Email of the Day
Matt Welch…is well, a moron. Frank Rich is ten times the man you could only hope to be. Don't think you can hide behind the philosophical notion that 'that government which governs least, governs best,' while you continue to apologize for your right-wing neo-fascist friends who are stealing everything the planet ever had to offer, by disingenuously using big government for their thievery -- while billions suffer and die. This small-government bullshit is just that -- and if you all weren't blinded by your racism and xenophobia and greed -- you would realize that you aren't fooling too many educated people. You fucks like the idea of 'small,' weak government because it allows corporate and business interests to run rough-shod over everyone, and do what it's already doing with 'big' government, only more surreptitiously, which is running the nation and the world into the ground, while a handful of criminals around the globe steal everything they can get their slimy hands on, for their own vulgar pleasures. That you're a willing 'intellectual' aid to this process is unforgivable. A pox on your house.
Why don't you suit up and head to Afghanistan -- or send your own teenage sons and daughters over -- on 'big government's' dime -- to slay some more rag-heads? You need a real taste of terror fella.
Mark Kaplan
New York, New York
In re: this. So much for knowing thy enemy.
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How does Mark Kaplan see the screen to type, with the goat's balls in his face?
I've heard rumors that Mark Kaplan fucks sheep...
Not that there's anything wrong with that as long as the sheep doesn't object.
(Hint for Mark: They never object if you hang their front hooves out the second story window.)
And he didn't even sign it "Have a Nice Day."
Which ought to be expected from a party to the liberaltarian alliance.
Drink?
Shouldn't that be "knowing thine enemy"?
He's on to us! Send out the Koch Brothers to buy his silence!
+10
Why buy when you can ensure silence?
Billions? So at that rate the libertarian world domination plan should be complete by say Thursday?
Fuck yeah, I'm headed down to the elementary school to buy some heroin out of the vending machine to celebrate.
So now "being a man" = "agreeing with my worldview"?
Or is it that you're not a man until you've lived the hardscrabble life of a theater critic?
Critics say, Mark Kaplan rapes sheep at a rate even Steve Smith can't match. Mark Kaplan calls that ridiculous. Still, many of the government programs Mark Kaplan holds dear, have sent money to known sheep rapers in the past. Kaplan still claims he doesn't rape sheep despite his support of these programs. But critics rightly note that without such programs sheep raping might well not exist in today's society.
And Joe Pile refuses to confirm or deny if he has given up sheep raping.
MY NAME IS JOEL, DAMMIT!!
and you can't rape the willing...besides, they are asking for it, prancing around the pasture like that.
Oh right! I'm sorry.
Just to be clear it's Joel Pile who is the alleged sheep raper?
Not Joe Pile?
So alleged sheep fucker = Joel Pile?
Joe Pile= no?
Joel Pile/possible sheep fornicator?
Joe Pile/not such?
Correct?
I think Joel Pile sheep fucker just went to the top of google search.
Hey Matt,
Do the ellipses after your name in the email omit text? This guy sounds like a genius and we shouldn't try to censor a towering intellect like this guy.
"Matt Welch" was the subject line, and the e-mail text started with three dots.
Three dots? Or DOT HEADS? RACIST!!!!
Maybe it's three Indians. You always have to qualify dot or feather and who starts a letter with three feathers?
Not only is this guy an "educated" genious, he also shows quite a bit of class. Take, for example, that he declares himself "educated," while starting off the next (run-on) sentence with "You fucks..."
Classy!
Okay, so I misspelled "genius." Sue me... blah, blah, blah...
It added authenticity.
joe'z law strikes again.
You don't need to make up a new name for it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law
Not only is this guy an "educated" genious,
More likely a "genie's ass."
Holeee Fuck.
Q: What's a bucket full of rancid gonorrhea spawned dick cheese?
A: Mark Kaplan.
That's sort of like if I selected randomly from my email from my lefty friends, every day. So far I've gotten 1,613 links to the piece on the Koch bros.
The sad thing ist that it's so common that people confuse a free market with corporatism like that idiot does.
The conflation is deliberate, at least insofar as the NYT is concerned.
It has always pleased me that in Liberal-land, corporations are coercive and government isn't. They are forced to sign contracts and voluntarily pay taxes!
