Letters to the Editor
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Perfect.
Very nice job. Right there with you on the brilliant, funny, fantastic former hippie/current Bushie parents, only I have four of them.
This was lovely and spot-on and Wil Wheaton should have a regular column on every website I obsessively waste time on at work.
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Ahem.
"However I find it is the liberals that I find have the greatest difficulty seeing the other sides points. It is the liberals that usually flip flop back and forth. The only time I have seen a Republican change is because things change. It is also the Liberals who can't back up thier opinions with logic (not wishy washy things like because it's wrong)"
I refer you to the furore over Bush's illegal spying scandal -- in that instance, as in so very many others, it is the lefties/Democrats (and the Republicans who joined them) who have logic on their side (amazing that some people actually have to be informed that, well, it's illegal to break the law, but that's how Orwellian the right-wing media has become).
Over the past few years, I've watched as vast reams of right-wing pundits, high-profile and low, resort to emotive gibbering entirely bereft of logic or honour, unable to provide any kind of reference for their accusations outside of worthless anecdotes, squeals of "everyone knows it's true!", or, most shameful of all, outright lies. Meanwhile on the opposite side of the divide, even the (justifiably, to my mind) vicious invective of lower-brow pundits like the Rude Pundit is riddled with links to decent data, real news reports (as opposed to easily-debunked trash from, say, 'Newsmax') and impeccable internal logic. While a lot of people only adopt liberalism as a knee-jerk reflex, there are plenty of us who chose this path thoughtfully, and are dedicated to intelligently searching for truth, fairness and human decency; a party like the Republicans, currently dedicated to the 'morals' of America's corporate shills and enemies of spiritual freedom, is of little use to us; hatemongers like O'Reilly are worth even less. I'm sorry if that sounds mean, but at least it's not groundless.
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Ditto
I felt like I was reading from my own diary.
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three cheers for michael hebert
extremists are inherently incapable of recognizing that they are extremists. three cheers for the radical center. if only someone could tap into it and create a political framework for common sense, we could all get on with our lives...
thanks, michael
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When Dad's attack!!
Sorry to hear your Dad is buying into all the right-wing nonsense. My own father has gone in the opposite direction: from moderate left to an left which is now somewhere way to the left of me. It makes for some interesting discussions. But my dear old dad doesn't see the need to explode with rage when we talk. If he did go nuts at me, in front of my wife and kids, much as I love him, I wouldn't give him a free pass. I do hope you can really sit down with your Dad, so you can ask him why he lets Limbaugh and O'Reilly into his head. Theres nothing wrong with getting a bit more conservative as you get older, hell, its happening to me now, and I'm only 34! Byt Limbaugh and O'Reilly are conservatives: They're haters, liars, bullshitters and hypocrites. If your Dad needs conservatism, tell him to go talk to John McCain.
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sorry, a clarification
I meant to say in my post that Limbaugh and O'Reilly AREN'T conservatives. Sorry, all!
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Wil Wheaton's revelation
Wil Wheaton's piece on the discord within his family is troubling not for the revelation of a dysfunctional family - who doesn't belong to a family of similar, or even greater, dysfunction? The disturbing aspect of Mr. Wheaton's piece is the impunity with which he plays himself as the good guy against the backdrop of intolerance and small-mindedness of his father. Is his writing honestly so important to him that he will bare this dysfunction without hesitation? Is his only remorse that his father has come to represent all that is distasteful about an opposing political viewpoint?
When did we, as a nation, become so obsessed with ourselves that we, in the most casual and frivolous manner, exploit the weaknesses and foibles of those who should find our confidence most secure? When did we become so comfortable turning our backs on relationships, however dysfunctional, that have been nurtured over decades?
It is not the routine dysfunction of Mr. Wheaton's family that sets his piece apart, but his unabashed willingness to feign dignity and reason in the writing of a piece that is simply cheap exploitation.
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the real war on xmas
nice piece, but why take this 'war' seriously. the fascists have laid themselves wide open to ridicule with this one, and that's the one thing an alcoholic/codependent cannot tolerate.
as for me, i work retail, and i'm an Official Saboteur Of Xmas. in the off-season, i take candy from babies and infect rats with plague, n'est-ce pas?
these people on the "right" (actually, seriously, fascists by another name) are all about fear, and nothing confronts fear better than laughter.
that's what mikhail bakhtin said, and was a communist!
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One little problem with your story....
Bill O'Reilly is opposes to the death penalty (or at least he say he does).
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I had the same experience over Labor Day weekend
My three-year-old daughter, my brother, and I flew back east to my parents' house for a friend's wedding. This was over Labor Day weekend. When we boarded the plane, there had been no food and water drops in New Orleans and Bush was still on vacation. Since my parents have been Rush Limbaugh listeners for years, (I still remember the time, several years ago, when my mother told me about a new cable news network she had started watching because it wasn't "liberal" like CNN), I knew that I needed to avoid any discussion of current events and politics.
The first night we were there, my daughter and I woke up to the sound of my father screaming at my brother at the top of his lungs "You're stupid! You're stupid! You're stupid!" My father, it seems, had decided he wanted to discuss politics after all.
In talking about it afterward, my brother and I realized that the most disturbing part was not the fact that we disagreed about the politics, it was the fact that our father had been conditioned to believe it was acceptable to bully, threaten, and intimidate people. I said, "It's not even about respect. It's about treating us with simple common courtesy." We have since made it clear to him that should he ever behave in that way toward us again, we will immediately remove ourselves from the situation until he is capable of acting like a rational person (As I say with my toddler, "You need to calm your body down now"-- the behavior parallels are amazing).
I've also used the parental blocking feature on my cable box to lock out Fox News on my TV. I may have to do the same to my parents' sets the next time I visit.