Joan Swirsky
Joan Swirsky is one crazy tea-bagger! Even amongst the tea-bagger community, she stands out as one of the most bug-eyed, poo-throwing, mouth-foaming lunatics you're likely to run across. How crazy? Well, let's look at one example.According to the most recent Gallup poll:
Barack Obama’s recent job approval ratings have hovered around 60%. Since they remain above the historical average of 55% approval, he is arguably still in the honeymoon phase of his presidency. Obama's initial approval rating was 68%, generally higher than what other recent presidents had at the beginning of their terms. He averaged 63% for his first quarter in office. Now well into his second quarter as president, his approval rating has stayed above 60% for the most part (Gallup.com)
So, any normal person would look at the polling data and think "Obama's still pretty popular." Even a normal person who hates Obama would have to say something like, "Dammit! The SOB's still pretty popular!" So how does Joan Swirsky interpret these numbers?
So, apparently, congressional radicals and union organizers make up over 60% of the US population! Either that or Joan Swirsky is running for mayor of crazytown! Oh, Joan, have I got a running mate for you!
Oh, never mind. He says you're too nutty for him.
But anyway, let's look at the rest of her article starting with the title:
Okay, I think that "million" is probably pretty generous, but even if that is an accurate number, that's one million out of a country of over three hundred million, which means that about a third of one percent of the population showed up for a series of rallies that had been relentlessly promoted by FOX News and talk radio and featured various right-wing media personalities making guest appearances, so let's not act like this represents some major movement or something. seriously, more people tuned in to a rerun of Smallville last night. (source)
Um, no.
I don't think there have been any since April 15. Maybe there have been a few, a few so small that no one noticed, but the "movement" has certainly not "grown exponentially." Here's what "exponential growth" means:
Example: |
when a > 0 and the b is greater than 1, the graph will be increasing (growing).
For this example, each time x is increased by 1, y increases by a factor of 2.
Exponential Growth
I'm sorry, do go on!
Wow! where to begin?
"Decades of debt?" You do understand that we've been running enormous deficits ever since Bill Clinton turned over the keys to Boozey McSimpleton, don't you? Funny how the so-called "fiscal conservatives" never seem to worry about deficits when they're actually in a position to do something about it. As soon as they're out of power, Oh My God, the DEFICIT!!!!!!
"spit on the Constitution and the Bill of rights?" Refresh my memeory, was it Barack Obama who gave us the PATRIOT Act? Was it Barack Obama who authorized warrantless wiretapping of US citizens? Was it Barack Obama who decided that he could just ignore treaty obligations, eliminate habeus corpus and declare anyone, even US citizens "enemy combattants" and send them off into the black hole of Guntanamo if he decided that that's what he wanted to do?
No, that was the last guy. Where the hell were you teabagger morons then? Now that there's a new president that you've decided you don't like, you imagine that he's attacking your civil liberties and threatening to bring about some bizarre admixture of godless communism and Sharia law. This is all in your head. Seriously, what has Barack Obama done to damage the Bill of Rights? You can't name anything, can you?
That is just so patently ridiculous, it's hardly worth mentioning. But, look. Besides the Fact that Ms Napolitano had fuck-all to do with the report, you just said that the report came out the day before the "tea parties" So how could the report comment on tea party attendees? Do you understand the linear time-line that the real world runs on? And Nowhere in the report does it refer to our military as domestic terrorists. It does mention that domestic terrorist groups may try to recruit returning military personnel. That's completely different. That's like if I told you, "hey keep your daughter away from that dude in the raincoat, he's a child molester," and you say "Oh, my God, you just called my daughter a whore!"
What other ridiculous accusations do you want to lob at President Obama?
See, I think you may have dreamed that first part. President Obama has been very clear that he thinks it is important to keep Iran nuke-free. And yes, he did criticize Isreal for building housing on someone else's land. Isreal keeps expanding its territory further and further into Palestine, and for some reason, we're all supposed to cheer for them. Apparently it has to do with some nutty "end-times" scenario or something, but anyway what Obama criticized was Isreal bulding settlements in Palestinian territory.
Do you honestly believe that the protestors in Iran would be helped by US support. The best thing that could happen for the Ayatollahs and Mullahs is to be able to paint the protestors as puppets of the Great Satan. (that's us)
Yeah, neither of those things have happened.
Um, I'm not sure what you mean by "European-dominated" (I don't have the time to keep up with all the latest conspiracy theories) but you do realize that we're in the mess we are now because of 20-odd years of de-regulation, right? You do know that, don't you? It was letting the bankers, traders and assorted gamblers run their business however they saw fit that led to the collapse of companies like AIG, Merryl Lynch, Bear-Sterns, etc. Although I guess that to some people, that kind of financial disaster is preferrable to having the dreaded "regulations"! Look, we don't trust people to just do the right thing, do we? No we have laws against murder and robbery and assault, etc, etc, etc. We don't ever say, oh, hell let's se-regulate people and let them do what they want. The free market will keep people from committing crimes. Of course not! So why would you expect that that approach would work any better with corporations which have no soul, no conscience, no sense of shame or remorse, and exist for the sole purpose of returning a profit to their shareholders? It's completely unrealistic to expect that corporations will behave as good citizens without being forced to. Yes, some would, just like many people would not go on killing sprees if the laws against murdere were recinded, but some folks would.
Jeezus! How much longer is this article?
Ok, two things. One, "czar" is afigure of speech. I believe Reagan appointed the first "drug czar" and there have been others since, and none of them were Romanovs. Second, Stalin appointing czars? That's a laugh! The Soviets deposed the czar. You don't have to be an historian to know how stupid that comparison is. Just because both "Czar" and "Stalin" are words that have to do with Russia doesn't mean that you've made a cogent analogy.
There is no state-run media, you moron. Maybe you're thinking of the last guy who paid columnists to write favorable articles and planted a gay pornographer/male escort in the White House press room. But even that is not "state-run media." Also there is no leftwing media. Well, there is, but it's The Nation, and The Village Voice, and Z magazine, not NBC or the New York times or whatever. The media is a business like any other. It probably shouldn't be, but it is. So the media is biased not to the left or right, but in favor of whatever makes it money. Which means that it will emphasize stories that it thinks will increase readership and eliminate stories that might piss off advertisers. The advertisers, of course, are mainly large corporations, so the media tends to have a pro-big business anti-labor slant, but that's about it. And by the way, if the media is so "leftwing," why would the alleged socialist have to manipulate them? wouldn't they just naturally be on the same side?
See, this is only happening in your fevered immagination. Seriously. Obama has not proposed any gun-control legislation. Really. You need to get out of the bubble. If all your "information" comes from listening to Rush Limbaugh and watching FOX, you're going to start believing all their paranoid fantasies. Then you end up like this:
Anyway, this insane article goes on for quite a while longer, but I just don't have the strength. If you want to see the rest of it click here. But I warn you, this takes you into the belly of the birther/teabagger conspiracy beast.