Flashback Friday - Buzzcocks

What is wrong with these people?

I'm trying hard to imagine the level of psychotic delusion it must take to be one of these women:

Dear Media: When you feature people who think Donald Trump was “ordained by God to be president,” you’re not presenting the “other side.” You are promoting the fringe views of people in a cult.
https://t.co/JopCrux23h

— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) March 27, 2018

Now I don't know why CNN felt the need to put these weirdos on the air. I guess maybe a "holy fuck look how crazy these fucking idiots are" story might be good for ratings. But if you're going to insist on talking to these kinds of demented simpletons, at least you could ask a few questions about consistency.

Such as:

If President Trump's sexual indiscretions are not relevant to the job of President, was that also true for President Clinton? If not, why not?

or

If President Trump is chosen/ordained by God to lead the nation. why wasn't President Obama? Did got oversleep in 2008 and 2012 and forget to go to the polls?

You know, when I was a young fundamentalist boy, not so very long ago - no it wasn't. It was not that long ago. - when I was a youngster, I was taught in my fundamentalist parochial school that all authority figures were ordained by God. There's a passage in the New Testament where Jesus tells Pontius Pilate something along the lines of "you only have power because my Father [God] has given it to you." So from this passage, it was extrapolated that your parents were in charge of you because God had put them in charge of you. Not because they were older and wiser and knew things and made the money to pay the bills and were. therefore, paying the cost to be the boss, but because God himself had put them in that position. Likewise, the mayor was in charge of the city because God had put him in charge of the city. The Governor is in charge of the state because God put him in charge of the state and so on and so on from the local cop on the beat all the way up to the President of the United States.
So, if these deranged deniers of reality were applying that principle to the presidency of Donald Trump, then surely the same principle must have applied to President Obama, right? Right?

oh right. . .


Anyway, while it is impressive to watch these ladies go through the mental gymnastics to convince themselves that Micheal Cohn - MICHEAL COHN! - generously  paid off Stormy Daniels with his own money without Trump's involvement because he was worried that even a false rumor about Trump's sexual indiscretions would hurt his campaign's chances after the "grab 'em by the p--sy" tape hadn't hurt him a bit, I'm not sure I really see the point of putting these daffy dullards on the air.
I mean, when you can sincerely, with a straight face, look a reporter in the eye and claim that a porno actress is somehow less credible than a man who lies publicly an average of six times a day, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-donald-trump-liar-20171208-story.html
why would anyone want to hear what you have to say about anything except to gape in wonder at the elaborate construction of your fever dream or to mock and ridicule you? Either way, seems like CNN  should have something better to put on the air.
I mean, I know they don't, but the should.

Why is this person on television?

Who the hell thinks it's a good idea to keep putting this little owl casting of a man on TV?




Who exactly does CNN think is interested in hearing anything this creepy shit-eating little racist has to say? This loathsome little worm couldn't even make a ripple in the Republican primary. And Republican primary voters are the only people nutty enough and racist enough and theocratic enough that they might possibly give a fuck about this guy. And even they had no interest in him. Maybe someone could look up how many delegates Santorum got, but if my calculations are correct. . .it was. . .multiply by the inverse. . . carry the one. . . uhhhh . . .ZERO. So why continue to give him a platform?

Is there just some producer at CNN asking "who can we get to say something really stupid and shitty about this issue?" and some pa goes "well, Santorum is hanging out in the lobby again."

Santorum: Instead of calling for gun laws, kids should take CPR classes

By Eli Watkins, CNN

You know, if it was anyone other than the frothy mixture, I would think "this must be taken out of context, because there's just no way. . ." but with Santorum, I can't really say I'm surprised.

"How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem. . ."

Oh, god damn it! Right off the bat! You're going to shit on these kids for wanting their government to do something? Making laws for the safety of the public is pretty much job number one for the government. And you got a problem with a bunch of kids not, what, taking the law into their own hands?  These kids are asking to not be murdered in school and your response is "lazy damn kids. Always wanting someone else to solve their problems for them?"

"How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that," Santorum said on CNN's "State of the Union."

So, how about instead of doing something to prevent school shootings, we do jack shit and you kids learn how to try and save your friends' lives as they bleed out in your arms? Because - since we are, in fact, doing jack shit about guns - these mass shootings are just an inevitable fact of life, so you might as well learn how to try and minimize the death count.

"They took action to ask someone to pass a law," Santorum said. "They didn't take action to say, 'How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem?

How do I, a high school student with zero power, take steps to deal with a nationwide epidemic visited on us by one of the wealthiest most powerful lobbying groups in the country and backed by Senators and Congressmen and state governments? Because clearly I, a high school student, should be solving this problem myself instead of asking the government to do the job they were fucking elected to do.

"They didn't take action to say, 'How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem? How am I going to do something about stopping bullying within my own community?

First of all, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between bullying and school shootings.
Secondly, whenever someone does try to do somehthng about bullying, you right-wing assholes start shouting about giving "safe spaces" to "snowflakes" or infringing on the First Amendment rights of Christian homophobes.

What am I going to do to actually help respond to a shooter?'... Those are the kind of things where you can take it internally, and say, 'Here's how I'm going to deal with this. Here's how I'm going to help the situation,' instead of going and protesting and saying, 'Oh, someone else needs to pass a law to protect me.'"

Jeezus, dude. What the hell is your problem? What upsets you so much about citizens petitioning their government for a redress of grievances? Are you seriously bothered that these kids are asking the government to take action on a serious public safety issue rather than figuring out ways that they could go Die Hard on a school shooter?

"I'm proud of them," he said. "But I think everyone should be responsible and deal with the problems that we have to confront in our lives.

