Michael Ryan Accuses Left of Name-calling, having no ideas. What?

Re: "Stop Name-Calling and Come Up with some Ideas" from the October 4th editorial page of The Augusta Chronicle.

I hate to use such a tired cliche' but isn't the pot calling the kettle black here when it comes to name-calling. For years the likes of Rush Limbaugh have called liberals such dehumanizing names as femi-Nazis, welfare queens, environmentalist wackos, etc. The Chronicle used to run a column by Mona Charen who wrote a book calling liberals "useful idiots." They also used to run Ann Coulter's column. Ms. Coulter calls liberals "traitors. In recent years it's gotten even worse with Glen Beck referring to President Obama as a Nazi, marxist, and racist. Tea bag protestors carry signs depicting President Obama as batman's nemesis, the Joker, and others showing him with a Hitler mustache, or as a monkey, or as a jungle bunny.

For Mr. Ryan to claim that the left is using name-calling to a greater degree than the right is outrageous and completely untrue.

To say they're out of ideas is even more ridiculous. It's liberals who, like it or not, are pushing for real health care reform, stimulus plans that do help the economy, and the cap and trade solution to global warming.

These problems that democrats are trying to address festered under conservative rule for decades, and conservatives offered no solutions whatsoever. Now, Mr. Ryan is accusing liberals of having no ideas? Who is he kidding?

Mr. Ryan defends conservatives from being called "wingnuts" by citing the number of advance copies of Sarah Palin's new book that have been sold. He wrote that, "there must be a lot of them (nuts) around." It wasn't his intent, but he admitted it--there are a lot of nutty people around. There is a market for conservative zombies who like to read books that support their pre-conceived notion of how things should be. Once again he also accuses the media of assassinating Ms. Palin's character. The media didn't assasinate her charactre--it's not their fault that she was clearly unqualified and unprepared.

In the tenth paragraph we finally see what has Mr. Ryan so riled up. Bill Maher called republicans lunatics, religious fanatics, flat-earthers, Civil War re-enactors, and bimbos."

Much of what Mr. Maher (a political satirist) said is true. A good chunk of republican support today comes from religious fundamentalists who want to teach fairy tales in science class. Republicans deny the possiblity of anthropogenic global warming, despite the near unanimity of opinion among climate scientists. And there's been more than one republican politician who has made statements in favor of secession from the United States.

And I can see from paragraph 14 why Mr. Ryan is so upset with Mr. Maher. Mr. Maher made fun of Glen Beck, saying he would some day be caught in a dress and playing with feces or something. As I demonstrated on previous entries in this blog, Mr. Beck is the source of the conservative talking points that Mr. Ryan plagiarizes. Mr. Maher dared to make fun of the republicans current, favorite sacred cow.

As I predicted in an earlier blog entry, Mr. Ryan weighs in on congressman Alan Grayson's recent comments on the house floor. Mr. Ryan wrote that it was much worse than what Joe Wilson said.

What Alan Grayson said was so true and not at all comparable to what Joe Wilson said. Here's the difference: Grayson had the floor and was telling the truth; Wilson did not have the floor and was not telling the truth. Grayson did not violate protocol, but Wilson did.

Republicans (and conservative democrats) are opposed to health care reform because they take bribes to protect insurance company profits. Insurance companies do profit when sick people die quickly. What Alan Grayson said was a refreshing (though calculated) burst of fresh air.