Burns is Back and As Hilarious as Ever

John Burns, the brilliant strategist hailed as the next William F. Buckley by St. Louis Tea Party leader Bill Hennessy, who managed to only be able to get 37% of the St. Louis County population to vote against a tax increase, is back sharing his cutting political insights. Apparently, leading a campaign that manages to change a population from beating an identical initiative to only getting 37% qualifies John Burns to explain exactly how future historians are going to talk about the tea party movement. And, according to him, the tea party will be remembered as having two phases: the Stand Around and Yell Phase, and the new Creep Out Your Neighbors Phase, pioneered by him.

And he's off to a fantastic start to his new movement, explaining to the readers of Hoft's blog how they can get involved on "Titter":



Let's hope Burn's endeavor is exactly as successful as his last one. It certainly looks like he's headed in that direction.

Gateway Pundit Uses Death Threat Against Pelosi as Argument Against Health Care Reform

Jim Hoft, fresh off whining about how the mean old "liberal media" interpreted the tea party burning a photo of Carnahan and bringing a coffin to his house as a threat, today cited a death threat against Pelosi as evidence that the health care reform bill is bad. Hoft refers to Pelosi saying that people are "thrilled" about the healthcare bill, then quotes an article reporting on a death threat against Pelosi. Concludes Hoft:

It’s a thrilling piece of legislation.

I wonder how those durn libruls will interpret this not-in-any-way-completely-creepy statement.

Gateway Pundit Misrepresents Poll Numbers

Gateway Pundit claimed yesterday that a CNN poll showed that 59% of Americans opposed the health care bill and only 39% supported it. However, as Media Matters pointed out, 13% of the people thought that the bill was "not liberal enough," which means that a majority of Americans either support the bill or wish it was more liberal.

Gateway Pundit also claimed that Pelosi's favorable rating was only 11% and Reid's was only 8%. But again, this was a completely misleading representation, since the polls offered a number of options. Pelosi's unfavorable rating was only 37% and Reid's was only 27%, far below any serious danger areas.

Gateway Pundit Extremely Concerned About Sex Lives of Local Undergraduates

Champion of Virginal Purity and All Things Good in the World Jim Hoft, aka Gateway Pundit, was forced to write a post today going into detail about a Washington University undergraduate's sex column in the independent student newspaper Student Life. Hoft, with only pure and good intentions, was so intent on warning his readers about this den of sin that he even decided to post three full paragraphs from the column on "how to give a textbook blowjob." Hoft's fellow middle aged male commenters then took turns alternately wagging their wrinkled old fingers at the downfall of society and calling Wash U undergraduates "sluts."

I'm sure undergraduates around the world will sleep much better knowing that Jim Hoft is keeping a watchful eye on their sex lives.

Gateway Pundit Thinks Yoo Deserves Medal for Saying President Can Massacre Civilians

Jim Hoft, aka Gateway Pundit, today claims that John Yoo, designer of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" of the Bush era, deserves "the Presidential Medal of Freedom, not Presidential Disdain." Yoo's legal philosophy, of course, is based on the absurd idea that the President can basically do whatever he wants, and a recently released legal document showed just how debased this philosophy is. When asked if the President can legally order the massacre of a civilians "massacred," Yoo replied "sure."

Apparently, Hoft is trying to compete with Glenn Beck for the Presidential Medal of Ridiculousness.

Dana Loesch Attacked a Women Who Recently Died of Breast Cancer Last Week

Several days ago, right-wing radio host Dana Loesch tweeted the following:

The link takes you to a post by Gateway Pundit titled "Obama: St. Louis Campaign Supporter Died of Breast Cancer - Says She Couldn't Afford Exam - But Breast Exams are Free to Poor in St. Louis." As detailed on the St. Louis Activist Hub Blog, the post is a typical right-wing blame-the-victim screed directed at a women they know nothing about without bothering do any basic research.
You can hear more of Melanie Shouse's story here:

So the next time you hear Dana Loesch whine about how she is being "personally attacked" when people point out how she is factually wrong or hypocritical, keep in mind that she is willing to viciously attack a women who just died of breast cancer without knowing the smallest detail about her life, and she does so simply because the woman asked to be buried in an Obama shirt.

