Fiting RadRite Loons, Again. Last Friday I spent many hours reading thru and answering the crazies on an AOL story about President Obama's basketball injury. The vile, racist trash that AOL permits is inexcusable. And a little coterie of Radical Right loons treats AOL comments boards as their own private chatroom for racist and insanely childish and irrelevant matters, including personal taunts and inside jokes that have no place on a public comments area. Comments there are supposed to be, according to AOL's Terms of Service (TOS) dedicated to a particular story and matters that can reasonably be regarded as related to it. I posted many remarks to try to rein in the discussion and rebuke the people who use comments areas as personal chatrooms, for wasting other people's time. The moderators were apparently off duty.
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I left comments of substance on a number of topics, and present below the 33 most important comments. Many of them make pointed replies to the viciousness and stupidity of the Radical Right. Liberals may find some of this argumentation useful in their own run-ins with Radical Rightists, online or in person.


All Obama has to do to END the deficits is raise taxes on the rich. Quick, simple fix that hurts no one, because the rich are SO rich they don't know what to do with their money. As my brother, who was a millionaire before his divorce, has said, "Beyond a certain point, money is just a way to keep score." Let the rich keep score by how many teachers' or soldiers' or police officers' salaries they pay; how many miles of highways they repair; how many of their fellow Americans they keep from dying because they don't have health insurance; and on and on thru all the many things that decent people want their money used for, not a 14th house, 21st car, 49th Armani suit, or 1,401st pair of shoes.
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B.C. (apt abbreviation, as in caveman era, 30,000 B.C.), kindly stop regurgitating the same tired, ridiculous talking points from Karl Rove. We've heard all that noise before, and it didn't stop the PEOPLE from voting Obama into the White House. As for North Korea, it cannot presently even remotely reach us with nukes, even if it does actually have them, something no one outside N.K. knows for sure. We could probably destroy ALL of N.K.'s military capability without breaking a sweat, with a new "shock and awe" campaign of two or three weeks' duration. The pretense that we are "stretched thin" is Pentagon b.s. to steal ever more money from taxpayers. We have 1.2 MILLION people under arms, and our Iraq and Afghanistan commitments TOGETHER don't amount to more than a small proportion of total U.S. forces. But if fools and weaklings let things go long enuf, N.K. may just have time enuf to perfect rockets that can carry nuclear warheads to every part of the United States. So how long do you want us to wait before confronting N.K. and destroying its capacity to nuke us?
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Cheney shot a friend in the FACE, not derriere. People who have health insurance ALWAYS seek medical care for a serious injury. The people who can't AFFORD health insurance are the ones who suffer permanent injury or scarring, and President Obama doesn't want anyone to have to go thru life with a horrible scar on his face from an injury. No, he wants them to get the care they need to recover with as small a scar as possible. But the Radical Right wants them to take months to recover from an injury that 12 little stitches could help them recover from in two weeks. And the Radical Right wants poor people to have conspicuous scars on their face, marring their lives ever afterward, while the rich get plastic surgery to get rid of WRINKLES. I am proud to stand with Obama's heart on healthcare, tho the bill he let Republican obstructionism produce is a monstrosity that must be improved. SINGLE-PAYER, now!
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I guess you don't understand economics. Free-market economies always have swings. Republicans have been notoriously responsible for grave economic downturns: Hoover saw the start of the Great Depression. Most of Reagan's first term was a recession. The Great Recession we have not yet recovered from started under Bush the Younger. If the Republicans had their way, not only would the unemployed not have jobs, but they would also not even have Unemployment insurance, and their children would have to beg for charity from the rich.
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Liberals have honor, and don't issue racist slanders to misrepresent Radical Rightists. As for Allen West, whoever that is, essentially nobody has ever heard of him. Regarding Obama's character, I have not seen him attack his opponents but reach out across the aisle again and again to try to accomplish good things for the Nation, only to be kicked in the teeth again and again. What Obama is missing is not character but backbone. If he were even 1/10 as indignant for us as he should be, and slammed the Radical Right as the racist and antihuman slime they are, the Democrats would have passed single-payer healthcare and won the midterm elections with a huge increase in both houses of Congress.
