The caricature on the lower left is Grimm, who the Daily News just reported is announcing his resignation from Congress tomorrow or WednesdayThe NY Post's right-wing film critic is an entertaining, witty writer-- but a crackpot lamed and blinkered by his own sick, twisted ideology. He flies into rages when normal people point out that right-wing politics-- ultimately fascism-- can only be explained as pathology. Using the word "crazy" to explain "rightists" drives him insane. Last summer, he vomited it all up for his Post readers in a deranged screed attacking historian Rick Perlstein's newest book, The Invisible Bridge, which conservatives hate because of all the unvarnished, sacrilegious truth about Saint Ronnie-- and because wrote in a Rolling Stone column that "Loony conservatives are now the Republican mainstream, the dominant force in the GOP."
One of these words is not like the others (or maybe they’re all pretty much the same-- you make the call): Loon, nutjob, crank, wingnut, whackjob, cuckoo, crackpot, dingbat, wacko, conservative.Can’t spot the outlier? You might be a liberal. Because even among the Very Serious and Highly Respected voices on the left, “conservative” and “crazy” are synonyms.A recent example: A highly acclaimed book that examines the conservative movement in the 1970s, Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. The book is the kind of thing that liberals praise as an evenhanded portrait of the Right. You know, kinda like how Super Size Me was totally fair about McDonald’s.One liberal dissenter, Sam Tanenhaus, writing in The Atlantic, describes the book as implying “contempt not just for Nixon but for the public that eventually elected him president twice, the second time in one of the biggest landslides in history. For Perlstein, the mere fact of a President Nixon is explicable only as pathology. . . . Perlstein describes the centrist Nixon as the sole author of ‘the fracturing of America,’ who feasted on middle-American fears . . . even as he turned the federal government into a private militia.”...Yet Perlstein is a liberal’s idea of “balanced” and someone who “doesn’t condescend” (Frank Rich, in his New York Times Book Review rave).What about the liberal writers who make no pretense whatsoever of understanding their ideological opposites? Here’s a partial list of the hundreds of conservatives who have been labeled “wingnut” by Salon.com alone: Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Justice Antonin Scalia, columnist Jonah Goldberg, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (and his predecessor Eric Cantor), the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Chris Christie.If these people and institutions are cuckoo, then conservatism itself is crazy. And that is exactly what liberals think. (Sometimes this tendency takes eccentric form, as when liberals argue that it’s “crazy” not to panic about climate change.)Liberals hope to tag completely mainstream conservative thought as outside the boundaries of polite discourse, but the electorate keeps refusing to comply by, for instance, electing a Congress designed to serve as a stalwart check on progressivism for 16 of last 20 years. This is baffling to liberals. How can that many Americans be batspit insane?Remember that liberals are the ones who are always claiming to have superior powers of empathy and tolerance-- and a more sophisticated sense of science, which has shown us that conservatives are actually the ones who are better at seeing things from the other guy’s point of view. An experiment by psychologist Jonathan Haidt (sometimes called “an ideological Turing test”) asked liberals and conservatives to put themselves in the other guy’s socks for the duration of a test and ask them: How would your ideological opponent answer?Conservatives were far better at liberals at this game, though that should have been easy to guess. When a conservative goes to the movies, picks up nearly any newspaper or watches TV news on any channel but one, he gets the liberal point of view. Liberals, especially in a place like New York, can easily seal themselves off from principled conservative thinking and many choose to do so. A result is that they haven’t a clue how conservatives think.Liberals also kid themselves that they’re better at arguing than conservatives, but calling your opponent crazy is an appeal to emotion, not reason. It’s also a lazy schoolyard taunt, and it fails an elementary rule of debate, the prohibition of ad hominem remarks.
