Metaphors for Dummies

Metaphors For Dummies

by digby

This is yet another fine contributor CNN has hired as part of their "best political team on television:



Loesch has been having a lot of fun in recent weeks with the idea that violent right wing political rhetoric has anything whatsoever to do with the spate of "isolated incidents" of real violence around the country. And for good reason. As you can see by that video she's quite the bomb thrower and would be left without a career if society decided that they didn't care much for her special brand of politics.

Her origins are in the St Louis Tea Party which is one of the more colorful of the genre. Bloggers at the St Louis Activist Hub has been following her for some time:

Loesch has started a cute movement on Twitter called No Metaphors, ostensively mocking the idea that nonstop right-wing extremist rhetoric might play a role in anti-government violence...Given Loesch's new fascination with metaphors that I'm sure she'll be pitching as she does her whine-to-the-media-about-how-the-tea-party-are-the-real-victims-here tour, I thought it might be worthwhile to go back to one of Loesch's most interesting metaphors.

In the week before the health care reform bill finally passed, Loesch's St. Louis tea party co-founder Bill Hennessy was openly writing about revolution:

Today, the House of Representatives voted 222-203 to dispense with yea and nay voting on the most important laws. That action effectively ends the contract between the United States and the People. “Screw you, America. We’re Congress. We’ll do whatever the hell we want. And you’ll gladly pay for it, you swine!”

But if Congress cut the ties to the contract WE wrote, aren’t we, the people, free from any obligations to the federal government? It would seem that we are citizens of our states and we owe no allegiance, legal or moral, to the government in Washington...Now, what do we do about it?

He then cites the Declaration of Independence, and specifically bolds the following:

it is their right,
it is their duty,
to throw off such Government,

Two more notable quotes from his post:

If Congress continues on its present course – to inflict socialized medicine on America by decree – the reaction from the people will be something that we have never seen before.

But if this bill passes, all bets are off. Every aspect of the government in Washington is fair game...


So then, on the day Congress was voting on the bill, the tea party holds a rally outside of Russ Carnahan's office. As a "metaphor," they had a picture of Russ Carnahan, which they beat with various objects:



And Dana? She was at the rally:



And her clever metaphor was to say, "I love the way a fire smells when it's burning tyranny" while her tea party friends set the photo of Carnahan on fire:


There's lots more at the link.

Loesch is the new breed, a Tea Party sex symbol in the mode of Sarah Palin but without the authentic life story. She's cashing in and why not? It seems there's an endless market for her hot brand of nastiness.

Poor Ann Coulter. She flew up and cracked the glass ceiling for shrieking right wing harpies everywhere and now she's been tossed aside for a new generation of hateful wingnut welfare queens without any acknowledgment of her many years of service to the cause.


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