POP QUIZ, HOTSHOTS! GUESS WHICH POLITICIAN WAS CALLED "HALF-HUMAN, HALF-APE?"

Think you know?  Well, you're wrong!  This is a comment left on the Dictionary.com blog post regarding Sarah Palin's invention of the word "refudiate,"  which was the subject of my last blog entry. (Language warning):

Now, there is nothing remarkable about this comment by a typical potty-mouthed anonymous leftist except for one thing: This remark has survived at Dictionary.com's "The Hot Word" blog for three-and-a-half days as I sit to type this blog entry. 

There's no way that it would still be online at Dictionary.com if the subject of the comment was "the half-human, half-ape Obama."  On the other hand, it would still be there if it had said "the half-human, half-ape Bush."

For any liberals that stumble across this post, why don't you enlighten me? Since it's clearly not tolerable to refer to black people (like myself) as being like "apes" while it IS at the same time OK to insult white people that way, which animal is politically correct to use as a simile when it comes to slams against stupid African-Americans?

Or ... are you like the overly sensitive folks in the Hallmark Cards, Inc. PR department, and are reluctant to even acknowledge that there ARE stupid African-Americans?

DICTIONARY.COM BLOG REPUDIATES SILLY "REFUDIATE" KERFUFFLE

The following is my reaction to the surprisingly sensible way the editors of Dictionary.com responded to the kerfuffle over Sarah Palin's accidental invention of the word "refudiate" in a Twitter message. Palin's intent was to appeal to Muslims behind the proposed mosque down the street across from Ground Zero to publicly reject terrorism.

Below are my comments made on the The Hot Word Blog posted Monday, July 19, 2010 at 5:34 pm. 

_____________________________________________________________

What you unsuspecting linguists at Dictionary.com are witnessing is another example of desperate Google-bombing leftist loons furiously searching for a stake to drive into the heart of Sarah Palin's increasing popularity, and -- even more importantly -- her relevancy.

They attempted something like this in January 2010, when Palin spoke on Fox News Channel after President Obama's first State of The Union address. She spoke to Sean Hannity regarding Obama's proposed "mandation of health care." Left-leaning quasi-journalists like bloggers Shannyn Moore of [her blog Just a Girl From Homer*], Media Matters contributor Oliver Willis, and Mediaite.com's Colby Hall sprung into action. A commenter on Moore's blog wrote: "'Mandation' is not found anywhere in the dictionary. I taught U.S. History and ... government [] for 33 years [and] I can say that if [Palin] had been a student in one of my government classes, she would have failed the course." Willis -- whose blog is falsely subtitled "Like Kryptonite to Stupid" -- wrote "America’s Idiot and Fox News front woman Sarah Palin has made up a new word." Of the word "mandation," Hall of Mediaite.com initially wrote, "No, that’s not a real word."

In fact, "mandation" IS a real word, though rarely used in common conversation, and is not in abridged dictionaries. When searched online, it shows up in the titles of several policy papers in which professors and professional researchers lay out the benefits and consequences of newly-proposed government regulations. So, to all those people who figured Palin's use of "mandation" confirmed their opinion she is somewhat illiterate, it proved exactly the opposite! It seems she was doing her homework, and (perhaps) found the fancy word in the process. Meanwhile, her sworn enemies were so ignorant, they thought if she said something THEY didn't understand, that SHE must have been wrong. Surprise!

In both the cases of "mandation" and "refudiate," the Palin-haters are careful not to address the substance of what Palin has said or written. They are hoping to shift the focus to a verbal error to distract you from examining what might be a legitimate and logical argument. Why let them manipulate you? You can read Palin's note regarding the proposed Ground Zero mosque for yourself, and make your own decision about whether she makes sense without her detractors' prejudicial pre-publicity.

To Colby Hall's credit: following a commenter's proof the word "mandation" did exist, Hall struck-through the word "real" in the sentence "No, that's not a real word," replaced it with "common," and wrote a postscript correcting his snap judgment.

_____________________________________________________________

*In my original post, I mistakenly wrote that Shannyn Moore's blog was AKMuckraker, and acknowledged that I mistakenly thought that Palin had issued a Facebook note in addition to the tweet.  At the time, she had not, but she has since.