No. No no no no no, you don't get to sit there and trash these kids and then say "I'm proud of them." Fuck that. Not that any of these kids would want an odious little rodent like you to be proud of them.
And how the hell do you trot out that Republican "personal responsibility" bullshit on this issue? I get that there a re a lot of issues where this trope could apply. There's a logic to saying  "if you don't have any monies, get a job. Don't ask the government to take care of you." It's nasty and dickish, but at least it makes sense and reasonable people could debate the idea. But are you seriously going to say "hey, if some psycho is going to come into your school with a military-grade assault weapon and spray a bunch of bullets at you, that's your problem. Don't go running to the 'naany state' to keep you safe." What the fuck is wrong with you?

"I'm proud of them," he said. "But I think everyone should be responsible and deal with the problems that we have to confront in our lives. And ignoring those problems and saying they're not going to come to me and saying some phony gun law is gonna solve it. Phony gun laws don't solve these problems."

Well, that is true. Phony gun laws don't solve problems. You know what do, though? Actual gun laws. Like they have in England. And Australia. And Europe. Amd everywhere else where these massacres aren't a regular part of life.

Crybaby of the Week

United States Congessman Mark Amodei




So last Wednesday, high school students in Rep. Amodei's district did what teens all over the country did. They walked out of class for 17 minutes to call attention to the government's complete inaction on the epidemic of senseless gun violence in this stupid country.
One student, a Noah Christensen, took the opportunity to call his congressman's office and siad, among other more innocuous things, that  Congress should "get off their f***ing asses" and take action. (CNN)

So the Congressman apparently did what any mature adult would do in this situation, he tattled!
And he didn't even do it himself, he had an aide call Christensen's school and report that the teen had used naughty words!

Amodei said his office received several hundred calls from students during the walkout and that Christensen was the only caller to use profanity.

 

Oh my stars! A middke-aged man heard a swear!

 

 

 

Amodei said his office did not seek to have the student reprimanded but was merely relaying to the school what had occurred.

"We did not retaliate -- we reported what the guy did," he said. "We did not ask for discipline or anything like that."

Riiiiiight. . . Obviously you had no intention of getting the kid in trouble when you called his school and reported him to the teacher for being a potty mouth you pissy little crybaby.

So I assume that after you calmed down from the shock of hearing a four-letter word, you realized that you had overreacted and apologized to the kid, right?

"I don't want him (Christensen) to apologize to my guy for dropping the F-bomb. So I'm certainly not going to apologize to him," he said. "What am I going to apologize for?"

Seriously?
Maybe because after your flunky snitched on him like a blue-nosed little priss, his school "gave him a two-day suspension for "disrespectful behavior/language" and barred him from fulfilling his role as class secretary/treasurer."

This should have been a no-brainer.

So Tennessee State Rep. John Ray Clemmons had what seemed like a pretty simple idea. He thought "hey, let's just get it on the record that the state of Tennessee doesn't approve of neo-Nazis."

So he introduced a resolution that, after a few "whereas"-es, stated simply:

BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE ONE HUNDRED TENTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE, THE SENATE CONCURRING, that we strongly denounce and oppose the totalitarian impulses, violent  terrorism, xenophobic biases, and bigoted ideologies that are promoted by white nationalists and neo-Nazis.

And it also said:

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that we urge law enforcement to recognize these white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups as terrorist organizations and to pursue the criminal elements of these domestic terrorist organizations in the same manner and with the same fervor used to protect the United States from other manifestations of terrorism

So this seems like the sort of thing that would be an automatic pro-forma kind of easy passing bill, because who doesn't want to condemn Nazis? And it's not like it's going to cost anything.

Well, you'd think so, but. . .

It took all of 36 seconds to be shot down by the House State Government Subcommittee last week. The single Democrat on the committee, state Rep. Darren Jernigan, made a motion to discuss Clemmons’s resolution. After none of the four Republicans on the committee would second the motion, the chair, Bill Sanderson, gaveled the resolution to oblivion and the committee moved on to other business. No second, no further consideration, no vote
Read more at https://wonkette.com/631438/tennessee-republicans-pretty-sure-nazi-lives-matter-too#2uz9hyoogYFbq4FF.99

Well, surely they must have had a good reason, right? There must be a logical rationale for NOT voting to condemn fucking NAZIS, right?

. . .  state Rep. Bob Ramsey explained to local teevee station WZTV that the language of the resolution itself was simply too vague:

Ramsey says he and his fellow legislators “condemn white supremacy and other hate groups.” The issue, is “we have no real definition for a white nationalist or neo-Nazi group.”
“We have no expertise on it,” Ramsey says. “How could we determine these groups are terrorists? We don’t know the federal guidelines on terrorism.”

What? How was that going to be an issue?
Werte they worried that some racist pricks were going to come to their offices and ask "does this resolution apply to my group? 'Cuz, see, we're like totally racist and all, but we're not actually Nazis. We hate Germans too. So, are we under your condemnation or not?" And then they were just going to be in suuuuuch an awkward situation, just stammering and stuttering like Jerry lewis "condemnaaaation! Of the racist type people with the hating and the marching and the - oh but not you, sir. No, you're a nice fella heh heh. . . please to not hurt meeee. . . with the hitting and the shouting and the kicking in my tuuuchus!"

Look, I get it. You're a Republican in 2018, you can't afford to alienate the neo-Nazi constituency. Shit, just look at Illinois' 3rd district. But just own it. Just come out and say, we need the Nazi vote. Don't be pathetic and pretend that condemning white supremacists is just too confusing. It's ridiculous.