Sunday Smith flipped out again-- this time because Stephen Sherrill only included 3 Democrats in his list for GQ of America's Craziest Politicians. Smith went on the warpath in a sad little Post column, desperately trying to equate right-wing demons Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Michelle Obama, Mark Udall, Kay Hagan, Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi with the actual psychopaths, like Ted Yoho, Joe Arpaio, Louie Gohmert, Steve King, Glenn Grothman, Gordon Klingenschmitt, Jody Hice, Ted Cruz, Paul LePage and Walker Walker, who Sherrill had some fun with.Anyone who follows DWT even minimally, knows how much I detest corrupt Democratics like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Steve Israel, but Smith's assertions of their "craziness" don't come close to any of what Sherrill was writing about. He whined, for example that Wasserman Schultz "compared Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to a wife-beater: 'Scott Walker has given women the back of his hand. I know that is stark. That is direct. But that is reality. What Republican tea party extremists like Scott Walker are doing is they are grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back. It is not going to happen on our watch.' Wait, I’m confused, this abuse already happened, is happening but “it’s not going to happen?”Sherrill explained that "Yes, this list is Republican-heavy, and while that may seem like standard liberal-media bias, the reality is that Democrats just aren't keeping pace right now in the crazy department. But to even the score, here's an incomplete list of crazy Dems from yesteryear: Rod Blagojevich, David Duke, at least one or two of the Kennedys, Anthony Weiner/Carlos Danger, and Jim McGreevey." [Duke, a huckster and KKK Grand Wizard, was an elected Republican state Rep. from Metairie, Louisiana, who ran for president as both a Republican and a Democrat, but it's completely fatuous to call him a Democrat-- note from Howie.] Here are sone of Sherrill's descriptions even Smith should have been laughing at:
Rep. Ted Yoho [R-Fla.]JUST HOW CRAZY?Claimed he sees "one side of our government, or two-thirds of it, running one hundred miles an hour toward socialism" and that conservatives like him "are like Fred and Barney in the Flintstone-mobile, trying to stop that."ACTUAL THING HE SAID:Explained his opposition to a proposed tanning-bed tax thusly: "I had an Indian doctor in our office the other day, very dark skin and two non-dark-skinned people, and I asked..., 'Have you ever been to a tanning booth?' And he goes, 'No, no need.' So therefore [the tax] is a racist tax, and I thought I might need to go get to a sun-tanning booth twice so that I can come out and say...I got taxed because of the color of my skin."FUN FACT:Is a large-animal veterinarian.THINK OF HIM AS:Joseph McCarthy, if he could deliver a calf.Rep. Joe Barton [R-Tex.]JUST HOW CRAZY?Claimed carbon dioxide "is not a pollutant" because "I am creating it as I talk to you. It's in your Coca-Cola, your Dr Pepper, your Perrier water." Apologized to then BP CEO Tony Hayward after the White House urged BP to create a Gulf-oil-spill relief fund, saying it was "a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown."FUN FACT:Chairman emeritus of the House energy and commerce committee.ACTUAL THING HE SAID:Walking back on his BP remark: "If anything I said this morning has been misconstrued to the opposite effect, I want to apologize for that misconstrued misconstruction."IN HIS DEFENSE:British petroleum companies deserve to be represented in Congress, too.THINK OF HIM AS:Oil.Rep. Glenn Grothman [R-Wis.]JUST HOW CRAZY?Really hates Kwanzaa, claiming in a press release that "almost no black people today care about Kwanzaa—just white left-wingers who try to shove this down black people's throats in an effort to divide Americans." Also declared that giving state workers the day off on Martin Luther King Day "is an insult to all the other taxpayers" who want to contact government offices.IN HIS DEFENSE:It does seem like all the stores are putting up their Kwanzaa decorations earlier and earlier every year.ACTUAL THING HE SAID:"Did people even know what homosexuality was in high school in 1975? I don't remember any discussion about that at the time."THINK OF HIM AS:The '50s.State Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt [R-Colo.]JUST HOW CRAZY?Has repeatedly bragged about performing a gay exorcism (he's a former Navy chaplain) to rid a woman of "the foul spirit of lesbianism," and also tried to perform a long-distance exorcism on President Obama because of something about the NSA. Believes that Obamacare "causes cancer" and that Obama's former FCC chairman was driven by the Devil to "molest and visually rape your children."ACTUAL THING HE SAID:"Father in Heaven, we pray against the domestic enemies of the Constitution, against this demon of tyranny who is using the White House occupant, and that demonic spirit is oppressing us."FUN FACT:Calls himself Dr. Chaps, which is not the least bit creepy.Rep. Jody Hice [R-Ga.]JUST HOW CRAZY?Claimed that "four blood moons" falling on "major Jewish holidays" could be a sign of "world-changing, -shaking type events."IN HIS DEFENSE:Blood moons are freaky.ACTUAL THING HE WROTE: Some ask the question 'How does same-sex "marriage' threaten your marriage?' The answer is similar to asking, 'How does a trashy neighborhood affect you?'"Rep. Mark Walker [R-N.C.]ACTUAL THING HE SAID:He's worried Obama will refuse to leave office when his term is up: "I don't think that's out of the question. I think he's gotten pretty comfortable up there spending all of those billions of dollars on vacations for he and his family."ALSO THIS:"If you have foreigners who are sneaking in with drug cartels, to me that is a national threat. And if we gotta go laser or blitz somebody with a couple of fighter jets for a little while to make our point, I don't have a problem with that."AND THIS:"I would beg to differ that Islam is a religion of peace, because you can't have a religion of peace when you've got nearly a billion people choppin' off heads all over the country."Governor Paul LePage [R-Me.]JUST HOW CRAZY?Refused to attend Martin Luther King Day activities, saying the NAACP is a "special interest." Then added, "Tell 'em to kiss my butt." Said that a Democratic state leader "claims to be for the people, but he's the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline." Urged a repeal of Maine's ban on the plastics chemical component BPA, claiming it wasn't dangerous and saying, "Put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen. So the worst case is some women may have little beards."FUN FACT:Was re-elected in 2014.THINK OF HIM AS:If Don Rickles mated with poutine.
