Sunday, January 20, 2013

Excuse me for one second....

Why in the hell would Nola.com have even asked this question and created a poll on it in the first place?

Should we wish President Obama well in his second term?  TAKE OUR POLL
(link is now dead and the poll has been removed by Nola.com)

What?  Really?  I don't even know where to begin on how fucked up that is.


This isn't an article, but a poll. Trivial? Perhaps. But if causes anyone to reflect on the significance of this day, then we consider that a success.

No, it's not trivial....it's fucking pathetic.  It's beyond pathetic.

Hang on....now it's making more sense:


He's the managing editor of the Baton Rouge hub.  Here are some of his former articles:

Louisiana economy is strong, Jindal declares

Jindal calls out 'water carriers' for liberal elite

He must be the Baton Rouge counterpart to James Varney.

Varney is essentially Bob Del Giorno with a keyboard.

UPDATE:  Where did you go bro?!!?  They pulled it down off the site.  I guess someone didn't consider it a success?  I'm not letting you off that easy....screen shots are wonderful things:





12 comments:

Anonymous said...



The Obama administration, and the Obamas as a family, have been putting up with so much, it's crazy.

I have no idea how they are staying so cool and graceful. Most of us, subjected to the level of crap they get from all sides, would have lost our shit publically at least once or twice.

I'm not talking about legitimate political discourse. There are plenty of places where I'm not on side with the decisions or non-decisions that this administration has taken.

I'm talking about the crap: the watermelon patch on the White House lawn "joke" pictures circulating in e-mails, the bone through the nose pictures, the Fox news woman who let slip a comment about the "in-nigger-ation" last week (She really did; it was Fox DC affiliate.), all that shit.

Have you ever seen so much BS directed at a President?

Lynching jokes, magazine covers portraying the First Lady as a Black Panther, the "sasquatch" meme about the FLOTUS that was popular for the first couple years of the last administration...

That one cracks me up, because that "sasquatch" joke originated in Eddie Murphy's stand-up routines of the 1980s, the "Delirious" era.

Racists who can't even be racist without stealing ideas and references from black artists is just too rich.

Dude, you just proved the other side's point.

If even the racists are living in a country where Murphy's stand up routines from thirty years ago are part of the common cultural heritage, it was about time for a black President.

And yet half the country seems to have gone completely insane.

This particular pissant protest was a little more subtle, but it is the same sort of immature BS.

There is no picture of the President as Hitler accompanying the "poll," but the official looking picture of the Seal does not successfully make this "poll" look like a legitimate political question.

Anyone who has ever seen how kids bully will recognize this poll for what it is.

It is like sending a note around a grade three class asking if anyone thinks that Jimmy Smith smells funny.

The author of the note can say, "I never said Jimmy smelled funny, I just wanted to find out how many people in the class though he did."

Thus planting a seed that Jimmy smells, and if it turns out that lots of people are willing to sign on to the notion that he does, Jimmy Smith will be beaten up after class for smelling funny, even if he smells just fine.

Poor little Baton Rouge loser. Yes, man, the President is more popular than you are.

That's what it comes down to, right?

Anonymous said...

Matter of fact, Zombie, if you can find a link to that Eddie Murphy "Delirious" routine on youtube, watch it or post it or something.

Check out what all those lily white Sunday-go-to-meeting "Christians" are referencing when they call the First Lady a "sasquatch."

I found it revealing that no matter what they claim they feel about the blacks or the gays, in their own private lives, this is the sort of cultural output they are familiar and comfortable with.

As part of that show, Murphy does a bit about "the First Black President" giving his first innaugeral address, and racing from side to side on the stage to keep from getting shot as he does so.

The "sasquatch" cracks about Michelle were always a sideways invocation of that possibility as a potential risk for the Obamas.

The sick freak who can slyly joke about that, in a slantways way that they hope no one will call them out on, while out the other side of their mouths they are ardently proclaiming to be "American patriots" is beyond me to understand.

Some of the hatefulness has been obvious and heavy handed; other examples, like the "poll" you post here, comes dressed as if it was a neutral or even official inquiry into the opinions of citizens.

How stupid do they think people are?

Not everyone is as dumb as the white racist base voter.



Anonymous said...

Sadly the Advocate is no better. Sunday's top headline on Jindal's income tax proposal was a naked shill. This "news" article featured two opinion quotes from conservative think thanks with no rebutting quotes, but even more despicable is their clumsy attempt to frame the debate in terms of a strawman discussion around revenue volatility instead of the obvious debate about how regressive the proposed policy is.

Pathetic.

AnomyousLady said...

When I saw that poll, I said WTF is this about?????? I did not understand it. Guess others did not either....

