wingnuttery 
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Mon Dec 17, 2007 at 06:20:12 PM EST
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Has it really been only about a month since David Horowitz blew through the Princeton University campus for Islamo-Fiasco Awareness Week? That cross-country pity party, which drew horselaughs from left- and right-wing alike, served chiefly as a stage for Horowitz's fantasy of himself as a charismatic firebrand who needs a phalanx of bodyguards to keep from being assaulted every time he sets foot on a college campus. As it turned out, the only people who needed protection were the unwary souls who wandered into one of his speeches and instantly suffered attacks of narcolepsy.
But it appears Horowitz made a big impression on one Princetonian: Francisco Nava, a winger student who last week concocted a story about being beaten unconscious by two assailants after receiving e-mails threatening him with all kinds of mayhem because of his conservative views.
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Fri Sep 07, 2007 at 01:01:37 PM EDT
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Punditosis - that nauseating intellectual halitosis produced by a diet of half-baked ideas and ill-digested information - can be seen in one of its most virulent forms this week in the pages of the Home News Tribune.
The sufferer, aka columnist Rick Malwitz, weeps bitter tears for the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, a Methodist group which holds title to a lovely patch of the Jersey Shore called Ocean Grove, right next to Asbury Park. A sizeable population of gay couples live there, but when two of them had the temerity to ask permission to use the boardwalk pavilion to celebrate their civil unions, the OGCMA (for the sake of brevity, let's call them the OGs) said no dice. Though the OGs routinely allow the pavilion to be used for all sorts of secular events and even non-Methodist religious ceremonies, they decided it would be against their beliefs to treat gay people like human beings with civil rights. You know, Leviticus and Deuteronomy and all that. Our orders come from the big guy in the sky, so whaddya gonna do?
Since the OGs promised to open Ocean Grove's facilities to the public in return for a juicy tax break through the state Green Acres Program, this bigoted decision has put them on a collision course with the state, which may decide it will no longer exempt the boardwalk, the pavilion and other public areas from property taxes.
Malwitz, adopting his most Solomonic tones, takes a look at this squalling baby and applies his hacksaw:
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Tue May 29, 2007 at 01:18:42 PM EDT
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Rise, everyone, and put your hands together for New Jersey legislators Mike Ferguson and Scott Garrett, doughty Republicans who understand that the real threat facing America isn't the fact that their president has transformed Iraq into a sleepaway camp for terrorists looking to hone their urban warfare skills and use them in other countries. No, the threat that has them galloping faster than Paul Revere is the fact that the words "In God We Trust" are on the edges of the new $1 coins.
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Fri Apr 06, 2007 at 12:20:08 PM EDT
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"Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!" was the conservative mantra long before 9/11, but the Keystone Kops operation known as the War on Terror has given right-wingers license to turn the volume knob up to 11.
And yet the public, working on the evidence of its eyes rather than the blinkered ideology of the Bush cultists, constantly has to be reminded to be afraid only of certain kinds of terrorists. It has the temerity to notice that while Islamist violence abroad is certainly dangerous, we have plenty of homegrown terrorists with light complexions and flag decals on their vehicles to worry about as well. This annoying tendency of the reality-based community keeps conservative pundits and bloggers in a near-continuous state of sputtering Yosemite Sam outrage.
This fear-crazed brand of wingnut political correctness is in full noxious flower this week as Michelle Malkin - whose eruptions of nonsensical outrage occur as regularly as blasts of steam from Old Faithful - rallies the troops against Burlington Township High School in New Jersey, where school and municipal officials staged a mock-terror drill that involved a fictional milita-style group rather than a bunch of swarthy Muslims in turbans:
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Tue Mar 27, 2007 at 09:07:00 AM EDT
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In response to my Sunday post about Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine and his conservative Wild West fantasies about the proper way to deal with one's frustrations on the highway - simply put, he scorns calling the police and favors hauling out a pistol and blasting away, regardless of the danger to other drivers and their passengers - I've been seeing and hearing entirely too many "Yes, but . . ." comments.
You know the kind I'm talking about. "Yes, it was stupid and crazy to start shooting on an interstate highway during the morning commute, but tailgaters are so obnoxious," or, "Yes, she might have put a bullet in the brain of a toddler in a child seat, but the other driver was scaring her," or, "Yes, she might have killed another driver and triggered a chain-reaction highway pileup that would have killed and injured scores of people, but what about her right to defend herself?"
I've also had a couple of people smile and agree with Mulshine, citing as their authority the science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, who once opined that "an armed society is a polite society."
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Mon Feb 19, 2007 at 12:12:40 AM EST
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Matthew LaClair, the gutsy young man who exposed the fact that a Kearny High School history teacher was using his classroom as a pulpit call for Christianist nuttery, will be attending the Kearny school board meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 20.
Though it's possible that young master LaClair may be planning to make a prediction of which character will be killed off in the upcoming Harry Potter novel, it's far more likely that he'll be there to offer his thoughts on the board's "Don't Bother Asking and Don't Even Try to Tell Us" philosophy for dealing with educational malfeasance.
You'll recall that LaClair taped-recorded history teacher David Paszkiewicz informing his captive audience that evolution and the Big Bang were an unscientific hoax, that dinosaurs were part of the cargo on Noah's Ark, and that only those who were down with the wingnut program were going to get a pass through the pearly gates. The school board responded with a number of weak-kneed measures, the most odious of which was to ban all future taping within classrooms - the only way LaClair had been able to prove his complaints in the first place.
The board meeting will be at 7 p.m. at Washington School in Kearny. I'm not saying you should go, but if you did, your rational well-mannered presence might help counterbalance the mob of religious hysterics that will probably be there as well. The values of American civilization have to be defended in all sorts of unexpected places, and if Kearny is one of them, so be it.
Cross posted at The Opinion Mill.
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