That coercion is for your own good, you backwards-ass, cousin-fuckin', pickup-drivin', know-nothing hayseed plebe!!
But we're not elitists!
Who is Mark Kaplan?
I hereby second the question. Never heard of him. Who is he?
He's my cousin, isn't he dreamy?
Baaaaaa!
...and why his email important enough to post on H&R?
That's MAX Kaplan!
STEVE SMITH AND MARK KAPLAN GOOD FRIENDS! STEVE AND MARK HAVE RAPING CONTESTS! MARK KAPLAN ALWAYS WIN! STEVE SMITH HAVE A SAD! STEVE WILL BEAT HIM NEXT TIME!
THIS IS WHAT LIBERALS ACTUALLY BELIEVE
Excellent south park tie-in.
Needs a blink tag.
Alas.
How does he know I have vulgar pleasures?
C'mon, man. Look at yourself.
Tis true...
Look at the way PJ O'Rourke does, Obergruppenfueher Welch: No babe ever fantasizes about being ravished by a liberal.
"You need a real taste of terror fella."
This from a guy who would, no doubt, wet his pants at the very thought of engaging in a fight of any sort.
Uh, didn't The Big O just surge 60,000 troops into that desert?
"A pox on your house."
Fie!
Ye shall rue the day, Welch!
"Rue the day? Who says that?"
Can you hammer a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?
I "alledgedly" use my penis to hammer the ewes.
Not right *now* ...
Yes, yes I can.
Yes, yes I can.
Yes, yes I can.
Yes, yes I can. You know, someone asked me that very question 26 years ago.
This asshat would fit right in with those bloody tampon leftists depicted in the "Die, Hippies Die" episode of South Park. I would like to think those hippies were merely caricatures, but Mark Kaplan suggests otherwise. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Or, in my case, be very amused.
I sort of take a Mencken-esque perspective. The booboisie are very entertaining, even when they run the country into the ground.
Matt,
Every right wing or libertarian writer I know has a whole list of whopper hate e-mails they have gotten. It is sort of an indoor outdoor sport among rightwing and libertarian journalists and writers to talk about who gets the craziest hate mail.
What is interesting is that left wing writers never seem to do the same. I never hear them talking about hate mail they get from crazed Libertarians or conservatives. I wonder why that is? Are they getting them and just not sharing them out of kindness? Or maybe there is a certain kind of absurdity that only exists on the Left.
A: No one reads them.
I've gotten tons of insane hate mail over the years from right-of-center sorts, particularly on War/Defense issues. Once a wife of a DIA agent threatened to have me investigated, because I was making some civil libertarian argument about WoT stuff.
Thanks Matt.
I will post over at Althouse once in a while. And I run crossways with the righties over drugs. Some of the responses are frankly embarrassing.
Do you still get them?
You don't write about immigration without getting hate mail. But it's true that since the occupant of the White House has changed, so too has the group identity of my biggest non-fans. (Libertarians excluded, of course.)
You can't be seriously be na?ve enough to think that progressives have a monopoly on boorish behavior. I've seen plenty of liberal bloggers post their hatemail. Kos used to post a Saturday hate mail-apalooza, which you should be able to search for on his site. It depends quite a bit on the individual blogger, and some are more inclined to revel in their persecution than others. Try using the "search" button on a liberal blog sometimes.
"Terror Fella" was the name of a dancer at The Ranch back in the 80s.
I'm well aware of how he tastes thankyouverymuch.
I laughed. There's nothing like some good punctuation humor.
There are only eight hundred thousand Mark Kaplans in New York. Git a rope.
Rope?
Wha? Mr. Kaplan should have stuck to the theater, understanding politics and political debate is plainly not his thing.
I came to the conclusion, some time ago, the understanding that the Constitution as a limit to government power is a bit like... language is to humans in general.
I'm sure we've all heard those stories about a kid who was horribly abused, chained up in a closet or some such thing into their adolescence, and when pulled out of the horror it's been found that they never really learn language. Scientists (I believe) have discovered a 'point-of-no-return' so to speak, in that if you don't learn language at a certain age, it'll never really come. It's not to say that these unfortunate souls can't communicate, they just use more rudimentary means.
