Renew Your English Lessons First
Wingnuts, 15 February 2008
Memo to the collective talent of Renew America: YOU ARE DUMB.
On Wednesday, I mentioned a misguided bit of comedy from Erick Erickson, the editor of right-wing blog RedState. Erickson posited that left-wing blogs were more successful than right-wing blogs because they've got tons of free time due to not having jobs and having lots of abortions. And certainly that's part of it. And once Planned Parenthood rolls out their free WiFi access later this year, Markos and Atrios and company will be able to bash Bush -during- their many abortions, so the gap's only going to get wider.
But I still don't think that's the whole story. There's got to be some credit given to the fact that right-wing bloggers are awful, awful writers. I mean, sure, their audience manages the impressive semantic feat of not being the most discriminating bunch while at the same time being the most discriminating bunch, but goddamn, some of that shit is just as insultingly unintelligible in structure as it is in ideology. Especially the text spewed at Renew America.
Hilarious examples pulled from a cursory review of the site's articles? Oh, I've got those. In spades. We start off with Warner Todd Huston, author of "I Am A RINO". Now, if you're not a masochistic reader of online political crap, you may not know what a RINO is. Huston recognizes that he needs to explain it, and here's how he goes about it. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!
"For those unfamiliar, RINO is not only shorthand for rhinoceros, that great beast of the African plains, but it is also an acronym. It stands for, "Republican In Name Only" — RINO."
Um, Warner? Todd? Warner Todd? I'm not sure which parts of your ridiculous fucking name you go by, but I think you need to know something. "RINO" is only shorthand for "rhinoceros" if you're saying it. And you're not saying it, you're writing. Just because you're required to be homophobic to write for Renew America doesn't mean you have to be homophonophobic. If it -was- a spoken speech, it'd still read like someone who was told to "open with a joke" and then had to go look up what a joke was. Written out, it's clumsy, awkward, and completely wrong.
And then there's J. Matt Barber. What the fuck is with these names? Anyway, Barber wrote an article called "Unmasking The Gay Agenda". There is absolutely nothing of interest in it at all. I mention it only because he makes the inexplicable decision to start it with a subhead: BALANCE OF POWER.
You don't start with a subhead. Again, it's like it was prepared for some entirely different medium - in this case, Ugly Powerpoint Presentation, and he just copy and pasted the text into a posting box. There are certainly enough bullet points in his piece to support that conclusion.
Oh, and by the way, at the end of the article, he claims that "'Gayness' is not an 'immutable' or unchangeable condition as homosexual apologists would have you believe. People can find freedom from homosexual behaviors and even from same-sex attractions. It's not easy, but untold thousands of former homosexuals have done it.". So, you know, In case you were wondering on what basis I decided he was worthy of ridicule. He's one of THOSE assholes.
And finally we have Donald Hank, who makes up for his lack of a third name by having a nickname first name as his last name. Hank, like everyone else at Renew America, hates the living shit out of John McCain, for the same wrong reasons "independents" love him. Like his stance on immigration, which I thought I understood until I read Hank's description of it:
"Senator McCain says he is the candidate best positioned to protect America from its foreign enemies, but like his fellow neocon, George W. Bush, refuses to support closing the border or deporting illegal immigrants, none of whom are required to show any evidence that they are not enemies of the US, thanks to the lax policies in place due to politicians like McCain."
My god! It's the fabled Ourobourous Sentence! Oh, wait, no. It just has its head up its own ass. Never mind.
And I'm sorry, but illegal immigrants being required to show evidence that they're not enemies? How would that work, exactly? What would that evidence consist of? If the rest of Renew America is any indication, it'd be a flag lapel pin, a demonstration of heterosexuality, and spitting on a picture of John McCain. I'm not sure when they'd actually do that, of course, since they snuck into the country, and the Hank types say we have to kick them out regardless of their love of country.
It makes no fucking sense. But that's par for the course at Renew America, where the staff writers are either some of the dumbest sonsabitches to ever grace the series of tubes, or they're being told to act like it because the highest-profile contributor to the site is Alan Keyes, and it's the only way to make him look good.