Yes, Uncivil, God Damn It

Patrick Healy and the editors of the NY Times are getting an eminently well-deserved roasting in the comments at the Times' new blog for this piece of irrelevant swill. It appears some comments have been deleted almost immediately -- although all the posters whose remarks have vanished subsequently insist that they didn't use nasty words or otherwise violate the oh-so-delicate sensibilities of the self-appointed guardians of what is laughably referred to as our national discourse. Well, discourse, intercourse...pretty much the same, I suppose.

Among the many comments thus far appended to this item, this one may be the best -- and since it too may be disappeared, I repeat it here:

As for deleting “uncivil” comments, I got over the civility thing a long time ago. Let’s see, when was it? I started to feel kind of uncivil when the NYT newsroom turned into a pack of rabid dogs over a decade-old land deal in which the Clinton’s got scammed out of a few thousand dollars, on the premise that they couldn’t have been victimized if they hadn’t done something wrong although nobody ever seemed to have the slightest idea of exactly what that was. But that was not enough to cause me to start using the wrong fork or slurp my soup.

Nope, I think I really started to get significantly uncivil when they spent the 2000 electoral campaign telling us that Al Gore was unfit to be president because of the color of his suits and because he had claimed to have invented the Internet, uncovered Love Canal, and to have been Oliver in Love Story, none of which he had ever actually claimed but it was fun to keep saying so. Meanwhile George W. Bush was a really nice guy, and a straightshooter who we should vote for because we wanted to have a beer with him. Were there, you know, public policy questions confronting the country? Evidently not.

So by that time I was wiping my chin on my sleeve and using mild epithets such as crap and damn in front of the ladies. But I would have to say that I really became downright rude when the Times joined the government of the United States in a campaign of lies, to lead the country into a war of aggression for the purpose of gaining control by military force over the petroleum of the Middle East, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, destroying the reputation of the United States throughout the world, and by the way failing to achieve its objective. I didn’t particularly like it either when the President of the United States asserted that he has the absolute, unaccountable power to make people disappear forever into secret prisons, there to torture them, even torture them to death, and that neither the Congress, the courts, nor international treaties can restrain this power in any way. I actually got ticked off enough to bang my fist on the table and say stuff like “** those ***holes” when they gave massive tax cuts to rich people while trying to take housing, health care, retirement income, and even food away from poor people, while stealing hundreds of billions of dollars they borrowed from foreigners to enrich their cronies at Halliburton and Raytheon and make our grandchildren pay it back, which they won’t be able to do because they will be impoverished by the collapse of our oil-fueled economy.

I’m definitely uncivil about stuff like that and I get even more uncivil when people who pretend to be liberals and to agree with me that oh yes, tut tut, all that just isn’t right, tell me that the real problem is that I’m angry about it. If I would just calm down and pay the proper respect due to the office to the man who is, after all president, all that bad stuff would go away. To that I say, uncivil as it may be, you are cowards, and [...] tools.

Bravo, Cervantes.

Do his uncivil thoughts upset some readers, or certain personages at the Times? Well, **** them.

Oh, my. Please avail yourself of my fainting couch. I shall retrieve the smelling salts immediately, and revive you.

Or not.