Oh, Bob Somerby, you’ve gone and done it now!!!
The minute I saw Rachel Maddow wearing fishing waders on her show Tuesday night I knew it would drive Our Own Monotonous Crank (Our Own Failed Comic?) completely insane and the following day he did not disappoint. He snidely referred to Maddow as “Our Own Rhodes Scholar” seven times and then proceeded to label her “a simpleton,” “an ass,” “quite inexperienced in politics,” a “peddler,” “a grasping person,” a “fool” and “dumber than Maureen Dowd.” He also had not-so-nice things to say about Mark McKinnon (a “slippery” “hustler”) and Todd Purdum (a “creep” and a “scumbag”). I don’t necessarily disagree with those descriptions of McKinnon and Purdum, but I certainly wouldn’t follow all of that name-calling, including the bile directed at Maddow, with something as hypocritical (and just plain wrong) as this rant about Duncan Black (aka Atrios):
Then too, there’s Our Own Economics Professor. In L.A., it was all about seeing ourselves in the other, into whom we might seamlessly blend.* By way of contrast, for Our Own Professor, it was about taking tribal pride in this perfected ignorance:
OUR OWN PROFESSOR (7/7/09): Why Sarah?
The whole Sarah Palin “phenomenon” has been pretty weird. I’ve tried to figure out why she’s so loved in wingnut world, where even they have to occasionally pick up on the fact that she’s pretty absurd. And I guess I come back to what I usually do: they love her because they thinks she pisses off liberals.
We’re not angry, we’re laughing.
Our Own Professor has been trying to figure why Palin is loved “in wingnut world.” Other professors might grasp something obvious; if you start out defining a group of people as “wing nuts,” you’re not likely to figure out how they see the world. In our view, Palin was the worst candidate ever—will almost certainly be the same if she runs for the White House. But anyone with two IQ points to rub together could come up with some obvious reasons why conservatives like her. Two quickies: They feel she lived her values when she gave birth last year. They admire the way she took out King Frank Murkowski in 2006, when he was her state’s reigning Republican governor.
Duh. How hard are such things to fathom? We liberals would love to see a Democratic pol living out our own liberal values; perhaps because we see it so rarely, Our Own Professor couldn’t conjure it as a possible reason. And liberals did love it, for obvious reasons, when a “regular person” went after King Joseph Lieberman, almost turning him out of office; Our Own Professor can’t seem to recall, even as he strains for reasons why wing nuts might love Sarah. But then, even as we swayed in L.A., Our Own Professor was preaching that ancient tribal hatred—the prehistoric tribal hatred in which one clan can’t even imagine how those in the other clan might feel. The tribal hatred in which weak, small minds boast of their weakness and smallness.
In Los Angeles, images of different people blended into each other. In Philadelphia, Our Own Professor boasted that he can’t perform such a move of the mind—that he is prehistoric, unwell. (In fairness, he probably knows that the other clan’s limbic brains don’t work right.)
* reference to Michael Jackson memorial—ed.
So Our Own Monotonous Crank, who hurls epithets at people on a nearly-daily basis, is upset with Atrios for using the widely-circulated term “wingnuts” and coming to a pretty logical conclusion (which Somerby doesn’t acknowledge) as to why said wingnuts still love Palin despite all of her very apparent flaws. The irony here, of course, is that Atrios has probably spent much more time trying to figure out wingnuts than Somerby ever has. I guarantee that Our Own Monotonous Crank has never donned waders and ventured waist-deep into the eye-opening and spittle-flecked comment sections of hellholes like Free Republic and Michelle Malkin’s blog unlike “weak, small minds” like Atrios and plenty of other lib/prog bloggers (including yours truly) have or Our Own Monotonous Crank would totally get what Atrios wrote. Wingnuts loathe “moonbats” (I’ll bet Somerby hasn’t a clue as to what that means) and love (live?) to make them miserable. It wasn’t until folks like Atrios and other lefty bloggers started throwing punches back at them that the liberal blogosphere really started to blossom. We went from wimps to warriors. And in the process we studied them. And we figured them out. And that “We Are the World” shit won’t fly in the blogosphere in the battle of wingnuts vs. moonbats. Ever.
But what I’ve addressed isn’t even the worst and most wrong-headed thing Our Own Monotonous Crank wrote on Wednesday. Oh, Bob Somerby, you’ve gone and done it now!!! You have forced me to defend Morning Joe‘s Mika Brzezinski. You horrible, horrible, horrible bastard.
Our Own Monotonous Crank, who relentlessly accuses Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann of being misogynists (correctly in the case of the former), actually scrawled the following:
We strongly recommend this post by Benen, and the July 6 post which preceded it (click here). Mika Brzezinksi has been defiantly unintelligent on Morning Joe since the program began. Luckily, she has a chic bob—it’s why she’s on—because her work is an unending marvel.
Not only is that statement wildly inaccurate but it’s also glaringly sexist. Granted, Brzezinksi frequently drives me nuts with her “mommy” shtick and her constant dimwitted defense of Sarah Palin, but reducing her to nothing but a hairdo is just plain wrong (and, yes, extremely sexist). She’s “on” because she worked hard to get to where she is today. She started working in journalism in 1990 and eventually became a frequent contributor to both CBS Sunday Morning and 60 Minutes. In addition, she co-anchored an afternoon show for MSNBC, her current employer, in 2000. She also famously (and fearlessly) reported from Ground Zero for CBS, including being near the South Tower when it fell. And, hell, you’d think even Our Own Monotonous Crank would appreciate her for the time she righteously protested against an attempt to bury the lead. (Oh, who the fuck am I kidding? Our Own Monotonous Crank will find something to hate about that.)
So because that horrible, horrible, horrible bastard Bob Somerby has forced me to defend Mika Brzezinksi and because he wrote something that was just as misogynistic as anything that’s ever tumbled over Tweety’s saliva-drenched bottom lip, I’m going to punish Our Own Monotonous Crank with Photoshop.
Here are pictures of Bob Somerby and Mika Brzezinksi:
Mika is the one with the “chic bob.” Bob is, ummmm, not.
Let’s fix that:
There you go, Our Own Monotonous Crank now has a chic bob just like “defiantly unintelligent” Mika. Someone contact MSNBC. I think we’ve just found Dylan Ratigan‘s future co-host.
UPDATE: It’s worse than I thought. I just read Somerby’s post from Tuesday and he was going after Richard Cohen (who I have no love for, BTW) for being sexist for—get this—calling Palin “a ditz.” I shit you not. The guy who claimed “defiantly unintelligent” Mika was “on” because of her “chic bob” criticized Cohen the day before because he used the word “ditz” to describe Palin:
But someone like Cohen can’t voice such a judgment about a woman without quickly turning to familiar sexist language.
Mirror, meet Bob Somerby. Don’t forget to compliment him on his new ‘do.
MORE: I just fleshed out the Atrios part of this post a bit. Reading a lot of Our Own Monotonous Crank tends to wear me out and I didn’t finish writing that portion.
Posted by Kevin K. on 07/10/09 at 02:07 PM • Permalink
Categories: Politics • Election '08 • St. McSame • Nutters • Sarah Palin • Poliblogs • Polisnark • Television •
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