Me and My Big Mouth!
columnist: Steven McDuffie

Topic: Media
On Janeane Coulterofalo, Tea Parties, & President George W. Obama

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Janeane Garofalo recently criticized the tax protest tea parties that were held across America earlier this month. Her criticisms were nothing more than argumentum ad hominem. In this article, I show how she could have done a much better job of criticizing the Tea Party protests.

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by Steven McDuffie
(libertarian)
Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Garofalo

As hard as it is to believe, there was a time, not so very long ago, that I was a political cousin of alleged comedienne Janeane Garofalo. We were both on the far left edge of the Nolan chart. We both supported Ralph Nader during the 2000 election. But something momentous happened: during that campaign, I caught the late Harry Browne on the radio, probably this interview on NPR. Mr. Browne had an uncanny knack for answering whatever question the interviewer asked, as concisely as possible, and then immediately segueing into a 30 second or minute long lecture on the topic of liberty. Though, it took many years before his ideas finally sunk in, I began moving up and to the right on the Nolan Chart after the 2000 election, and especially in the months following Sept. 11th, 2001. Starting out as an intransigent liberal¹, desperately clinging to progressive liberal ideology like a rapacious coyote with his jaws locked onto his prey, I was dragged kicking and screaming towards libertarianism².

Garofalo wasn't so lucky. Instead of chancing upon an amazing beacon of liberty like Harry Browne, she gravitated toward the loathsome John Kerry—a man I can only regard as the most fantastic joke ever perpetrated on the electorate by a major political party. In other words, she moved down and to the right on the Nolan Chart. Instead of moving toward a more liberty-oriented avatar, she moved toward a more authoritarian one (Nader, state-worshipper though he is, certainly has a far richer understanding of liberty than does Kerry).

I don’t recall paying much attention to Garofalo prior to her recent comments on Keith Olbermann's MSNBC show, Countdown³. Even in 2000 when we were both Nader supporters, she wasn’t really on my radar screen. I was aware of her, but outside of a few brief clips on TV, I never knew much about her. Now, I know a little more about her, and I am still trying to suss out how I feel about it. I was asked to write a Nolan Chart article on this subject by a friend, and I am not sure how it is going to turn out.

So here goes nothin'...

Garofalo isn’t quite as articulate as she thinks—it's not evident that she's quite as articulate as a bright 7th grader—making the writing of this article all the more difficult. Her rapid-fire (vapid-fire?) screed tended to drift from incoherent thought to incoherent thought, but I think it’s possible boil her "arguments" down to their constituent components and address them. Making this task even more difficult is my own problem with the Tea Party protesters, which I will get into in the second section of this article.

Here are Garofalo’s "arguments" as I see them:

• The "tea-baggers", as she calls them, are a subset of a group that hate Obama. Included in this larger group are people that she calls "rednecks", "conservatives", "Republicans", etc.
• This larger group have either merged with the White Power movement, or have actually been crypto-racists the whole time. It’s likely that Garofalo thinks that everyone on the right of the political spectrum is racist, and the obvious corollary to that is that no one on the left is. I don’t know the woman, and I don’t want to put words into her mouth, but as far as I know, she hasn’t said anything that would contradict my opinion.
• All people who hate and/or fear and/or disagree with Obama who aren’t white must obviously suffer from  Stockholm Syndrome. The implication is that no one can possibly disagree with Obama unless they have some mental problem (to wit: her rant about the limbic brain⁴).

The picture of Garofalo that emerges is of the left’s answer to Ann Coulter. Like Ann Coulter, her attacks on Obama-bashers are a flagitious example of argumentum ad hominem—in fact, textbook ad hominem and like Coulter, Garofalo's opinions are  nugatory and absurd—and outrageous, by design. Her (tens of) devotees and disciples can rest assured now, knowing that they don’t have to bother thinking. They don’t have to worry about considering the arguments of Obama-bashers even for the briefest of moments, because the enlightened Janeane Garofalo has ascertained that Obama-bashers are motivated only by rage and racism. It’s not that Obama’s policies stink: it’s that he’s black! Clearly this sort of vitriolic rubbish is more suited for schoolyard disputes or online chat-room debates. It has no business on a TV program that pretends to offer considered political commentary, biased though it may be. If Olbermann had the merest shred of journalistic integrity, he would have cut this shrieking shrew’s mic after her first statement.

One final thought on Garofalo: she shrilly implied that only liberals know anything about history. I thus hereby challenge Janeane Garofalo to a public debate on any historical topic, anytime, anyplace, anywhere. I have forgotten more about US history in the last year than this unfortunate harpy has ever known⁵.

Tea-baggers

Then there are the Tea Party participants. Sigh…

Where were these people for the last eight years? When George W. BushCo was attenuating nearly every right guaranteed under the Bill of Rights, they were cheering. When BushCo was acting as if he had inherent powers as an executive that weren’t outlined in the Constitution—that pesky document that actually created the Office of the Presidency—they turned a blind eye, saying that '9-11 changed everything'. When BushCo helped create the unconstitutional, NRA-endorsed, Project: Safe Neighborhoods, that encroaches on the 2nd Amendment, where were these "conservative" Tea Party people? Applauding? Pretending it didn’t exist, or that it was, in fact, constitutional?