Gateway Pundit Misleads on SOTU

Gateway Pundit kept up his usual absurdity today, creatively interpreting his handed-down right wing talking points to attack Obama. First, he claims that the blog Think Progress, "caught the president's dishonest attack on Bush," referring to Obama noting that he inherited a financial disaster from the Bush administration. But actually Think Progress defended Obama, writing, "stating facts is not blaming Bush," and linking to this explanation of the deficit claim.

Furthermore, Gateway Pundit suggested that this was, "the worst state of the union address sin history." But in fact a CBS poll showed that 83% of speech watchers approved of the proposals Obama made in his speech, and 70% thought that Obama shares the same priorities for the country as they do.

And in the update to this post, GP and his friend Darin Morely from Reboot Congress apparently approve of calling Obama a ratf***** and "hating" him.

Fringe of the fringe.

Gateway Pundit: Bush was "World's Greatest Liberator Since WW II"

Yes, he really said that. This is what the tea partiers long for: a return to George Bush. I'm speechless.

Gateway Pundit Pisses on Ted Kennedy's Grave

In case you ever wondered what motivates someone like Gateway Pundit, here's your answer: pure hatred.

Jim Hoft put up a blog post today titled "This One's For You, Mary Jo," referencing Mary Jo Kopechne, the woman who died in Kennedy's 1969 car accident (the source of numerous right-wing conspiracy theories). Hoft also featured a picture of the car being pulled out of the river. Pretty hard to see any motivation for Hoft posting that other than pure spite.

Of course, we learned quite a bit about Jim Hoft's character when he posted a race-baiting video from a white supremacist website and refused to take it down.

Gateway Pundit Promotes Tea Party Scam

Gateway Pundit, while busy trying to hype up the fabricated story that President Obama ordered "union thugs" to beat people up at an August 6 townhall, promoted the national bus tour called the Tea Party Express last fall.

The only problem? Two thirds of the spending from the "Tea Party Express" went to the political consulting firm that created it. That's over $850,000 going to the operatives who run the GOP consulting firm based in California.

But since Gateway Pundit is so interested in the truth, I'm sure he will issue an apology on his blog anytime now.

Gateway Pundit 's Commenters on his Post Attacking Michael Steele

In light of recent right-wing bloggers (including Gateway Pundit) declaring that Harry Reid is a flaming racist, I thought it might be interesting to examine how the commenters on Gateway Pundit's site reacted to his recent post attacking RNC chair Michael Steele. Gateway Pundit, remember, has linked to videos from white supremacist web sites on multiple occasions while trying to promote his agenda, and has refused to remove such links even after being told that they are offensive (in fact, he deletes comments that mention this). Since he deletes comments on his site that criticize himself, it follows that he could easily delete any of the following comments. But he doesn't.

You will not be surprised to know that most of the people on his blog despise Steele:


That's fine: everyone is entitled to their own political opinions. Less fine is the fact that many commenters use Steel'e flaws as an excuse to pretend that affirmative action is the root of all societal evils:





And worst of all, and really the subject of this post, is the fact that many of the commenters seem to believe that Steele is involved in a secret conspiracy to destroy the Republican Party from the inside:





Hmmm, so Steele is a mysterious "Other" who pretends to be like the rest of us but is really something Different who is trying to secretly destroy the entity he leads from the inside. Sound familiar? Like, uh, exactly the same thing these fringers believe about Obama?

One person even spells it out:


It's a shame Gateway Pundit encourages these kinds of comments on his site.

Shorter Gateway Pundit:

Give Massachusetts Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown all your money because he' only going to lose by 9 percent.

I suppose I should be thanking him...

Oh Noes! STL Tea Party Uses "Horrible Sexual Slur"

The vast majority of what this site covers is pointing out lies, contradictions, and absurdities in the St. Louis Tea Party rhetoric. Since they are incapable of responding with actual arguments, they instead attempt to make personal attacks or discredit the site in any way possible. Generally, these take the form of, "St. Louis Pushes Back does X, so we should ignore everything written there." The "everything" is important, of course, because what they're really trying to do is to prevent their audience from realizing just how dishonest most of the Tea Party commentary really is, and the only way to do that is to keep them from reading sites that systematically examine what they say.

