Ark. Rep. Nate Bell is a disgusting waste of oxygen.

I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine? #2A

— Nate Bell (@NateBell4AR) April 19, 2013

Nate Bell, you have dog shit and drier lint for brains. Go hit yourself in the face with a hammer. I’d tell you to fuck yourself with a pineapple, but you’d probably enjoy that.

(There are some awesome responses to his Tweet. Follow the link and read them.)

This isn’t supposed to make sense from the outside.

I see around the leftosphere that someone named Steve Stockman is showing off a bumper sticker that says:

If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted.

Our first reflex is to sputter and point at that womb-controlling, gun-pushing asshat and insist to him that if a fetus shot a gun through its mother’s abdomen, that fetus would be screwed, and besides, babies are already born so stop calling fetuses babies.

That’s not the point. This slogan isn’t about us. We’re not supposed to picture a scenario that actually makes sense. This is about combining anti-choice with pro-gun sentiment. It’s about selling the anti-gun-control position to womb-controllers.

I suppose this message is supposed to evoke the image of a fetus shooting its tiny gun at the abortion provider when he dilates the woman’s cervix, rather than threatening the pregnant woman with a bullet wound if she chooses to abort.

Considering that abortion providers already have to wear bulletproof vests to work, this rhetoric is irresponsible, but it’s not surprising. The anti-choice movement has long demonstrated that it sees nothing wrong with being pro-war, pro-death-penalty, anti-environmental-protections, anti-public-assistance, and anti-universal-healthcare. Why shouldn’t they also be anti-gun-regulations? This is just more of the same.

Ask the Daily Beast, and you shall receive the rape apologism!

Oh yes. Oh fucking yes. Here we go, in the comment section.

Laird Winkelvoss 7 hours ago

Girls, in the 1850′s when you passed out drunk at a party with a bunch of boys present, they would have to do copper engravings of you being assaulted.  Tedious and time-consuming.  Now, you can be instantly humiliated world-wide.  Think about it.

Yes, everything was so much better for women back in the days when we couldn’t vote, own property, access contraceptives, and public knowledge of one act of non-marital sex could ruin our lives.

Everyone knows that this shit keeps happening because WOMEN HAVEN’T THOUGHT ABOUT IT.

The arsonists are telling us how to prevent forest fires.

I got this from New Ways Ministry (see previous post).

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is not happy about the new VAWA.

Antonin Scalia said WHAT?!

“Perpetuation of racial entitlement”? WTF is wrong with you?!

If you’re “just” trying to be funny, then you’d better damn well BE funny.

Greta Christina has an excellent post on the impact of supposedly transgressive comedy. It is not only about Seth MacFarlane’s bigotry-perpetuating nonsense on Sunday night, though that is the initial trigger.

What’s more: I’m sick to death of the notion that, if you critique something a comedian says or does for being hurtful and fucked up, you need to “lighten up,” “stop taking things so seriously,” and “get a sense of humor.” I remember years ago, Pedro Almodovar responded to feminist critiques of one of his movies (the critiques had to do with rape jokes, if I recall correctly) by saying something along the lines of, “Why are feminists like this? Isn’t it possible to be a feminist and still have a sense of humor?” To which I wanted to respond, “Isn’t it possible to have a sense of humor and still not think your jokes are funny?” This idea that having a sense of humor means giving all comedians a free pass on criticism for anything they say, ever… it’s bullshit. It’s a “Shut up, that’s why” argument. It’s a reflexive attempt to shut down any criticism — artistic as well as political or moral — before it ever starts.

Well, you don’t get to have it both ways. You don’t get to say that comedy is an important form of artistic expression, a valuable contribution to our cultural landscape in which artistic freedom is necessary and paramount… and then say that everyone just needs to lighten up, and what comedians say and do isn’t that big a deal, and it’s ridiculous to call them to account for it.

Yes. I have long been unimpressed by the “JUST a joke” gambit.