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Marcy..., Bush attacked a country that never attacked us and killed, directly and thru the chaos that the removal of Saddam produced, 1.25 MILLION Iraqi deaths. We are indignant that less than 3,000 Americans were killed on 9/11. How would we have liked to be invaded by a Moslem army that killed 1.25 MILLION Americans -- except that the U.S. has 10 times the population of Iraq, so to be proportionate, a Moslem invasion of the U.S. would have to kill 12.5 million Americans. So Bush was honorable, was he, even tho he sanctioned torture that the FBI said was NEVER necessary, and disgraced us in the world. You are delusional. None of the leadership of the present-day Republican Party has any honor at all. ALL of them are war criminals, and should be arrested if ever they travel to Europe, subjected to war-crimes trials, and dropped thru a trap door with a noose around their neck. Bush has already been warned: don't travel to Britain. All Republicans who were in on the lies and backed the invasion of Iraq should be held to account for their crimes -- as should everyone, like you, who makes excuses for those hideous crimes that have stained this Nation's honor in blood.
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OMG. Marcy... wrote something sensible. Did she actually sign off and someone else seize that name? In any case, the movie was "The MOUSE That Roared". Alas, there is no world community capable of or willing to address situations like North Korea, and the Radical Right doesn't want to strengthen the United Nations, which was designed to stop wars and stand up for human rights. So, absent a strong UN, it is the U.S. that everyone turns to. We SHOULD be able to turn to Communist China, which is next to that lunatic North Korean regime, to tell the Kims to stop the madness or CHINA will invade, AGAINST N.K. this time. But we can't count on China, can we? The UN can't count on China, nor Russia, which also adjoins N.K. The WORLD can't count on China, or Russia, or the EU, or UN. It all comes back to us, because the Radical Right won't let us create powerful international, multilateral institutions to deal with precisely the kind of problems that North Korea poses. So we CAN'T just sit on the sidelines and watch -- thanks to the Radical Right's United Nations bugaboo.
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No, the comments against Obama are an active, concerted attempt by absolutely unrepresentative un-Americans to coopt comments areas for Radical Right propaganda. Decent, sensible people see the hate-filled rants and leave. Liberals need instead to fite back, here as elsewhere, and answer the lies. There is NOTHING about Obama's programs that is the slitest "socialist", and people who throw around that term have absolutely no idea what it means -- in large measure because they are uneducated yahoos who don't know Karl Marx from Groucho Marx.
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randy, seek professional help. Marcy..., the Iraq attack was about ISRAEL -- nothing else. Iraq was Israel's only credible enemy, so the Zionist lobby insisted the U.S. destroy it. Now Iran is Israel's only credible enemy, so the same traitors are advocating we attack Iran. The oil excuse doesn't make any sense. We don't get oil for FREE. We have to pay for it, no matter where it comes from. As for poppies, the U.S. could perfectly well grow all the poppies the pharmaceutical industry has any legitimate need for, and benefit American farmers. It is the TALIBAN, not CIA, that pushes drugs to fund its malicious works.
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Bush never ran ANYTHING. He was an absentee owner of his ranch, and played at clearing brush, while ranch hands did the real work. I'd like to see Bush take on Obama on the basketball court. Do you imagine that Bush would triumph? Basketball is Obama's game; baseball may have been Bush's -- he did, after all, own a pro baseball team, so we would expect him to know something about that game. Even George Bush the Younger knew a few things. Not enuf to be President, of course, but he was never really President, only a puppet whose strings were pulled by the Real President, a collective leadership of mostly unknown people but two whose names we did know, Karl Rove and, above all, Dick Cheney. How good was the Real President at sports?
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Obama is a multi-millionaire. Does zaccinc REALLY think the multi-millionaire Obama hates capitalism?
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No one person "runs the country". The Federal Government is some 12 million strong, including government contractors. The bulk of the work of the Government is done by the executive departments, run day-to-day by Cabinet Secretaries. But the country is much more than the Federal Government, and it is run by millions of different people doing different things, including running their own small business. The people who work ridiculous numbers of hours don't do so because they want to but because they can't afford to have other people help. The President has LOTS of help. His role is to set policy and reconcile differences among advisers. For clearness of judgment, a person needs to vary his activities and get some recreation and perspective. Of course, if you want someone so overworked that he can't think clearly, that's your choice. It is not mine.