Anywho, the point of all this is that I've noticed the same thing with understanding of the Constitution. If people don't learn that the Constitution is fundamentally a document which creates limits to federal power, after a certain point, you just don't get it. You have been chained up in a closet somewhere, and it's never going to happen.
The alarming thing is, it seems that more and more people have been chained up in this closet, and because of it, we could be in real trouble.
Looks like were doin our jerbs!
OMGah! It's really nice in here.
So Frank Rich's fans appear to be just as logic-challenged as he is. Explains a lot.
How do we know it's a Frank Rich fan and not Rich himself? Perhaps he attended the Glen Greenwald school of sockpuppetry.
Lay off Greenwald.
I'm not sure it was appropriate not to censor the guy's name.
It was a letter to the editor. And as noted above, New York, NY does not lack for Mark Kaplans.
Fair, but how many Mark Kaplans go by "Chad"
Sounds mildly anti-Semitic.
Is it racist to say that there are a slightly higher percentage of black people in Africa?
Sure is. Capcom got in trouble for it.
Why did he sign it?
He's dumb enough to have written it, so clearly he's dumb enough to sign it, too.
I'm not sure it was appropriate not to censor the guy's name.
The first rule of email is to never send one that you aren't willing to see published/forwarded ad infinitum.
The best part of writing a newspaper column was the hate mail I received. Very amusing stuff. I still quote it sometimes at parties.
And I can personally vouch for Welch's contention that just as much -- if not more -- hate mail comes from the right as from the left.
GO BACK TO IRELAND YOU DRUNKEN PEDERAST, I HATE YOU (spits). THINK YOUR SOOOO SMART, MR. ANCHORBABY. I HOPE YOU DROWN IN TEQUILA YOU DAMN WETBACK POTATO FUCKER! IT'S NOT ENOUGH THAT you people OWN HOLLYWOOD AND ALL THE FAT CAT BANKERS BUT NOW YOU RUIN MY SUNDAY MORNING WITH YOU VILE SHIT YOU NEED TO LEARN ABOUT AMERICAS REAL HEROS! GO BACK TO AFRICA!!
You're welcome.
*slow clap, nods head*
From this email, I am to understand that the evil corporations are screwing us by using big government and also that they would screw us with a small government too. I guess this provides this guy with the desperation he needs to blindly rail against the private sector...they're screwing us over no matter what kind of government we have!
Ha. But Kaplan forgot the part about it costs more for big government to help corporations run roughshod over us than for small government to do it. And that is typical for a collectivist. Bigger government at all costs.
You can say that again.
Ha. But Kaplan forgot the part about it costs more for big government to help corporations run roughshod over us than for small government to do it. And that is typical for a collectivist. Bigger government at all costs.
Thanks.
I see what you did there.
As best as I can tell from his email, it's kind of an amalgm of:
Bigger Government will fix this.
The Right People aren't in charge.
Smaller government definitely won't fix this.
The War in Afghanistan exists for reasons other than Big Government.
Matt Welch wouldn't be such a smarty-pants about Big Government if he had to fight in the War Which Has Nothing To Do With Big Government that Bigger Government Will Fix.
So liberty and free markets are now code words for racism?
Faith in Big Government is a premise to rail against Big Government. Or maybe it's the other way around. It's hard to tell from Mr. Kaplan's signed letter to the editor.
What strikes me as odd is the idea that we libertarians and small-government conservatives--numbering in the millions--are all, in this person's mind, supporting large corporations crushing the life out of, well, us, among others. Doesn't he realize that we think there are political, social, and economic justifications for our position? That benefit the greatest number?
Rat bastard.
I believe the proper term is Rat Fucker.
And coercion is peace.
Whenever I hear or read anyone of Mark Kaplan's rather obvious political persuasion toss out a racial epithet or two in this context it is clear to me that they are projecting.
Mark Kaplan: There were times while I read Frank Rich where I felt...
Mark Kaplan: ...retarded. Like, really retarded.
Reason: Damn!
Mark Kaplan: In a weird way I had to sort of just free myself up to believe that is was ok to be stupid or dumb.
Reason: To be a moron.
Mark Kaplan: Yeah!
Reason: To be moronical.
Mark Kaplan: Exactly, to be a moron.
Reason: An imbecile.
Mark Kaplan: Yeah!
Reason: Like the dumbest mother fucker that ever lived.
