The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Conservative ‘Character Flaw’ Diagnosed by Neurological Scientist Janeane Garofalo

Posted on | December 11, 2010 | 18 Comments

“The British empire is the original douchebag empire, where sh*tty Americans and sh*tty Australians come from. . .
“What politics does shine a big light on is human frailty. And I think what conservatism has shined a light on also is human frailty. What does it mean to be a conservative or a Republican anymore? I’m not quite sure, but it clearly shows you’ve got a lot of frailty — you’ve got a lot of flaw. That you’re arrogant as f**k about that and you’re belligerent and you have very little self-awareness.
“But what does it mean to be the type of journalist who kowtows to a conservative? . . . To be a modern-day Republican or conservative, to be a George Bush type of Republican or conservative, to be a Hannity type — it’s a character flaw. It’s a character flaw or it also could be neurological. . . .
“I’m not joking at all. Limbic brain — seat of your emotions — something’s not working, whether it’s your private life or your literal neural anatomy, something is not working. . . . It is, I think, a neurological issue.
“It is also the party now . . . for racists, for sexists, for homophobes, for closet queens. Whatever, again, is wrong with you, because a tent full of hate has elastic walls.”
— Janeane Garofalo, May 27, 2009

Exactly why that audio was featured today at The Blaze, I’m not sure. Perhaps they just found it online today, but they didn’t provide a full transcript and I thought it might be a useful service to provide one.

One of my 18-year-old twin sons was sitting on the other side of the office while I playing and re-playing that audio to transcribe it.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“Janeane Garofalo,” I said.

“Never heard of her,” he said.

Garofalo probably considers her amateur diagnosis to be a real cutting-edge breakthrough in political analysis, but this business of treating conservatism as a mental disorder has a very long history, as I explained a year ago:

Even before the Senate voted on cloture, the Democrats’ health-care legislation was already delivering benefits in the form of a free mental-health screening delivered by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: If you oppose this bill, you’re a dangerous nut.
Such was the essence of Sunday’s floor speech in which the junior senator from Rhode Island quoted at length from Richard Hofstadter’s 1965 classic, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and offered it as a diagnosis of the health bill’s opponents.
Whitehouse paraphrased Hofstadter’s thesis, warning of “the dangers of an aggrieved right-wing minority with the power to create what [Hofstadter] called a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”
This “aggrieved” minority, Whitehouse asserted, was responsible for the “malignant, vindictive passions” of those who opposed the health-care bill. He compared these opponents to the Nazi brownshirts responsible for Kristallnacht in Germany — “broken glass has sparkled in darkened streets” — as well as to the Jacobin rabble of revolutionary France and racial lynch mobs.
“Does that sound familiar…in this health debate?” Whitehouse asked. . . .

This particular species of nonsense, the widespread liberal belief that there can be no rational reason to oppose their policies and that therefore voting Republican is symptomatic of insanity, has been employed against Glenn Beck and his audience. Back in March, when Frank Rich was portraying the Tea Party movement as an aggregation of violent kooks, I wrote:

There is no cure for the liberal disorder of political psychosis, which erupts whenever it appears conservatives are gaining ground. If present trends continue, Republicans ought to make one concession on health-care reform — free Xanax for Democrats on Nov. 3.

We’re barely five weeks past Election Day, folks. The era of total moonbat madness has just begun.


Category: Celebrities

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