One of the funniest attempts at this strategy is to write that this site should be ignored because it used a "horrible sexual slur": namely, the word "teabagger." Aficionados will be aware, of course, that the term teabagger (along with its connotation) was originally used by right wing activists, and only later picked up by the people laughing at them. Anyway, you'll notice that this site does not actually use the term that much: incessant name-calling is more of a characteristic of right-wing extremists and isn't really Pushback's shtick.

But if "teabag" is really such a horrible sexual slur, then why did Dana Loesch, Americans for Prosperity, and Gateway Pundit all use the term today? Gateway Pundit had the following headline:

(screenshot from Hoft's blog)

Loesch and Carl Bearden took it a step further, tweeting the following:

I guess it's only horribly offensive when critics of the tea party use it. The hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Is Bill Hennessy trying to frame the Young Americans for Liberty?

Gateway Pundit posted a message today from John Burns, the NON-STUDENT who built a gulag on the Wash U Campus to protest AmeriCorps (among other things). As was pointed out on the St. Louis Activist Hub blog, Burns loves free speech so much that he decided to try to disrupt a Show Me No Hate rally last Sunday.

Burns's letter complained that the Wash U administration was trying frame the Young Americans for Liberty for the hammer and sickle emblems that mysteriously appeared on campus exactly the same day that YAL put up their gulag. He claims that "The students had nothing to do with the spray chalking" and that the university is engaging in, "MALICIOUS, RETALIATORY ACTION AGAINST THE STUDENTS" (caps lock #fail from the original) Gateway Pundit claimed they were being blamed for "random grafitti."

But if that's the case, they why did Bill Hennessy include pictures of the hammer and sickle in his report about the "student" demonstration?


Is Bill Hennessy trying to frame the Young Americans for Liberty? Why would he suggest that the emblems had something to do with the display?

Notice the precise wording of Burns. He said no STUDENTS were involved in the spraying. So maybe he's saying some of the visiting horde of tea party activists like Burns, Hennessy, and Jim Hoft were the people who actually defaced the campus property.

And John Burns, noble person that he is, decided to stick up for the students. Except for that small part where he says who actually did it.

Kiener Plaza Holds 3,000. Tea Party Doesn't Come Close To Filling It But Claims 4,000 Anyway

Kiener Plaza has a maximum capacity of 3,000 according to it's website (h/t Fired Up! Missouri for pointing this out earlier). As you can see from this picture, today's tea party did not even come close to filling it:

(screen shot from Gateway Pundit's page)

But of course, that won't stop Gateway Pundit from claiming that they had 4,000 people.

Since they claimed to have 10,000 people at their April rally, at least we can all agree that today was a giant #FAIL.

Outsourcing to the Daily Show

The Daily Show makes the universe a better place in so many ways, the least of which being that it makes my job much easier.  The show has offered the perfect response to a few of the latest faux outrages by local wingers:

First we have the oh-so-scandalous incident where President Obama bowed to the Prime Minister of Japan.  This caused Gateway Pundit to collapse into his fainting couch. And Adam Sharp had to say the pledge of allegiance seventy times in a row just to clear his head.  The Daily Show had the appropriate response to their weeping and gnashing of teeth:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Submission Accomplished
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Then, Dana Loesch, in an act of lazy "journalism," copied an ABC news story (but changed the state to MO) to suggest that the government was secretly sending money to the "zone of unaccountability."  Fortunately, VP Biden explains what was going on in this clip:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Joe Biden Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Any guesses as to whether Loesch will have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge the explanation?

A peak inside Gateway Pundit's noggin

If he was capable of feeling shame, Rush Limbaugh would have been very embarrassed recently by the fact that he reported a satirical story on President Obama as true.  The basic idea of the story was that President Obama had written a thesis in which he claimed that he had some serious problems with the constitution.  As mentioned above, the story was in fact satire, and though Rush eventually acknowledged this fact, he refused to apologize.  

After seeing this incident unfold, local looney Gateway Pundit (Jim Hoft) decided he needed to write a blog post warning his readers about evil libruls who will try to trick them into believing their satire.  When the author of the original satire piece emailed Hoft telling him that the story was clearly marked as satire, check out Hoft's hilarious response email:

Matthew- Obviously, your satire is not clearly marked or Michael and Rush would not have linked.