Mark Kaplan: [pause] When I was writing that email.
Reason: Everybody knows you never do a full retard.
Mark Kaplan: What do you mean?
Reason: Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, 'Rain Man,' look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Count toothpicks to your cards. Autistic, sure. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, 'Forrest Gump.' Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain't retarded. Then there was Sean Penn in 'I Am Sam.' He went full retard. Left the Oscars empty-handed. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard
Mark Kaplan went beyond full retard, he went double retard.
Double Secret Retard?
I went on a date with Mark Kaplan a few years ago. He was very small. It didn't even seem real, that's how it small it was. I remember thinkiong that maybe the light was askew or perhaps my contact lenses had slipped, but no, it really was that small. He did buy me a nice dinner though.
Threadjack: Justin Raimondo defending the "Kochtopus":
http://original.antiwar.com/ju.....kochtopus/
And when a truly radical libertarian current did emerge, out of the Ron Paul campaign, with a real mass following, the Cato-ites disdained it, telling Chris Hayes of The Nation magazine that Paul was too populist and plebeian for their aristocratic oh-so-high-minded selves. He wasn't, they averred, cosmopolitan enough.
Cosmos...I hate those guys.
What exactly is wrong with cosmopolitanism, if I may ask?
It's the overwhelming sincerity they put into everything they say or do to the point you have to explain jokes to them, and not just the ones that should be obvious to anyone, but all of them.
They mean well, and that is what really hurts.
I don't understand what you are saying. Explain, please.
a handful of criminals around the globe steal everything they can get their slimy hands on, for their own vulgar pleasures.
Wait- Mugabe's a libertarian, too?
Now I get it!
I don't know about you guys, but if Obama gets reelected, I'm moving to Somalia.
According to Mark Kaplan and Frank Rich it is the reddest of red states. In that case, it should be nice there.
If Obama gets reelected, Somalia is coming to you!
Oh, come off it. Somalia sucks.
Hmm(pbuh), my sarcometer must not be working. I didn't detect any but surely you were being sarcastic.
No reason to praise me. Not yet at least.
"while billions suffer and die"
So, "peak oil" has been put off a bit, but "peak retard" is here at this very minute.
Cool!
Just wait until we develop zero point retard. Then they'll be no limits.
Strange that there is a physics current in today's threads.
It certainly has a capacity for charm.
Excellent.
I woulda used spin.
How colorful!
I predicted "peak retard" back in the 80's, look how that turned out!
I predicted "peak retard" back in the 80's, look how that turned out!
No, you didn't predict it, you occupied the position. Unfortunately, like peak oil, we never seem to actually reach peak retard. One day a Mark Kaplan comes along and no more peak retard for Ehrlich.
Anyone who has every spoken to Barney Frank knows that "retard" is in no way a limited resource.
Dear Mister Kaplan-
You probably shouldn't answer your doorbell in your bare feet.
You might get splinters, or sumpthin'...
---"you can hide behind the philosophical notion that 'that government which governs least, governs best"---
---"right-wing neo-fascist friends who are stealing everything the planet ever had to offer,disingenuously using big government for their thievery"---
If we had the first one, wouldn't the second be very unlikely???
Um -- I think it's highly unlikely that logic would prove an effective response to Mr. Kaplan.
So liberty and free markets are now code words for racism?
Whaddaya mean "NOW"?
An email? Why doesn't he just come to Hit & Run to insult you like the rest of us do?
What discredits the guy immediately isn't so much that he disagrees with you - it's that he takes an ass-clown like Frank Rich seriously.
He doesn't take Matt Welch seriously, at all. He takes Frank Rich ten times as seriously as that. Do the math.
Krugman? Is that you?
Pfft, I have my insult letters hand delivered.
Matt, you missed your opportunity to say "I am half the man Frank Rich is!"
Hey, Matt Welch, I heard Mark Kaplan badmouthing you, he said you weren't fit to bed down with the dogs. But I stood up for you, and told him you are.
The only logical next step is for General Matt Welch and Frank the Swan Rich to have a song-and-dance-off.
A well-crafted piece of hate mail is a joy forever. I especially liked the nod to the Bard; "a pox on your house" gives the letter a much-needed whiff of sophistication. Well done!