I followed up on The Hot Word with this comment:

_____________________________________________________

For accuracy’s sake — In my previous comment, I wrote three things which need clarification:


1. Palin-hating blogger Shannyn Moore does NOT publish AKMuckraker, that is her Palin-hating colleague Jeanne Devon. Moore’s blog is named Just a Girl From Homer.


2. I was under the impression that Palin had a Facebook note that expanded her stance against the proposed Ground Zero mosque she expressed in her “refudiate” tweet. She does not at this time.


3. I wrote that Media Matters contributor Oliver Willis’ blog was “falsely subtitled ‘Like Kryptonite to Stupid’”. That one’s accurate, now more than ever.

_____________________________________________________

The thoroughly dishonest Oliver Willis viciously smeared Glenn Beck in April 2009 (among many other times). I refuted the particularly ridiculous argument blaming Beck for a neo-Nazi's murdering three Pittsburgh police officers in this thread.

 Now, to get into the spirit of Shakespearean word invention, I am announcing the coining of a new term for the above-mentioned "Google-bombing leftist loons."  Since they like to bomb, and they are from the left side of the political spectrum, I shall forthwith refer to them as "The Leftwaffe."

Yeah, I know, Godwin's Law.  But the jackboot fits, and they ought to wear it.

DON'T CRY FOR $HIRLEY $HERROD. SHE DOESN'T NEED THAT GOVERNMENT JOB. THE GOVERNMENT'S ALREADY GIVEN HER 13 MILLION DOLLARS.

This story is getting more and more ridiculous.

For the moment, I will not address the video of Shirley Sherrod speaking of not helping a white farmer as much as she could have, and whether or not she was being racist and smug in sending him to someone "of his own kind," or simply describing her attitude prior to an epiphany. I will not address whether or not Andrew Breitbart was duped into believing she is a bigot or has a jiu-jitsu media strategy that will take days to unfold.

For now, I'm just going to let everybody know that you don't have to worry about Shirley. Thanks to some digging by Washington Examiner reporter Tom Blumer, it has been discovered that Shirley Sherrod was appointed by Agriculture Secretary Vilsack for her USDA post on July 25, 2009, just days after she and her husband received from Vilsack as a cash settlement payment in a 1999 class action discrimination suit (...wait for it...) $13,000,000.00.

As explained at RuralDevelopment.org, circa July 2009:

The cash award acknowledges racial discrimination on the part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the years 1981-85. (President Reagan abolished the USDA Office of Civil Rights when he became President in 1981.) New Communities [the Sherrods' farming trust] is due to receive approximately $13 million ($8,247,560 for loss of land and $4,241,602 for loss of income; plus $150,000 each to Shirley and Charles [Sherrod] for pain and suffering). There may also be an unspecified amount in forgiveness of debt. This is the largest award so far in the minority farmers law suit (Pigford vs Vilsack).

From my quick, shallow research done in the wee hours of the morning, it appears to me that the Sherrods are one of the biggest beneficiaries of continual extraction of Congressional cash through the Ag Dept on behalf of black farmers who were (according to the 1999 Pigford v. Glickman consent decree) victims of discrimination during the Reagan Administration.

That settlement (known in D.C. shorthand as "Pigford Farms") is a sore subject to fiscally-minded legislators. Here's C-SPAN video of Steve King of Iowa, who sums up the Pigford Farms case on the House floor (May 13, 2008) by saying Pigford class action claimants had skyrocketed from around 3,000 estimated black farmers at the time the suit was filed to 96,000 after the announcement of the settlement, and that the money designated for the settlement will exponentially be increased, shuttling taxpayer funds to people who never actually suffered discrimination. In another C-SPAN video, Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley refers to the phenomenon of Pigford Farms settlements paying off dead people.

Indeed, King's fears came to pass, as you can see here as Secretary Vilsack (former Iowa Governor) appeared alongside Jesse Jackson at a Rainbow/PUSH event ("Urban Stimulus") in which he explained that the original plans for the Pigford settlement, the discriminated farmers would receive on the average $50,000 apiece. But, he added, there were complaints from tens of thousands of alleged discriminated black farmers who somehow didn't understand the instructions about how to get paid. To accommodate them, Vilsack said, the Obamastration authorized an eventual 1.25 BILLION dollars, and left the door open for even "a bigger pot of money."