Finally, when BushCo launched two illegal wars—war being the ultimate big government program—what percentage of the Tea Party folks were singing his praises? Significantly more than 50%, I’d bet, and probably more than 75%. One blog I read recently asked how the Tea Party protesters could, on the one hand, cheer on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet, on other hand, not want to pay the taxes that fund these same wars.

Most of the Tea Party protesters were misguided, but not  in the way Garofalo believes. They were misguided because they think that the US Government has gone to pot only in the last three months or so. Not all of the Tea Party people think this, obviously, and not all of the 2009 Tea Party protests were partisan Republican neo-con whine-fests… but most of them were. I didn’t get the impression that any of the Tea Party protesters suffered from seething racism, kept hidden just beneath the surface: I just got the impression that they were pissed-off Republicans, angry that the other party is in office.

Why couldn’t Garofalo have gotten on Olbermann’s show and said something like that? The question almost answers itself.

Obama

Then there is the man at the center of this tempest: President Barack H. Obama II.

The problem I have with Obama isn’t that he is black. In fact, I confess that it really did honestly touch my heart that a black man was finally elected president. I would have never guessed that it would have happened in my lifetime. I just wish, following Walter William, that the political equivalant of Jackie Robinson had been elected.

During the campaign, after Obama secured the nomination, I warned my liberal friends that they were very likely going to be sorely disappointed with Obama. Many of my friends on the left—fellow anti-war activists—voted for Obama because they thought he would "bring the troops home from Iraq". I assured them that, in all likelihood, there would still be tens of thousands of US troops in Iraq come 2012, and indeed, Obama has since all but promised exactly that. Of course, this cannot be surprising when one considers that, during his single, unremarkable, partial term in the Senate, Obama did not vote against the military action in Iraq and Afghanistan a single time.

A few other reasons I fear and/or disagree with Obama:

• He promised to end the DEA raids on medical marijuana patients and suppliers in states that have medical marijuana laws, and broke that promise almost immediately.
• Obama promised that there would be no more warrantless wiretapping under his administration and that telecommunications companies who complied with the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program would not be shielded from prosecution, and yet recently, Obama’s DoJ submitted a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, and in doing so, made arguments that were more fascistic and unconstitutional than anything ever conceived of by the Bush Administration. This, obviously, isn’t surprising to anyone who researched Obama’s record in the Senate and discovered that he voted for the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and the Patriot Act Reauthorization Bill.
• Despite the conclusion drawn by the US Government’s own intelligence agencies, and the IAEA, Obama continues to accuse the Iranian government of having a secret nuclear weapons program. Obama’s speech to AIPAC during the campaign sounded like something written by Karl Rove.
• Obama is illegally bombing and killing people within the borders of Pakistan. There is no constitutional provision that allows for any such actions taken by this president.
• Candidate Obama also expressed his belief in, and pledged his support for, the full reinstatement of Habeas Corpus, and yet, just a few short months later, President Obama’s DoJ filed a brief that is legally identical to the Bush Administration’s position on Habeas—this time regarding detainees in Afghanistan.

Mark Edge, the co-host of my favorite call-in radio program, Free Talk Live, recently told me "I made a mistake, early on. I said that Obama was nothing more than Jimmy Carter, [and now] I think he’s George Bush." Indeed. During the campaign, Obama supporters assured me that if McCain wins, it will be the third term of the Bush presidency. I retorted that if either Obama or McCain are elected, it will be the third term of the Bush presidency. It pains me to say that I was right.

Notes:
1. Recently, one of my younger, liberal relatives, who isn’t old enough to remember how I was back when I was a liberal, said, "You don’t act like you were ever a liberal." My response? "Thank you!"

2. After the elevation of self-described "libertarians" Bill Maher, Neil Boortz and Glenn Beck onto the national scene, I began to feel less comfortable describing myself as a libertarian. By the time statist "Big Government Bob" Barr was nominated as the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, I began to totally eschew that label altogether.

3. I swear to you that I had to google "Keith Olbermann" to find out what network carries his show, and what it is called.

4. I recommend that Garofalo read Broca's Brain by Carl Sagan, so that she might learn that a more effective insult against right-wingers would have been to accuse them of having an over-sized R-Complex.

5. Update: I have been informed that Garofalo has a degree in history, so I am forced to admit that she has probably read as much history as I have, and possibly more. Will I still debate her? Sure, but I will make sure to not underestimate her, which I probably would have done had I not known her academic background.

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©2009 Steven McDuffie, all rights reserved. You must have written permission from the author in order to republish this work.
Published: Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Last modified: Monday, May 4, 2009

The views expressed in this article are those of Steven McDuffie only and do not represent the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. Steven McDuffie is solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.

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