Yeah, The incongruity makes for some fine innate humor. "A pox on your house, you ratfucking turd stain!" Classing-up the banality is the way to go when it comes to douchebaggery insult tactics.
This guy's entire complaint about libertarianism isn't that it allows corporations to run a muck; he acknowledges that that happens with "big government". Rather he simply posits that corporations will rob us all more "surreptitiously".
I am rapidly learning that, despite my likely annoying desire to provide my opinion to anyone who mistakenly opens the valve, my political beliefs are dangerous because they are "sneaky".
Brad Pitt? Is that you?
This Mark Kaplan guy sounds all right to me.
After all, he didn't mention the Bible or talk about values or anything like that icky Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin.
But don't worry, Real Libertarians. Keep on trying to build bridges with the Left.
Imagine an email from one of those folks at a Glenn Beck rally. It might contain a Gospel quote. Horror!
Nah, I'd rather have a country run my Mark Kaplans than some people secretly praying for my soul AND DOING SO WITHOUT A GOVERNMENT PERMIT, no less.
Really, I view either kinds of hate mail to be equally amusing. If they must resort to personal attacks, then they are clearly not my equals. I have no interest in wasting time with my inferiors.
I have no interest in wasting time with my inferiors.
Implying all of us here are either your equals or superiors. Thanks, Tristan!
Pretty much. At the end of the day, while I may disagree, I am among my equals and superiors.
Imagine an email from one of those folks at a Glenn Beck rally. It might contain a Gospel quote. Horror!
Impossible. You have to be literate in order to write an email.
Well, now isn't this letter interesting. Folks, you aren't looking at a liberal rant or anything. You aren't even looking at a representative of socialism-it would be far more coherent than that, in any case.
Rather, you are all being treated to is a representative of your average G20 protester type. It is more of an emotional personality disposition than a coherent political position. Very reactionary.
The most depressing part is that, no more than ten years ago, someone like this would be considered a crank. Now their views are being promoted in more respectable terms. I'm not a right-winger. I'm still one of those old-fashioned, hoity-toity libertarians who hates the right and left and says a pox on both of them.
The sad truth is that Mr. Kaplan is essentially right, but doesn't have a coherent analysis of cause and effect or a solution. It's people like him that make Brennan O'Neill, over a spiked!, to be seen as a right-winger; while he is still a committed Marxist. It's really quite exasperating.
personality disposition disorder
ftfy
The sad truth is that Mr. Kaplan is essentially right,
You lost me, there. I don't see a single thing that he said that was right, other than his backhanded admission that Big Corp was using Big Gov to line its pockets.
Yes, that is what I mean. I also implied that he was right about what exactly the rich are doing with their newfound power.
And then Holy Cow left a flaming bag of dog shit gibberish on the front porch, rang the doorbell and retreated to the shrubbery to observe...
burberry scarf,burberry scarf has been a worldwide business leader in selling high-quality consumer goods.
burberry scarf had expanded our line from burberry scarf to a wider range.
They are burberry scarf,burberry scarf.burberry scarf:do you want to buy it?
I'm still here, P Brooks.
But tell me again, why do Real Libertarians bend over backwards to make common cause with the Left, which Mark Kaplan perfectly represents?
Instead of making common cause with the tens of thousands at the G. Beck thing over the weekend?
Oh, I know. I know. Because Real Libertarians have no interest in pushing the country toward Libertarianism.
Real Libertarians just want to be the cool kids in the Gulags.
Because the enemy of my enemy isn't my friend. I don't want to make common cause with the left either, as demonstrated by this letter.
As for the whole Gulag comment, relax. That isn't what is happening. It's just run-of-the-mill corporate liberalism.
One can't help but laugh at the false dichotomy Holy Cow has set up here, though: if you're not a fan of Beck or Palin (who both just hawk a different flavor of statism), then you're automatically trying to make common cause with the Mark Kaplans of the world.
Mark Kaplan displays the ultimate example of the Left's complete misunderstanding of libertarianism. That's what we'd like to correct, then see how far we can go recognizing that decentralizing economic and political power go hand in hand.
Unfortunately, its almost impossible to connect with liberals like that. For all of their hand-wringing over the "epistemic closure" of the right, I have found liberals extremely averse to giving principled libertarian arguments the time of day.
Liberals are just as tribally circled around their elites as conservatives. Their elites just tend to be academia and journalists so they feel all self-righteous.