Oh, the date of that Vilsack explanation? June 28, 2009. Less than a month later, he would welcome Shirley Sherrod aboard for a government job that she apparently thought she would have as long as she wanted it. But according to the Rural Development press release, Sherrod was starting up New Communities, Inc. again, picking up where she left off when it shut down in 1985. Which is it? Either? Or both?

THE T-PARTY VS. THE C-WORD: A Coffee Party Fan Drops The C-Bomb on Michelle Malkin

Hey, folks, remember the "Coffee Party" movement begun by liberals/progressives/whatever as an effort to counter the Tea Party movement as the ObamaCare vote was coming to a head? In case you've forgotten as much as the participants apparently have, their credo was the following:

Our Vision: Reason and civility in public affairs; A gov't of public servants accountable to the People; A People committed to the Common Good & Civic Virtue.

One of the people with high hopes for the Coffee Party Movement was Jim Weatherwax of New York City. Here's what Jim wrote about it on its Facebook page March 15, 2010:

Heck, I like coffee better than tea anyway. Hope that coffee gives the Dems more balls to do the things they promise!!!!!

Jim seems to be like many of your neighbors (or, if you're living in a liberal conclave, most): He likes Mad Men, he loves cats, he hates puppy mills and the use of dogs as bait for sharks (which I didn't even know was going on), and supports ObamaCare. He doesn't like Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck, believes Debbie Schlussel only long enough to buy her debunked allegations about Sean Hannity, and thinks that "conservative talking heads" really don't like Obama "because he's African American."

Obviously, Jim also doesn't think much of the Tea Party movement. Here's what Jim wrote on March 22:

Can u really call it a tea party when u hurl racial epithets and homophobic comments?

(Set aside for the moment that there exists not a shred of evidence -- despite a $100,000.00 bounty -- that any racial epithets were spoken in that supposed incident at the Capitol building in which Democratic Congressmembers attempted to provoke acts of incivility.)

When Jim's sister Ellen Nelson joined the Facebook group "1,000,000+ people who disapprove of building a mosque at Ground Zero," Jim posted a note detailing the loss of Muslims in the attacks, and ended with this comment:

It is up to all of us to always promote tolerance and not hate and bigotry.

So, you would think that intolerant, hateful name-calling when debating political issues seems like something that Jim is totally against.

Right?

Well, it turns out, not so much.

Jim Weatherwax was one of more than a few liberal partisans who were motivated to recently write conservative columnist Michelle Malkin -- a daughter of Filipino immigrants to the U.S. -- with hateful notes loaded with profanity, sexually-charged Asian and Filipino racial stereotypes, and wishes of death and harm. Here's what Malkin posted earlier today from her hate mail bag:

from James Weatherwax jameslwax@yahoo.com
to writemalkin@gmail.com
date Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 6:09 AM
subject Your comments
mailed-by yahoo.com
signed-by yahoo.com
hide details Jun 24

You’re just an angry cunt. Your vitriol towards this President and the administration goes a lot deeper than on just a political level. You might want to look into some good therapy.

I just shake my head and go enjoy my day.

Now, it would seem Jim is lying here. If he was being truthful, he would have written, "I just shake my head, write an angry email with a vulgar slur in it, and then go enjoy my day."

It seems to me this is the reason why the Coffee Party never got percolating: The HuffPo/DKos/Comedy Central people who were supposed to make it a force to be reckoned with couldn't tolerate the lofty "reason and civil[ity]" aims. Their type is more used to things like calling Malkin a "Filipino prostitute," a "slut right-wing whore" or hope she and her family die in a traffic accident. And now that so many outspoken conservatives are female, how they love to drop that C-bomb.

Maybe it's the coffee that has gotten you all jittery, tense, and nervous, and some tea would do you good.

Now, some might suggest we all write Jim Weatherwax and give him a piece of our minds.  I say, let's NOT.  I have a better idea: Send a note of support to Jim's sister, Ellen Nelson, who mildly countered her brother's support of ObamaCare (which had passed moments before) in these exchanges (In reverse order chronologically; the 219 that Jim references is the number of House votes the Senate bill finally received after the Stupak betrayal). 

Ellen was able to do something her brother was not: Disagree with someone else without being disagreeable. Let's continue to encourage that.

(Cross-posted at L.N. Smithee's Facebook Page.)