The C-SPAN Right-wing Loon Call of the Day

06/03/2005

Arianna Huffington Snidely Attacked by a Seething Right-wing Loon Arianna Huffington is a beautiful and articulate woman. Born in Greece and educated in Oxford, she was escorted into the political arena by her husband, one-term Republican Representative of California Michael Huffington. Initially Arianna appeared in various political forums in the 90s as a staunch conservative, using all of the buzzwords and shallow shibboleths of the reactionary right-wing platform. Then in 1998, her husband came out of the closet and admitted he was a bisexual. The two amicably divorced, and, suddenly, Arianna, unencumbered by her husband's Republican party affiliation, reemerged as a liberal. She's a very strong opponent of the corporate aligned two-party system, and is even pals with the right-wing whipping boy, Al Franken. All of this, with her distinguished European pedigree, adds up to an interesting guest appearance on yesterday's Washington Journal, and sets her up as a sure-fire target for right-wing loons. The recorder was running. Complimented by her elegant and refined composure, Arianna evinces optimism and confident conviction in her liberal principles. Polluted as their minds are by right-wing pie holes engaged in incessant liberal bashing, nothing infuriates right-wing loons more than to see a liberal sincerely and comfortably espousing progressive values without the compunction right-wing pundits tell them liberals should have. It's disconcerting, this intrusion upon the right-wing loon's homestead, the sanctimonious claim to the moral high ground. The selected right-wing loon call of the day was the third or forth call for Arianna. He immediately attacks the two previous callers as from the "fringe," and that he wasn't surprised, he said, because that's the type of person she attracts. When questioned by the moderator Peter Slin, the caller goes on to explain that Arianna herself is on the fringe, and that despite her protesting the use of words like Fascism and Hitler, it's the same type of words she uses all the time to get attention. But he wasn't finished; he's still got a surplus of venom coursing through his veins, and it has to be injected into something, as if it's an instinct of his rutting season. Shifting the subject to Arianna's ex-husband, the caller said he had been a fan of Michael Huffington's, and asked what had become of him, and after seeing her personality, "I'm really not surprised he went gay." Now, wasn't that a piece of work? What a human being. What class. If you've ever tried to call into Washington Journal, you'd know that it takes persistence to get through. The redial button or perhaps some other advanced dialing technology is essential to the effort. The technology aside, one would assume that the effort would be in direct proportion to the gravitas of one's message. But as you can see, no such correlation exists. It has nothing to do with gravitas and everything to do with childish, inappropriate, and misdirected rage. And at the encouragement of right-wing pie holes, right-wing loons seek out a target for their unaddressed issues, instead of dealing with them like rational people. That target would be the liberal caricature as embraced by this caller from Canyon Lake, Texas.	The target of his spittle was the retired FBI chief Mark Felt, now famous thanks to the announcement that the agent had been the mysterious Deep Throat of the Watergate scandal. What we have here in this caller is a man with a lot of anger to express, and a limited vocabulary with which to express it. In less than a minute, he uses the word liberal as a pejorative four times, each followed with some snarling absurdity. He's an ignorant windbag attacking a straw man, the caricature made proverbial by the exploitative right-wing pie holes. I'm reminded of those hate rallies in Nineteen Eighty-four, when the face of Goldstein is projected upon a screen in an auditorium and all of the party members shout epithets at the image. If you critically examine our times, the analogy is only slightly rhetorical: You have a group conformed in hatred toward a manufactured enemy of the state. Thanks to the current level of right-wing punditry, a typical right-wing loon has no sense of proportion. They can't differentiate between a denial over oral sex and the vagaries posited to garner support for the death and destruction of an unnecessary war. Any detraction of the conservative agenda is seen by the right-wing loon as tantamount to treason and deserving the absolute severest of penalties. Sometimes in a feeding frenzy induced by their own rhetoric they''ll eat their own, such as this caller enraged over the filibuster compromise. Can you image that? What a rant that was. Treason, he said. The seven Republicans were guilty of treason and should be prosecuted. The depth of his enmity toward liberals is so intense, he went blind at the thought of compromising with them. The taste for liberal blood had quickened his bloodlust and made him feral, and now he's striking at anything that moves. The invectives uttered against his fellow apparatchiks as an excuse for prosecution were absurd, demonstrating that the man has no concept of the real meaning of treason. Unable to truly vent his spitefulness without himself incurring punitive consequences, he urges enlisting the judicial system to legally exact his thirst for revenge on the turncoats. But a charge inspiring a self-righteous hatred must be levied, so treason it is, a crime comprised of several of the worst sins. The Second Coming For sorting these recordings, I create categories using the artist space in the mp3 properties dialogue box. For instance, the category for the call above is titled Partisan Hateful. One of my favorite categories is one titled The Second Coming. These are callers who insist on sharing their advanced biblical knowledge, with particular attention on the scriptures prophesying the imminent apocalypse, and Jesus' return. Here's one. Keep in mind, this is what Democrats are up against: people who can't tell the difference between theology and values. How do you reach such people? Alric Knebel alric@cableone .net
This page is created for the primary purpose of entertainment and — to a much lesser degree — education, and has not been endorsed by, or is in anyway associated with, C-SPAN.
Previous Edition Iron Eye Foundation

Arianna Huffington Snidely Attacked by a Seething Right-wing Loon

The Second Coming