FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE RIGHTOID
BLOGOSPHERE
Days after the election of Barack Hussein Obama as president of the United States in 2008 I began to scour that dark, foul-smelling Internet backwater some pundits call the right-wing Blogosphere.
The reason was, I knew a few million of my fellow Americans would be apoplectic with fury that the White House was now occupied by a black man. I wanted to see if that ire would manifest itself as overt threats on the new president's life.
I know my fellow Americans well enough to know that although most are decent people who wish no one ill and are tolerant of the differences between their fellow humans, many are not.
These latter ones are losers; bitter second-raters who believe they might have achieved the success they think they'd been promised -- wealth, power, status, a ride-on lawnmower, an 18-year-old mistress -- if America had, as they fantasize, been reserved for native-born white men with a low-normal IQ and a personal history that includes playing high school football. They generally vote Republican, if they vote at all.
Not realizing that their ineffectualness and obscurity is solely the result of their own intellectual and psychological limitations and not of some nefarious plot, they spend their days and many of their drunken nights cursing those they imagine jumped the success queue ahead of them -- blacks, latinos, "illegal immigrants," liberals, Commies, women, etc.
This would be more humorous than anything else, if these embittered sluggos weren't so often armed to the teeth, while nurturing the fantasy that one day they'll be called upon to "defend their country" by shooting down as many of the aforementioned blacks, latinos, "illegal immigrants," etc. as they can.
That this is not a joke -- or my own paranoid fantasy -- is evidenced by the fact that no sooner had Obama taken the oath of office than ammunition sales in the United States soared to such an extent that many gun shops ran completely out of ammo, as panic-stricken "bitter clingers," who frightened each other with apocryphal tales of imminent gun-confiscation, raced to buy up all the bullets they could find.
Slugs buying slugs, if you will.
It didn't take me long to find a blog that epitomized the upwelling of fear and loathing that was beginning to bubble up from the toxic ooze that characterizes right-wing thought in America today, the miasma of formless rage that also gave birth to the hilariously misnamed Tea Party.
There, on the Townhall.com website run by the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, lurked a nasty piece of work imaginatively titled the "Anti-Liberal Zone," owned and operated by a tireless blogger who calls himself "Gunny."
"Gunny" was later outed in a news story as Bob Pinkstaff, allegedly a retired Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, and it would be difficult to find a more hate-filled, devious, racist spewer of propaganda anywhere on the Internet outside of the notorious Stormfront white-supremacist site.
If you are a leftist, a marxist, a maoist, a statist, or a progressive, Gunny (or, as he is fond of referring to himself, THE Gunny) declares on the site, "YOU ARE MY ENEMY!"
(Note that Gunny even reserves his pique for progressives, a mild descriptive that applies to many Republicans as well as folks of a more liberal bent. Apparently, if you're not a stark, staring, hard-right FoxNews follower, Gunny has no use for you.)
But what's clear is that the primary "enemy" who keeps Pinkstaff up at night, gnashing his teeth and bashing his keyboard, is President Obama, to whom Gunny refers in the subhead to his blog's title: "I'M GUNNY G AND I PROUDLY DEFY THE COMMUNITY ORGANIZER-IN-CHIEF!"
That's what he calls Obama when he's not calling him "The Kenyan Usurper."
Gunny's modus operandi was both simple and duplicitous. In almost every post he issued dire warnings about the imminent leftist/Muslim/racialist assault on the American people by the Obama government, pointedly reminded his readers that the Constitution guarantees their right to bear arms, and cited Thomas Jefferson's oft quoted aphorism that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Even a dolt (a word that aptly describes most of Pinkstaff's dozen or so followers) can do that math. The message is clear and ugly: The Obama administration is tyrannical, and Gunny's followers are the "patriots" who are being called by history to grab their hunting rifles and shoot a government official or two.
On two occasions Gunny's threats were so blatant that I alerted the FBI.
[One day in August 2009 a reader posted a comment on one of Gunny's rants that said in part, "At some point, this situation WILL erupt into VIOLENCE! Ladies should be careful and Gents should deal with things as they see fit."
Gunny replied: "Carry concealed if you have a permit. I will be."
On another occasion, the blog displayed a graphic bearing the words, "Bomb the U.N.," under which Pinkstaff wrote, "The Gunny could not agree more."]
I have no way of knowing whether the G-men paid "The Gunny" a visit, but the violent imagery in his scribblings seemed to become more restrained immediately after I dropped the dime, and he began occasionally inserting into his screeds the disclaimer that he doesn't advocate violence.
The hell he doesn't.
Pinkstaff's psycho rants finally frightened even the rightoids at Townhall.com. which early last year booted The Anti-Liberal Zone, which promptly set up shop here, at Blogger.
Shortly afterwards, an attack on Gunny's blog by a person or persons who demonstrated their opposition by flooding it with comments prompted Gunny to start previewing readers' posts -- and rejecting ones he didn't like, including several by yours truly.
Since I can't countenance censorship of any kind, I ceased posting to Gunny's site (except for the occasional lapse) and threatened to establish a counter-blog.
I am nothing if not a man of my word. This is that blog. A place where fascists, racists, rightoids and tea-party assholes come to die.
I won't post every day and I won't cleave to any particular philosophy or dwell in any predictable political niche.
I'll employ this blog to expose the lies I find on Gunny's odorous hate-fest, as well as use it as a jumping-off point to comment on other issues of the day.
Feel free to comment as you see fit. Use whatever language expresses you. I will censor nothing, but actual threats of violence against identifiable persons will be passed on to the proper authorities.
Let's have some fun.
-Ivan
Friday, July 15, 2011
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