Comedy, even the most juvenile, ridiculous type, is not trivial. Like TV shows, movies, books and songs, they are among the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we live our lives. This is why prominent comedians are respected entertainers who are allowed to charge us to see them deliver jokes. You don’t get to enjoy the kind of cultural power that we assign to people like George Carlin and Louis CK and then deflect any criticism of your material with “but it was JUST a joke.” Brave humor punches UP. If you’re at the top and punching down at people who are already accustomed to being mocked, trivialized, exploited and assaulted, then you are not a very interesting comedian.

 

Liberal Tips to Avoid Being an Asshole

This idiotic hashtag started out ostensibly as a means to mock Joe Salazar and other anti-gun liberals for supposedly being inadequately committed to supporting women in their endeavor to avoid victimization. If it had kept to the narrative of women using guns to defend themselves against assailants, it would have been problematic, but not reprehensible. Instead, the tag soon spiraled into an orgy of racism, xenophobia, slut-shaming, and other anti-empirical nonsense. It is utterly unsurprising that when conservatives want to mock liberals, the topic of rape is not their friend.

If you think a Twitter topic about how guns supposedly help women protect themselves from rape is your chance to take potshots at immigrants, liberal women, single women, sexually active women, conventionally unattractive women, and women who have had or may later have abortions, you’re not doing conservatism any favors. I’m not really surprised to see 140 characters at a time from people who clearly have a problem with women demanding the right to bodily autonomy and sexual self-determination, but it’s not in your interest to keep giving me material. There’s a good set of reasons why Todd Akin and the rest of Team Rape were roundly humiliated in the last election. There’s only so far you can get by pissing off liberals before the liberals turn out to be the mainstream.

Also, if you think it’s cute to make jokes that imply that ugly women don’t get raped, please hit yourself in the face with a hammer. Whatever effect it has on your cognition will only be an improvement.

Advice to GOPers: Please staple your damn mouths shut.

The latest faux pas comes from Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia, who, I am not joking, has defended Todd Akin, of all people. Here’s the thing: if you defend Todd Akin, you deserve to be kicked out of office and run out of town on a rail. There’s no ambiguity about this. There is nothing defensible about Todd Akin, and Gingrey has just marked himself as more of the same, because he seems to think that we didn’t hear Akin the first time:

and what he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’ That’s what he meant when he said legitimate rape versus non-legitimate rape. I don’t find anything so horrible about that.

 

You would think a UN treaty on rights for disabled people would be a no-brainer, but…

I made another video. Below, I have posted some documentation.

Be quiet, Jim Inhofe! Grown-ups are talking!

Full story here.

I actually looked at Life News to get this quote. *shudder*

Robin Marty brought me here.

Mr. Frothy-Mix thinks the UN wants to abort his precious little girl.

The opposition was led by tea party favorite Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who argued that the treaty by its very nature threatened U.S. sovereignty. Specifically he expressed concerns that the treaty could lead to the state, rather than parents, determining what was in the best interest of disabled children in such areas as home schooling, and that language in the treaty guaranteeing the disabled equal rights to reproductive health care could lead to abortions. Parents, Lee said, will “raise their children with the constant looming threat of state interference.”

Richard Mourdock joins the rest of the fish in the barrel.

This shit keeps happening. First we had Todd Akin saying a “legitimate rape” can’t establish a pregnancy, so there’s no such thing as a rape exception for abortion law. Then we had Roger Rivard telling us how “some girls rape easy,” and we can’t trust a young woman who reports a rape. Now we have Richard Mourdock explaining very earnestly how there can be no rape exception because pregnancy by rape is God’s intention. We have all these Republican Congressional candidates saying these horrifying things about rape, pregnancy and women’s reproductive freedom, and they all think that if they just explain themselves a little harder, then we’ll see they’re decent guys who don’t hate women at all.

They are mistaken. Their further explanations merely dig them deeper into that hole.

Indiana candidate Mourdock has put himself in the national spotlight with this business:

Mourdock was asked during the final minutes of a debate whether abortion should be allowed in cases of rape or incest.

He replied: “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that’s something God intended to happen.”

In case you’re wondering if the quote is missing some context, here’s the full paragraph:

“I struggled with myself for a long time but I came to realize life is that gift from God, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape. It is something that God intended to happen.”