Jim

I find this to be a truly revealing look into how Hoft thinks (or rather, how he approximates thinking). He starts out from the assumption that Rush Limbaugh must be right.  All other evidence must conform to this brute truth of the universe or else it is immediately rejected.  If Rush said that the sky was purple, and Hoft looked up and saw that it looked blue, he would conclude that Marxists had surgically altered his vision while he was sleeping.

And, of course, Hoft's assumption that Rush could not possibly make a mistake was about as wrong as any belief could be.  Michael Leeden, the right-wing blogger who wrote the post that Rush cited, himself admitted that he missed the tag on the blog post that said "satire" (BTW, GP does mention this in an update, but is apparently oblivious to the fact that it contradicts his previous assumption).  

I wonder how Hoft will integrate this into his belief system?  Marxists holding Leeden at gunpoint?  Implanted mind-control microchips?  Whatever it is, we can be sure that Rush Limbaugh must not have made a mistake.

A look inside twisted minds...

Here are a sampling of comments from Jim Hoft's blog regarding the news that Republican Senator Olympia Snowe helped vote a health care reform bill out of the Senate Finance Committee. I apologize in advance for how offensive some of the comments are, but I think it's useful to see just how irrationally angry Hoft's followers are and how quickly they turn to obscene personal attacks on people who deviate even slightly from far-right ideology.

OMG, Snowe. What a useless piece of shit.
myna | 10.13.09 - 12:14 pm | #

Time to drive this leftist bitch out of the GOP.
snake eater | 10.13.09 - 12:23 pm | #

Snowe is an 'enemy inside the wire' of the Republican camp. Why doesn't she just switch over to the Democrats.
IOpian | Homepage | 10.13.09 - 12:28 pm | #

Time for you to go, Snowe.

By force if necessary.
itsallverbatim | Homepage | 10.13.09 - 12:30 pm | #

Someone needs to put that ugly bitch out to pasture and win her seat. What a fucking traitor.
Anonymous | 10.13.09 - 2:27 pm | #

Did that POS every have a townhall meetin? I'd drive out of state just to go to her townhall meeting.
Anonymous | 10.13.09 - 2:27 pm | #

Every time I look at her, I'm reminded of Lilith, Frasier Crane's ex-wife off of Frasier.

Cold chills.
ChrisP | 10.13.09 - 2:36 pm |

This is how the far right deals with dissenting opinions.

There's a fraud at the White House! Either that or Gateway Pundit doesn't know what he's talking about

Little Green Footballs, a blog that broke with fellow Republicans because of the party's blatant racism and intolerance, wrote up a funny story about a fake right-wing "outrage" over how a painting in the White House was a "fraud."  Actually, it was an artistic response to a different piece.  Artists do that sometimes.

But since Michele Malkin said it, Jim Hoft was sure to follow.  It's safe to say that when Republicans start complaining about the White House's art choices they have gone fully into "kitchen sink" mode.

Update: Jim Hoft wouldn't pull race-baiting video from racist, anti-semitic group, but youtube did!

Earlier, I wrote about how Jim Hoft (aka Gateway Pundit) linked to a race-baiting video from a  white supremacist group and refused to take down the video after repeated requests from his commenters.  Or, to be more precise, here's the full timeline:

1.  Jim Hoft originally linked directly to the white supremacist group Council of Conservative Citizens while presenting the video.

2.  After being challenged in the comments, he made it look like he removed the link, but actually moved it to a different spot (see update #2 in the link).

3.  After being further challenged, he removed the direct link altogether, but still kept his link up to a youtube channel of the anti-semitic, white supremacist KillTheCensors.  

4.  However, after being repeatedly asked to remove the link to the white supremacist youtube channel by commenters and fellow conservative bloggers, he refused.  He also was shown to have linked to the Council of Conservative citizens on previous occasions.

But even though Jim Hoft is not willing to do right, at least youtube is.  I noticed on the page today that the video Hoft linked to had been removed:

Curious as to why this would be, I did a search on youtube for Hoft's friend KillTheCensors, and came across this anti-semitic comment:

(the video this comment was under, BTW, was a video claiming that Detroit's economic downturn was entirely due to the fact that there weren't enough white people living there now)

And when I clicked on KillTheCensors user name, I found out that the account had been disabled:

It's good to know that at least youtube won't support blatant racism, even though the most influential blogger in the St. Louis Tea Party movement does.