AnomyousLady said...

I saw that crap!!!

Ricardo said...

The comments were brutal and beautiful. I lambasted Carlos Sanchez as a Hispanic for such a disrespectful question on the eve of President Obama's second inauguration. It was instantly deleted. How far did all the hate get the Right in his first term? Again to Mr. Sanchez I say, PENDEJO.

Jason Brad Berry said...

What exactly does God's hand look like?

Jason Brad Berry said...

And just to break down your interesting mix of noun-adjective-adjective-noun:

hoodlum + liberal + Islamic + impostor

liberal + Islamic is an interesting enough combination but where does the impostor come in? Is he a hoodlum impostor, a liberal impostor, or an Islamic impostor? What exactly is he posing as that he really isn't?

I thought you might be bold enough to put black in that equation, I suspect that's another adjective that gets under your craw.

The floor is yours, please continue....

brutha said...

I wonder if Obama's AG will have to throw out the charges against Nagin like he did for Ted Stevens becuase of the misconduct of the Gov't.

Doug Handshoe said...

What pains me most isn't what has happened to the Times Picayune - you see there are two Newhouse media properties to the east in Pasgacoula (The Mississippi Press) and the Mobile Press Register.

I mention this because the unfolding scandal at the Mississippi DMR will be bigger than anything I've seen while moderating Slabbed by magnitudes.

The silence from the Mississippi Press, which covered and indeed broke aspects of the scandal back in the day is deafening.

Is there no one left at the Mississippi Press that can do basic investigative journalism? I guess not.

Jason Brad Berry said...

Not sure if you know this but my alma mater is Ole Miss. It pains me to see the lack of investigative journalism not just in MS but everywhere. Maybe I need to go revisit my journalism school and try to light a fire under their ass. :)

Anonymous said...

I doubt it is a lack of talent or capacity.

Libel suits, as you have seen, are an effective ploy for keeping corruption secret.

Your SPEECH Act victory was an incredible point for the good guys, Doug.

I don't like the limits on speech that a libel suit culture creates.

I do, however, think that hate speech, the use of words to incite more substantial violence against a particular person or group, does exist.

And it is serious. It is not fair to cry wolf over it.

That robs us of the chance to develop nuanced responses that keep most speech free while retaining the capacity to act against a gathering storm.

Radio Rwanda laid on a steady stream of hate speech to prepare that country for genocide. The speech acts inciting violence were a form of brainwashing.

When courts look at who was responsible for those killings, they view the saturation of the local media environment with speech that dehumanized a certain ethnic group as an aspect of the genocide, as the "opening act" of the violence.

Nazi propaganda created the cultural climate where a well integrated Jewish population was singled out. The temperature of the whole society was raised using rhetorical devices.

Without this kind of speechifying, it would have been hard to just start rounding up people to kill them. The dehumanizing hate speech had to come first.

Hate speech is real, and it is OK to create some forms of protection against it.

Where it is a prelude to genocide or mass killing, it will have certain characteristics.

The intent of hate speech is to systemically dehumanize a person or a group as a form of psychological preparation for doing them more serious harm.

The secondary intent of hate speech is to test the waters, to see if anyone will protect the targets. If no one does, the bully can up the stakes and get physical.

(Your response to nola.com's bullshit "poll" shut down one instance of this, Zombie.

That's the simplest and best way to protect free speech while also protecting the vulnerable: call out bullies yourself, so that no one makes laws to do it for you.)

If the intent is to brainwash yourself or others to prepare for harming someone, you'll see a "wall" of hate, repeated over and over, often using mass media technologies.

There are some fundie stations who in my view are skating pretty close to this line.

When hate speech is used in more one-on-one situations, there is usually the invocation of harm or threat to a person or group.

Talking about "jewing someone down" on a deal is racist speech.

Talking about killing jews is hate speech.

Talking about calling out a corrupt politician who happens to be Jewish is neither racist nor hateful.

Saying "yo' mama's so fat" is playing the dozens. Talking about pouring acid on your mother's genitals is hate speech.

Rude speech has some protections in a free society, distasteful as it sometimes is.

Distinguishing between rude speech and hate speech needs to become more skillful.

I don't like hate speech, but my first step would be an informal censure of the hateful person, rather than a law or libel action.

You may want to have the tools on the books to shut down Radio Rwanda, but you don't use nukes on a gnat.

Existing limitations on "fighting words" that have been part of free speech legislation for a long time, and laws against making threats, establish some guidelines.

There is a big difference between real, potentially murderous hate speech and ordinary, at times uncivil, trash talk.

Libel suits should not be used as a mechanism to supress a free press.

But they are, and it is working.