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Not just this comments area but many, many more are infested by the Radical Right, because that tiny proportion of the country is intent on making people think they are much more numerous than in fact they are. So they land hard on comments areas, leave thousands of malicious, extremely short comments, all conforming to the current talking points, and drive everyone else away with their disgusting and hate-filled rhetoric. Liberals need to answer the lies and denounce the hate. But decent people detest lowering themselves into the muck that the Radical Right spews.
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Yes, the Tea Party extremists who speak of the "original Constitution" are loons. The Bill of Rights wasn't part of the original Constitution. And some of them want to take away birthright citizenship. So how would anyone achieve citizenship if birth in the U.S. didn't count? If it doesn't count for people now, it couldn't count for people six generations ago, and NO ONE would be a natural-born citizen.
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Everything good in this country -- including ESTABLISHING this country -- was done by Liberals. Conservatives, starting with the Tories and proceeding to the Confederates and now on to the RadRite Republicans and Tea Partiers, have always fought progress -- and always lost.
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A church in Iraq PROVES the tolerance of Islam. Islam took over Mesopotamia, and changed its name to Iraq, by 636 A.D. -- 1,374 years ago. Yet there are still Christians in Iraq. There are still Christians in Egypt, conquered in 640 A.D. There are still Christians in Lebanon, conquered around 636 A.D. So much for Islam being "super intolerant". Does the Radical Right know anything about history?
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Race has EVERYTHING to do with the intense, extremely irrational hatred of Obama we see everywhere on AOL comments boards. No other explanation works.
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Alas, isolationism is not viable. The issue is not military bases as such, but whether the U.S. was ASKED IN.
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The rich think it all ultimately works out to their advantage, because the bulk of people are rendered miserable, and nothing makes the rich so happy as seeing other people miserable. It also works to their economic advantage to make people so desperate that they will take huge cuts in wages and benefits, so more and more of the price of the goods and services they perform for the owners of the business will go into the pockets of the owners, not the people who actually do the work. But the rich are stupid, because that kind of behavior tends to create REVOLUTIONS in which the furious, impoverished working people KILL the rich. We need a statue of a guillotine on the National Mall in Washington, and at Broad Street and Wall Street in New York to remind people of what happens to people who try to crush the poor.
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Ah, there it is, the real object of the Republican Radical Right: impeachment. Not possible, tho. You tried it with Clinton, over trivia and intrusion into his sex life, which had NOTHING to do with his oath of office. You'll try it with Obama, and fail even worse. And Obama isn't going to any Moslem country. He's an American, and relatively few Americans move abroad. Esp. few American Christians move to Moslem countries. And it is 'people' who talk such claptrap that are the real traitors. But keep talking your open racism and religious bigotry, Rightwingers. Americans need to hear (or read) every ugly word of it.
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You can't mediate with the Radical Right. They are absolutists: absolutely wrong, absolutely hateful, absolutely devoid of the democratic spirit of compromise and cooperation. Obama kept reaching out to them, and they kept leading him farther and farther from what the people who elected him wanted, and then the Radical Right voted against the very bills they insisted Obama write. They are pure evil, and must be crushed, not accommodated.
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The Radical Right always wants to talk about their nonexistent God (pro) and Obama (con). They will drag into any conversation whichever is NOT the topic. And yes, O.M.L., we DO expect you not to respond to off-topic comments. Just say, plainly, that is OFF-TOPIC and we won't discuss this here.
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Off-topic. But I got a free English-language Koran "Compliments of The Council of American-Islamic Relations" (www.cair.com), and it's a very big book -- 1,164 pages, with many explicatory notes. I think it does contain the totality of the Koran. In any event, Obama is a Christian, so Islam is entirely off-topic.
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12 stitches is not trivial. A bandaid won't suffice. And your trivializing the President's injury does not make it trivial. To the extent that pain distracts him at a time when North Korea is straining for a fite is not good news. And if he takes a painkiller that has psychoactive effects, that could be even worse in time of international tension. So this story is really not as trifling as it might at first appear.
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What did Obama do to stop the export of manufacturing? He promoted legislation to end a tax loophole that actually encourages U.S. corporations to send jobs to China -- but the REPUBLICANS blocked it! The Democrats MUST make sure that that measure passes before the present Congress adjourns. As for NAFTA, it was bipartisan, negotiated by Bush the Elder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nafta#Negotiation_and_ratification) and ratified under Clinton. It was designed, among other things, to PREVENT a flood of Mexican economic refugees across our southern border. It does NOT include Communist China. Free trade/globalization is an insane plot by the rich and super-rich to pit American workers against Chinese, to force Americans to accept ever lower wages and ever worse working conditions, on the theory that the purpose of free enterprise is to victimize the great majority for the benefit of the tiny minority. Free trade is an ENEMY of the United States, and all its advocates are guilty of economic TREASON. If Canada and Mexico want free access to our market, they can join the Union as a bunch of states, and pay all the prices that the current states paid when they consented to form a Federal union. If they refuse annexation, they proclaim plainly that they don't WANT access to our market. In or out, but not half-in and half-out.
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27% [of Americans are "birthers"], according to CNN in August. 27% of Americans overall is not actually reflective of the reality. It is mostly Radical Right Republicans, and more 'men' than women. They are the racists, who will seize on anything to justify their hatred of the Big Black Boss in the White House, and the mentally deficient and uneducated. That's about the percentage (somewhere between 25% and 35%) of neo-Confederates in the Nation. They are the recalcitrant albatross around our national neck that has been with us since the Union destroyed the Confederacy -- because we didn't sterilize Johnny Reb as we should have.
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If you want to hear from ordinary people, this is assuredly not the place. Rightwing crazies have made it their life's work to haunt AOL comments boards and vilify all decent people. AOL allows them to hijack discussions off to wildly irrelevant topics, carry on private conversations in a public area, and otherwise drive sane and reasonable people away, so they can claim victory once they are only talking to themselves. Liberals and moderates need to report them to AOL and hope that the slanderers and topic hijackers are given the boot.
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So do you guys get some kind of Rightwing Crazies Newsletter with the day's talking points?
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The fact that these people dare to say the outrageous things they do proves that they don't believe them for a minute, because he could have them sent to Guantanamo, or off to some "rendition" country. As for the suggestion that the President of the United States has less power than Pelosi or Reid, the person who made that claim has plainly never had so much as a single political-science course at the college level.
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Michael, the Nazis were FASCISTS, not socialists. They went to WAR against the Communist Soviet Union, which proudly called itself "Socialist". The mere fact that the word "Socialist" was in the name of the Nazi Party means nothing. Fox News has the word "News" in it. Do yourself a favor and look up "Socialism" and "Fascism" -- and "Communism", for good measure -- in Wikipedia and learn what they mean.
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STOP talking about people not mentioned in the article or logically connected with the article at issue. When I leave, I will just leave, with good manners, and not call attention to that fact. There's only so much time I care to waste on my inferiors. I have tried to contribute to a discussion of the ideas raised here, so that grownups who stop by aren't left at a complete, amazed loss to understand how an article about a basketball injury became a playpen for obscene, racist children.
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The Capitol and Pentagon are still standing, so were never blown up. The Pentagon was damaged on 9/11 (because Bush didn't tell passengers they must not let their plane be hijacked), but not by the Weather Underground. And the Weather Underground did NOT kill three people. Check Wikipedia. Obama was much too young to "associate himself with a terrorist" from the Weather Underground, and the man you are referring to was NOT a "terrorist" but education reformer when Obama encountered him. But of what importance is the truth to the Radical Right? None.
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I don't think McCain chose Palin. He was running behind, and the same Invisible Hand that chose Dubya, the collective but nameless leadership of the Republican Party, offered him their indispensable backing on the condition that he accept their choice for Vice President: Palin. McCain scarcely met her before he agreed to that condition. I'm sure he now rues the day he let himself be pushed to raise her to national prominence -- esp. since she helped lose the White House for him.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,429 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:27 PM