflict has been dragging on for years, which is not entirely a bad thing, as it has produced a thriving War on Christmas industry, which our economy desperately needs.
The opportunities for outrage this year are slim, but where there's a
rightblogger, there's a way, whether via imaginary banning of the colors
red and green or via Planned Parenthood gift certificates. Cover the
children's ears and continue!
Two years ago, conservatives were on the ropes. But the GOP victories in
last month's elections have them dreaming big again. They're back to
talking about destroying the Democrats once and for all. Even Newt Gingrich is talking about running for President in 2012, which shows how general the optimism is.
Some in the political meth labs of the right dream bigger still, and
push for new Amendments to the Constitution. So what would you expect
these newly-empowered Sons of Liberty to push? The Human Life Amendment? Repeal of the Civil Rights Act? A ban on the cursed TSA?
No, comrades, those are from the old wish-lists. The front
runners so far are an Amendment to have state legislatures, rather than
citizens, directly elect U.S. Senators, and another allowing state
legislatures to overturn federal laws.
This weekend we got another fat load of WikiLeaks,
based on purloined diplomatic cables to and from the U.S. State
Department. As happened when Julian Assange's muckraking endeavor leaked U.S. military data from Iraq
earlier this year, conservatives are outraged, and some call, as
before, for the expeditious arrest of Assange, or fantasize about his
assassination.
Rightbloggers generally take a two-pronged approach to the leaks: They
believe the new document dump is an unpardonable breach of U.S. security
-- except to the extent that it may be used to denigrate the Obama
Administration, it which case they feel it deserves wider dissemination.
Since the Republicans -- with the help of those Revolutionary-War reenactors
in the tea party -- scored big in the 2010 elections, they've been
bringing up the U.S. Constitution a lot.
Incoming House Speaker John
Boehner pushes the GOP "Pledge to America" promise "to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers
and honor the original intent of those precepts that have been
consistently ignored..." Congresswoman Michele Bachmann wants a "Constitutional Conservative Caucus" and classes on the Constitution for Congressional freshmen. When they talk about Obamacare, they increasingly argue that it has to be repealed because it's unconstitutional. Etc.
You can get some sense of conservative seriousness about the
Constitution from the first big civil liberties issue since the election
to inflame rightbloggers: the newly enhanced security screenings at
airports, which sometimes involves the touching of junk.
Hey sheeples: Barack Obama thinks he's better than you.
Obama gets a lot of this from conservatives, and has since before he was elected. He's been called "arrogant" by thousands of them, including Karl Rove and Vegas entertainer Wayne Newton.
But this week he got a heavier dose of it than usual, with the Weekly Standard,
the Daily Caller, and Ben Shapiro all devoting long essays to the theme
of Obama's self-regard, accompanied by rightblogger mega-dittos.
It seems a weird charge to make right after Obama's party suffered heavy
losses in an election, and while he was out of the country on
diplomatic missions. Why now?
As you may have heard, President Obama has made a trip to India, and it's
costing taxpayers a bazillion dollars because he brought the entire
Seventh Fleet and thousands of campaign contributors.
Oops, sorry, that's not true -- it's only $200 million a day and he only took 34 warships. Oops, that's also not true (or as the Wall Street Journal put it, "demonstrably incorrect") -- there's no tally yet, but no one who actually knows anything about such things (like the Pentagon) will credit the figures.
Several rightbloggers got on the $200 million story quick, and have not
corrected to this day. Others, to their credit, did. But because it's
Obama, and because they are who they are, there was plenty else to
complain about. (For example, did you know Obama brought a teleprompter? Haw!)
On Saturday in Washington Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held their Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Keep Fear Alive. The purpose of the event, which drew more than 200,000 people, was to help Cat Stevens win support for his fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
What, you didn't know that? You must have missed the rightblogger
coverage. You probably also missed that the rally was a huge failure and
not funny. Well, that's what you get for relying on the Lame Stream
Media, sheeples.
Celebrity journalist Juan Williams had a good week, on balance. First, he was fired by National Public Radio for remarks he made on Fox -- his other major employer -- about his fear of Muslims on airplanes.
That might seem at first a minus, but Williams was immediately rewarded by Fox with a new $2 million contract. Plus, he cemented his reputation among conservatives as one of those liberals who -- like Joe Lieberman -- can be relied upon to criticize liberals.
You could argue (as some liberals did)
that Williams' shouldn't have been fired for his comments, especially
since he said some less-offensive things later. Some rightbloggers did
make that argument. Some even denounced prejudice -- against
conservatives. Prejudice against Muslims, though, they didn't mind. In
fact, that was mainly what they liked about what Williams said.
house burn to the ground because he hadn't paid protection money, and
the rightbloggers who thought this was a laudable example of free market justice.
This week they celebrated another free market triumph -- though at least
this time it had to do with people being rescued rather than abandoned
to their fates.
It began with Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal
announcing to the world that the miners who were dramatically rescued
last week after 69 days underground owed their escape from certain death
to capitalism.
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