THE MAGPIE:MAGPIE WILL return to unalloyed silliness next week but right now, and once more with feeling, we have a final (mildly serious) whirl on the merry-go-round that has been the US presidential election.It was a notable feature of the campaign that some online readers in the US reacted, foaming at the mouth-style, anytime anyone had a pop at Sarah Palin.
Maybe it's asking too much to expect people who hate liberals to be anything other than illiberal, but when Magpie did a turn on October 3rd on Tina Fey's demolition job on the Alaskan governor on Saturday Night Live ("Side-splitting parodies by two comedians make Palin a laughing stock in US," ran the headline), the e-mails came thick and fast.
"You are an idiot - your headline is absurd. Why don't you stick to picking potatoes and your nose," suggested a chap named Lou. A political science PhD candidate clearly.
"Too bad it is the ignorant, ordinary people of America that is voting isn't it? Not the educated journalists and talk show hosts and comedians of the world. I say sit back and smile alright, you will be so surprised when McCain wins next month!! I simply can't wait!" So wrote Marie via sbcglobal.net. Wonder how Tuesday night went for her?
"All of you had better watch out because I feel there is a general disgust against the press and your biased reporting," wrote Leslie from Wyoming. One assumes that the "you" is the hated media. "We are not idiots, we have eyes, ears and brains."
"What is this, BBC West?" fumed Maura. "The article you published is grossly slanted and in no way can it be considered good journalism, but I suppose that's hardly news any more is it, considering the state of muckraking that goes on within your company?" Have no idea what that one's about . . .
Carole was steamed up. Really steamed up. "You are a liar, whoever you are . . ." The media affection for Obama was "disgusting". "Obama . . . a charlatan and a real liar. A man of zero accomplishments, feeding at the public trough all of his adult life . . . who hates the USA, and will say anything to get elected, so he can forward his socialist and Muslim ideology . . .Thank God I had the good fortune to get out of [Ireland] while I was a young woman, and have never looked back. God Bless America!"
Magpie's colleague Newton Emerson got a few blasts of neocon grapeshot over a riff about La Palin, and Garrison Keillor drew this blast from Christina (A True American, according to her e-mail signature): "You are an idiot!!!!!!!! We true Americans do NOT want Obama in control of the United States of America! He is for a socialistic, communistic government which we do not support! You as a liberal, socialist, communist media slave may support and participate in this biasism to this non-American, non-experienced Muslim, but we do not."
Get off the fence Christina.
The Muslim tag (Obama's middle name is - horror! - Hussein) hugely energised the neocon bloggosphere, bleeding at times into the mainstream (assuming one counts Rupert Murdoch's Fox News as mainstream). One of the more repulsive of the shrill, nasty, in-your-face neocon commentators is a racy motormouth named Ann Coulter, a regular on Fox.
As readers of a website Media Matters can see from this link, (http://mediamatters.org/items/200802140009) Coulter's been merrily peddling a form of anti-Obama racism for some years by making references to terrorism, while persistently referring to him as "B Hussein Obama". Shocking, low-intensity racism, no?
Certainly not, says game gal Coulter, "It's shocking that . . . he's probably going to be our next president, President Hussein." That's from a February sortie on Fox News's Your World.
Magpie was watching Fox on October 31st when Coulter excelled herself on the Hannity Colmes programme. In an interview fronted by Alan Colmes, she declared: "Every single one of Obama's friends is a dangerous lunatic." And then, during a discussion about politics after an Obama victory, she got a tad agitated and spluttered: "I feel like we're talking to the Germans after Hitler came to power."
If the unmentionable should happen to Barack Obama, will we remember those responsible for stoking the fires of hatred?
Oh alright, after all that poisonous nonsense, here's a giggle. Have you heard the Obama Llama Song? No? Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqXX6kuk_XQ