The Joy of Hate (7 page)

You have to admit, it’s staggering seeing a vegetable calling someone else a vegetable. If Larry Flynt had come across Larry Flynt after the shooting, he would have smothered him with a pillow. So why does a legendary pervert who once had sex with a chicken (it’s in his memoir) see fit to say such things?
Because he can
. A champion of FFP and a victim of LBSS (or Liberal Blind Spot Syndrome), he has lost all context of what’s considered appropriate language about women or children. I suppose if I said I’d love to wheel him off a cliff because his life is not worth living, I’d have to retract that statement and apologize quickly. So I won’t.

We’ve gotten to a place where a well-respected columnist can fabricate the most elaborate fantasies about Sarah Palin, because, well, he can. While we ridicule (and by “we” I mean myself and my slew of honeygliders that live in a cage under my bed) the birther conspiracies about President Obama or 9/11 truthers, the same cannot be said for the insanity spewing from Daily Beast columnist Andrew Sullivan’s addled brain. He was once a promising writer but he got comfortable. After surrounding himself with Palin-haters, he threw his hairy body full force into the craziest of theories—the kind that would get you institutionalized if you didn’t have a famous byline. To recap, here is Sullivan’s take on her baby Trig:

Um, so wait. It’s not just
you
mocking the child, it’s actually the parents! Well, that gets you off the hook, uh, I guess. Worse than this quivering analysis (almost joyous in its brutality) is that it’s excusable by the usually sensitive left. You can tolerate everything I suppose, including not tolerating a mom who decides to give birth and raise a child with challenges. Don’t you think
this is slightly weird coming from a gay man? I mean, given the fact that homosexuals were some of the first to be exterminated in any attempt at a “pure race,” you’d think he’d support Palin for sticking to her own beliefs about all life being sacred. Guess not, especially if all your tolerant friends just find the whole damn thing perfectly hysterical. And by “friends,” I mean the Greek chorus of liberal blog-readers who echo your every synaptic spasm when they should be doing their freshman English homework. I’ve only met Sullivan once, but I’m kinda certain he’s off his rocker, although I’m sure he’d tell you he’s damned if he’s not tolerant. And Obama describes his analysis as brilliant.

Which brings me to Keith Olbermann, the most tolerant man in the universe, provided you agree with his own intolerant idiocy. There may be no man on the planet more filled with joyous adolescent hate for women. The things he’s said about Michelle Malkin (a lipsticked pig, as he so fondly called her) alone qualify him for the Douchebag Hall of Fame.

But for some odd reason he focused on a not-so-famous writer who’s appeared on my show countless times, S. E. Cupp. Here’s what he had to say about Ms. Cupp, a truly awful, reprehensible, doesn’t-deserve-to-live person (I kid the Cupp—she wears really cute glasses).

“On so many levels”? What a delightful way of denigrating women! Essentially, it boils down to this: I hate the fact that you’re a conservative female so much that you should have been aborted! So where does this vitriol come from, in Olby’s case?

It’s pretty simple: Cupp is a very smart and very capable person who would never sleep with something as grotesque as Olbermann. If you asked Cupp, my guess is she’d rather sleep with a mummified sea urchin. And who can blame her? This could explain why Olby is almost always alone, looking lost, sad, and angry. But did he get any grief for what he said? Not at all, because he picked on a conservative woman. And they are fair game. See, if you’re pro-life, then clearly you’re already against women, so even pigs like Keith can say vicious things about you. You don’t tolerate abortion as birth control, therefore you shall not be tolerated—or viewed as a human being.

At a certain point you’d think this kind of crap would get old. But in the world of tolerance, intolerance flourishes, for acceptance of different points of view is wholly unacceptable. God bless them for their monumental hypocrisy. I only hope Keith finally does have offspring and it eats him.

Sounds over-the-top? I don’t know. One thing I’ve learned about tolerance is that you can’t tolerate a fetus. They’re just so damn annoying. They just lie there and make your life difficult. A fetus takes up room in your body, puts off your career, and all in all is a drain on your finances. They keep you home from protests. They keep you from running off to Catalina with your cute philosophy professor (he’s so tortured). And worst of all, unless you’re a Hollywood celebrity who can pay for round-the-clock nannies, they make you grow the fuck up. Frankly, how fetuses convinced us to let them into our exclusive club called society is beyond me. It is the best club in the world, and needs someone stronger working the door. I have an idea: why not Democrat Gwen Moore?

Here’s what she had to say about unborn kids.

So true. These selfish little piles of protoplasm—if they are allowed to grow, they need to be watered, and that water is expensive. Filling up bellies is both time-consuming and a strain on your wallet, especially if you like to go clubbing. Buy a new smartphone. What Gwen is talking about reminds me of the philosophy of Casey Anthony: you can’t let a baby get in the way of a girls’ night out.

If anything, the real victims of repressive tolerance are the unborn. In the name of choice—or rather, tolerating the choice—we cannot tolerate that inconvenience. When feminists see what Palin did, to them, it reminds them that there is a universal tolerance that dwarfs their own narrow definition. It makes them feel small and selfish.