Therefore, when they are confronted with reasonable arguments in opposition to their own opinions, they either resort to the name-calling elitism of Paul Krugman, or the redirection of arguments to lowest common denominators of Frank Rich types.
What's really revealing here is how Mark Kaplan apparently simply cannot imagine that a non-leftist would also be anti-military and anti-inventerventionist. He apparently thinks that only leftists reflexively and mindless oppose military action when in reality many libertarians do as well. He however, can't understand that because in his mind, everyone who is not a mind clone of Kaplan believes in the same evil things.
In the end, this really speaks to Kaplan's hubris and narcissism. He is so convinced that his world view is obvious and true that he cannot imagine anyone with a different world view than his and he can't imagine that a moral, human person could possibly do anything other than agree with him in lock step. He thinks everyone believes the world works exactly like he thinks it does, it just that some of us are so evil we decide to choose to do the wrong things out of self-interest even though we know the "right" thing to do. Since everyone immediately recognizes the "right" thing to do, all evil people chose to take the exact same opposite of the "right" action. Therefore, all people who disagree with Mark Kaplan all believe the same wrong thing.
It is this hubris and narcissism that underlies everything that leftists believe and do. Everything is about them. All conflicts and ideologies are always ultimately centered on the leftists' own struggle to violently bend the world to their will. (Think of the way Marxist blamed absolutely everything bad, on capitalism. e.g in one generation homosexuality is a capitalist perversion and the next homophobia is.)
We are all taught the lesson of histories that show the dangers of people who think they speak for God. We should learn the dangers of people who believe themselves to have a functionally God-like apprehension of a staggering array of highly complex issues to such an extent that that only the evil will disagree with them.
I find that this attitude is a common human failing. Lots of it on the right as well.
Indeed, the case can be made with how conservatives treat war critics.
It's a big mistake to believe that, "everybody does it." People hold differing political ideas in the first place because they have significantly different models about how the world works. Those models justify different types of political behaviors.
Conservatives are not arrogant or narcissistic to anything approaching the magnitude of leftists. A conservative believes he/she personally should be restrained by tradition, religion and common law. They view every individual as flawed and constantly engaged in a battle not to fall into selfish behaviors. They believe the world is a very complex and poorly understood place in which we have to struggle to find the right answer.
Leftists by contrast believe that individuals are not restrained by anything and that they can pull any idea out of their hat and force others to follow the idea. They view themselves as functionally morally perfect individuals who do not have to struggle to do right. They believe the world is a relatively simple place in that any reasonably well educated person can understand to such a degree of accuracy that such people are justified in imposing that understanding by force.
You can see the narcissism of leftist in their attitudes towards wars and foreign policy in general. They always argue that the real cause of a foreign policy problem is the American/Western non-left and that the solution to all foreign policy problems is to degrade the non-left. They don't believe that anyone else in the world takes any negative action save in response to something awful the Western non-left did. They don't credit anyone else from having any human motivations of their own that have nothing to do with actions of the left's domestic opponents.
Conservatives have their own political sins but arrogance, hubris and a the-world-revolves-around-me attitude are their bigs ones.
"Conservatives are not arrogant or narcissistic to anything approaching the magnitude of leftists."
Well, except for the Religious Right, who think unless you accept Jesus Founded America and Gays Are A Secret Cabal Aiming To Convert Our Children, and All Liberals Are Motivated By Athiesm, Hurricane Katrina Was Punishment for Permitting Abortion, Darwin Was Wrong, etc
Speaking of which, Nick Gillespie and The Jacket called it a while back...I think around 2006, he announced that the high-water mark of the Christian Right had passed, and that power was going to slip though their fingers like sand... Who the hell has heard ANYTHING from James Dobson, Family Research Council, Ralph Reed, et al, in the last 2 years? These guys used to be power-players in DC, and I think they are almost all direct-to-video now... can't even get a free lunch anymore. I think during the 2008 election, Dobson sort of took himself out of republican politics by saying *none* of the GOP candidates was Christian enough for him. "Thanks for the big help there, James!"
I can't say I'm sorry about it.
The 'Christian Right' is like libertarianism. They talk alot, and even occasionally get their points out there to be heard, but, in the end, they generally only ever get to see scraps of their policies put into effect.
