Getting Talmudic On They Ass

Digby has a sample of some of the hilarious fashion statements available to conservatives. One of them is a t-shirt which purports to offer a caricature of liberals (along with advice on how to deal with liberals). The major problem is that the author of the thing doesn't understand that for a caricature to be funny it has to have some semblence of accuracy regarding its subject. This shirt caricatures a figment of someone's imagination. If I were a "fixing the internets" type, I'd replicate the image with the word "liberal" replaced with "Martian" and have done with it. However since I'm a liberal, I thought I'd offer some corrections, counterexamples, and commentary. That's us liberals: always trying to lend a helping hand (even to people who want to "bitch slap" us).

• The main diet of liberals is tofu and granola. This makes them puny and easy to throw.

  I hate tofu and granola. I eat steak (a preference I'm proud to share with Tom Frank). While I've seen Dave G. eat tofu, I've seen him eat far more steak. Same goes for S.O.L. I don't think disappearingink is a vegetarian - I couldn't tell you for sure - but I do know he is not puny. While Deep Cover sometimes makes claims to vegetarianism, visits to Bill's in Essex give evidence to the contrary. None of us is easy to throw, but we've all been known to stumble.



• Liberals will try to entice you with their twisted logic. Counter with a bitch slap.

  Let's take these in reverse order. If someone thinks that "bitch slaps" are appropriate forms of discourse then they should not be suprised when they have to take a trip to their local hospital to have their nose reset. And I won't ever bother trying to use standard methods of reason to explain something to someone who reacts with violence (purely chimpanzee behaviour, which, oddly enough, leads to...)
  

• Hanging a picture of Ronald Reagan over your door will keep liberals from entering.

  It will totally fail to keep this liberal from entering (a simple "I'm busy" might suffice though). It will also fail to keep me from laughing my ass off. See, whenever I see a picture of Reagan I think of two things. The first is my junior high school buddy Richard Moon. For a 13 year old kid, he had a dead on Reagan impersonation and his favorite joke with it was to say, in his normal voice, "Mr. President, can you explain Reaganomics to us?" And then he'd put on his Reagan voice and just say "Well...welll...". The second thing Reagan's face makes me think of is a chimpanzee named Bonzo.



• Liberals are against nuclear weapons but have yet to suggest a soy based alternative that obliterates cities.

  Whoever wrote this one is a total dumbshit. At the behest of a liberal, other, very smart liberals invented nuclear weapons. The only time nuclear weapons have been used in war occurred at the behest of a liberal. The nearest we came to using nukes post World War II was under JFK - also a liberal. I'll admit that these days liberals prefer "soft power". Put a despot in charge of a city and it'll destroy itself. As another instance, to obliterate a city you could make sure that the person in charge of the nation in which the targeted city resides is a total incompetent moron. Then just wait for a hurricane.



• If you see a fuel efficient car, it's probably being driven by a liberal. Run it off the road with your SUV.

  This liberal takes public transportation. Does that make me an illegal immigrant, or gay? I will admit that most of my friends have fuel efficient cars. This is mostly due to not wanting to spend shitloads of money on gas when that money could be used for beer.



• Liberals are constantly inflaming the culture war. They seem to forget which side has all the guns.

  Really? Maybe I should ask Fixer and Gord about the guns part. As for inflaming the culture war, this is the most interesting part.
  
  There really isn't a culture war, at least not in the way most people would understand the term. What there is instead is a very loud, very spoiled minority of people who think that their right to not have their sensibilities offended trumps all the other rights in the Constitution. This minority assumes that their offended sensibilites constitute a culture and that everything they read, see, and hear which offends them is an act of war against it. Given that humans are born with both cognitive ability and senses of sight and hearing, it's very likely all of us will read, see, or hear something which we find offensive. Most of us will grumble and grudgingly accept that some people are just rude. We might even change the channel or avoid seeing movies we think might offend us. Not so the culture warriors. I suggest that it would be better for them and better for us if they just jabbed red-hot-pokers into their eyes while standing front and center at a Motorhead show. Then they'd be blind and deaf and never have to worry about being offended. And the rest of us wouldn't have to deal with their consant bitching.
  
  It's really tempting to be glib and rephrase the item as "Jingos are constantly inflaming the Muslim world. They seem to forget which side has all the suicide bombers", but that's not really fair.



• The most dangerous predator of liberals is the real world. They hide from it on college campuses.

  Well, given that this liberal never went to college and has spent the last 15 years cultivating a career, paying taxes and rent, voting, eating, and managing his money (often badly, true), I'm not sure which "real world" is preying on me. Maybe it's the one where certain natural resources on which the entire country depends are finite and yet people insist on wasting those resources. I also wonder which real world this guy, for instance, inhabits.



• Inspired by rhyming slogans and giant puppets, liberals sometimes congregate in groups called "protests". The purpose of this is unknown.

  Ok, they've got me there. Every protest I've ever been to has been totally ineffective. However, that whole immigration demonstration thing was pretty effin' impressive and did manage to effect government policy.



• Liberals are always whining about tolerance, but when I punch them for that, they get moody. Hey, be tolerant!

  The only tolerance I whine about is my alcohol tolerance. Since the 1990's it's gotten far too high. But if you punch me for whining about it, I promise I won't be moody. See second point.

So what have we learned? That a very vocal group of people think they are under attack from an imaginary conspiratorial enemy. They suggest combatting this delusion with violence directed at their fellow citizens. Oddly enough, this is exactly what every despot (or religious fanatic) does. Strange that citizens of a republic ought to have volunteered to become that which we're supposed to despise.

Update: Just because I don't want to use a whole other post to do this when it's kinda sorta on a related note, I suggest that all hail Retardo yet again.