And extermination is always the go-to place for the tolerant when they find someone they cannot tolerate. Remember Chris Titus? Of course you don’t. He was a comedian who had a short-lived TV show, based on his own troubled life. It was god-awful, but we tolerated it anyway, because it came from a place of pain. Yeah, we had to tolerate his bad jokes and self-absorbed meanderings because he “hurt” inside. But knowing pain doesn’t mean he cannot inflict it on others. When faced with the idea of a Palin presidency, Titus said:

What country is he talking about, exactly? The United States of Paranoid Has-Beens? Well, it’s a country shaped, in his mind, by LBSS. With Liberal Blind Spot Syndrome, it’s perfectly okay to say you’re going to kill Palin, because in the tolerant worldview, she’s exempt. Consider the crimes she’s committed: she’s pro-life, she’s from Alaska, and she doesn’t adhere to the typical mindset you find among the pathetic comic groupies that Titus plies his wares on when he’s sulking through various shitholes he’s been forced to perform in. She is not one of them, so he can imagine her killed. He did this schtick on
The Adam Carolla Show
. I love Carolla, and I get his gig: he lets comedians talk and doesn’t correct their idiocy. Or maybe that level of idiocy was just too much to correct in one show.

Titus knew the score, and knew it could help his “career.” Somewhat. Later he had to explain himself, which he did poorly—offering a quasi-apology, then justifying his words pathetically. I’d repeat them here, but really, there’s almost nothing worse than making an apology when you don’t believe in it and you don’t have to. He could have just said, “Yeah, I hate Palin. So what?” But he didn’t. Catch him soon, at a strip mall near you. He’ll be performing there nightly. If you call washing dishes at Sbarro and hitting on teenage goths at Hot Topic “performing.”

THE NETWORK WHERE I
work is evil, or so I am told by people who don’t watch it. Which is why my employer is the only media enterprise exempt from the warm hug of tolerance. A half dozen media groups are devoted to tripping it up. Endless comedians, bloggers, and talking heads devote most of their mental energies to demonizing the network. And why? Because out of a media culture that is purely liberal—from newspapers, to networks, to music and entertainment—one entity rejects such easy assumptions about the world. And for the modern, tolerant liberal, that simply cannot be tolerated. Everyone must be in lockstep—before we can disagree, apparently.

Now, this chapter is not meant to be a whine on media but a gentle salute to those people who endure the slings and arrows of the oh-so-tolerant, who somehow feel threatened by a group of people who question their long-held, lazy opinions. And it’s also a less than gentle rebuke to those who can’t handle an alternative news source being around at all.

Shouldn’t the tolerant, so confident in their beliefs, not worry about disagreement? Shouldn’t they actually embrace it? They don’t. They won’t. And they make my job a lot of fun because of it. And certainly a lot easier.

But the tolerance troops do not just express themselves through
hectoring, weepy lectures. They can also sneak up on you under the guise of reasonable jocularity. “Come on, man” is one way of putting this mode of persuasion. Or more precisely, “Come on, man, you really don’t believe that.” You often hear this from an easygoing liberal when you say, “Without the media, Obama would have been creamed in the election.” Or when you claim, “The constant global warming threat is exaggerated.” The “Come on, man, you don’t believe that” is their way of saying, “You’re too sane to actually believe that. Don’t you want to be one of us? Cool people don’t say what you say. After all, you live on one of the coasts. You’re in media. You’re not Amish. You can’t really believe that!”

Anything political that I ever say on TV is greeted by my liberal friends with this kind of friendly but exasperated response. They’re like a fancy waiter who can’t believe you requested ketchup.

This kind of lazy answer is a great way for the tolerant to terminate debate—because in your heart you want to be liked by your friends and peers, and they’re promising you that gift if you just stop raising questions about their cemented liberal dogma. Liberalism is the one-way ticket to backslapping approval among the cool kids, which makes it about as rebellious as a divorced dad getting an earring from the local mall’s Piercing Pagoda.

The best purveyor of this cheery semi-intolerance is the talented and funny Jon Stewart. His show is a thirty-minute stretch on the one phrase “You can’t be serious.” His targets are almost always on the right (and granted, a lot of those targets make it
really
easy for him), rarely on the left. And when he does hit someone on the left, you almost have to feel grateful for it. He’s been doing it more often, God bless him.

To understand this kind of soft condemnation of the right,
let’s turn to Stewart’s Rally to Protect Liberalism. It wasn’t actually called that, but it should have been, simply for the sake of honesty. Just a few days before the 2010 midterm elections, Stewart and Stephen Colbert held the Rally to Restore Sanity—an event masquerading as an inclusive, fun rejection of all things crazy. I’m sure that having it right before the midterms (in which the Dems were about to be slaughtered) was just some bizarre coincidence!

Anyway, they called it a Million Moderate March—
moderate
being the apt word for an appropriate, hipster response to anyone who might be pissed off about health care reform, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, or anything else that all the cool kids were okay with. It’s also a slap in the head to anyone who isn’t cool—and it played off the massively popular (and, according to the media, sinister) Glenn Beck rallies, which, despite the revival-like flair, were actually disarmingly calm and picnicky but still posed a threat to earnest libs, who own the right to protest. Still, the fact that first-timers were organizing made these goofy white Christians in their khakis ripe for ridicule by an acerbic, charming, media-savvy Manhattan millionaire. The longer I live, the more I’m convinced the world is just one big high school, with the cool kids always targeting the uncool.

So instead of being an innocent celebration of “Lighten up, dude—we’re all friends here just having fun,” it appeared, at least to me, to be a stunt meant to undermine the resurgent right. It’s exactly the thing that that bald, nerdy guy in glasses from the
New York Times
subscription commercial might attend and feel totally good about himself for days afterward, while lounging on a blanket in Central Park with a round of runny cheese and a bottle of light Sancerre. It’s something that attracted celebrities who want
to appear politically astute without rubbing too many people the wrong way. It was for ideological wusses, who liked dipping their toes in the pool without getting wet.