The only different being that libertarians actually have something relatively intelligent to say, unlike the Religious Right.
You're missing the point. It's not that Conservatives don't think they have political answers, its why they think they have the answers that counts.
Conservatives believe that tradition, in many forms, tells everyone, rich or poor, educated or not, how to behave. Conservatism is therefore very egalitarian. Everyone knows the right answers by virtue of growing up in a culture. Its just humanity's inherent weaknesses that keep us from implementing those answers in personal or public spheres.
Leftists take the opposite tack. They believe that tradition in any form is virtually useless. Therefore, they believe that most people can't know the right answers and that only a special intellectual and ideological elite really understand anything. Leftisms is therefore inherently elitist.
Elitists have different political behaviors than do non-elitists.
I would add that one reason that the Christian Right has faded is because so many of their ideas have been accepted and co-opted by the center and become mainstream.
If you look back at all the violent hostility to traditional morays that was all the rage in politics during the seventies and then compare it to now, its quite clean that we shifted back to more traditional views.
I believe it is called SOLIPSISM.
He's got you on the manhood thing, Mr. Welch. Everyone knows that theater critics are true men among men. I was a combat medic, and even I tell my sons that treating men under fire was just a way to compensate for my inability to face up to the brutal realities of the theater.
why do Real Libertarians bend over backwards to make common cause with the Left
I don't know, Mister Bones; why DO they?
An interesting feature here would be "The Hate Mail of the Day."
Maybe "of the Week," but yes, that's a good idea, thanks!
I"m perfectly fine with religious fanatics secretly praying for my soul, as long as that's all they do for it.
I especially like that "secretly" part, the less they bother me with it the better.
Good Lord, somebody would really rather have a Total State under the control of intemperate, intolerant fanatics than a country run by religious "fanatics" who pray secretly for others?
I don't exactly understand how that is a response to my comment, sorry.
I believe he was using sarcasm to say that he agreed with you.
It's bad enough the Mark Kaplans of the world are voting, living in the United States even, but there are quite a few with other titles besides fucktard. The most troubling are Senator and Congressman.
Anyone know what Gabe Kaplan's been up to lately?
Dig on this:
http://www.examiner.com/conser.....rn-violent
What say ye, Tony, Chad, and Max?
I'm fine with it.
Me, too. Violence against the right is a good thing.
Count me in! I'd love to kick some right-winger ass!
Kill the Christofags!
I could help with some discreet funding...
Who is Joel Pile?
Well, Matt,someone finally pegged you. Or whatever. Thank the Lord for such rants to amuse. And when is Frank Rick going to "suit up and head to Afghanistan?" Just curious...
All angry reason letters should be released to the public. Angry emails are the best. There's nothing more satisfying than trolling the ever loving shit out of someone through email.
Maybe Reason should hire a full time troll. To respond to emails.
Where do I apply?
A
Welch, you ratfucker.
Matt,
Good to see Dave Weigel is still staying in touch with the Reason Staff.
I mean, geeze, you wanted to put Welch in his place, just remind him his beloved Angels were swept by the Baltimore Orioles--not once, but, in fact, for the whole freaking season.
Explain to me again how being constitutionalist libertarian is all somehow just a 'cover' for being corporate apologists? I don't get where the 2 things connect.
Like: strong supporter of freedom of speech? YOU'RE JUST A SHILL FOR BIG... PORN...
Pro Drug-Decriminalization, Legalization?
YOU'RE JUST A SHILL FOR BIG... SOMETHING
Oppose REAL ID? Any 'papers please' civil mandates?
YOU'RE JUST A .... CORPORATIONS... SLIMY THIEVES...
Support Gay Marriage?
COVER FOR RAPE OF THE PLANET BY TEH CORPORATIONS
Want the Federal Government to reduce the deficit?
EVIL HATER OF ALL LIFE
I mean... basically, what the guy seems to be saying, is: If you're 'small government' = you want endless wars and the despoliation of the planet by our Secret Corporate Overlords.
Is anyone else like, "What the fuck?"
Is this all because he wrote a post saying, "The Kochs are no different than George Soros?" Is this an entirely invented 'controversy'?
Isn't "Mark Kaplan" Cass Sunstein's Hebrew name?
thanks