Awesome: Republicans Afraid of Dan Savage

Let’s just kick it over to Ben Smith of Politico:

With the Massachusetts Democratic Party attacking Senator Scott Brown for refusing to film a video for the “It Gets Better Project,” which offers moral support to gay teens, the National Republican Senatorial Committee came to Brown’s defense today with a shot at the project’s founder, Dan Savage.

Savage, who edits the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger, is best known as an often-raunchy syndicated sex columnist.

Emails NRSC communications director Brian Walsh:

If, as the old saying goes, you’re known by the company you keep, than the voters of Massachusetts deserve to know who Democrat Party operatives are teaming up with to spread outrageous attacks on Scott Brown’s character.

It’s truly reached a new level of desperation in their efforts to tear down Scott Brown, but we look forward to hearing whether state and national Democrat leaders agree with Dan Savage’s long history of lewd, violent and anti-Christian rhetoric. Given their press conference call today, one has to presume at this point that they do.

It might be that this is some sort of honor, in the end. Rachel Maddow, for instance, takes much delight in recounting for her viewers how often Republicans use her name as a scarecrow for fundraising.

Congratulations, then, to Dan Savage. All that knob licking is starting to pay off. Maybe he should demand a royalty.

A United State of Americans

Perhaps the ugliest demand of politics is that tragedies often have political implications, and at some point those must be discussed. The end result, of course, is the often undignified spectacle of pundits trying to score public relations points in the face of human suffering and sorrow.

To wit, I’m pretty sure I just heard, on BBC’s Newshour, one of the right-wing authors cited in Norway shooter Anders Brevik’s outsize manifesto compare himself to The Beatles.

Or a blogger for Crooks and Liars suggesting that FOX News is unwilling to describe Breivik as a “conservative” extremist. And while there is no question about why FOX News might want to protect the word “conservative” from any negative associations, there really isn’t a dignified way to go about that discussion:

As you can see, the host is getting away with blaming social media, Norway’s law enforcement authorities for not monitoring social media more closely for people like this, and just about everything but coming out with the truth: Brevik was not a “domestic extremist.” He is a radical right-wing cultural warrior who has been influenced by many different people, including Tim Phillips, director of Freedomworks, apparently.

Herridge, instead of discussing the fundamental problem here, spends an inordinate amount of time blaming the Internet for his views. There is some truth to what she says. It’s easy to turn social media, blogs, and other content into an echo chamber which then magnifies anger and hate. Just have a look at Andrew Breitbart’s timeline sometime for an example. He specializes in that kind of tactic. Still, it’s beside the point. The point here is that Brevik espoused extreme right-wing political positions and acted on them to inflict political mayhem on his countrymen.

Let’s not forget that he didn’t just target a random group of people. He chose to target the youth movement of the current political party in power, which is further evidence of just how far he was willing to go to eradicate opposition.

A Tragedy for the Ages

It’s the sort of lede nobody ever wants to see:

An unsteady forklift dropped a container full of fine Australian wine worth more than $1 million, smashing most of the bottles. The winemaker says he’s “gut-wrenched, shocked and numb” after the loss of his flagship shiraz.

According to the Associated Press Mollydooker Wines, which was preparing enter the American market, lost over 460 cases of shiraz bound for the U.S. The wine was slated to sell at $200 a bottle.

Winemaker Sparky Marquis said the accident site looked “like a murder scene. There was red everywhere.”

That great disturbance in the Force you might have felt; that cosmic shout of anguish that seemed to pull you out of your body that you might view the whole world at once to seek such pain.

Yeah. That’s probably what it was.

The only upside is that the wine was insured at the time of the accident.

A Headline We Never Ever Want to See Again

If I never ….

Amy Taxin brings us the chilling headline:

And the lurid detail: