Carnage at Virginia Tech is not so different from abortion
This is the slug above Cal Thomas’ latest word vomit in today’s Tennessean. I’ve known for years now that ol’ Cal doesn’t play with a full deck. This, however, takes the proverbial cake and crams it up the proverbial asshole of straight-talking, decent humanity.
I appreciate Cal’s loathing of abortion and his right to voice his opposition to it. Some of us, though, have and lost friends at Tech. Using them as a rhetorical device just to make a point about abortion is sleazy. Disgusting. It’s horrifying and disgraceful. This little sleight of hand makes him no better than the scuzzy politicians and rhetoricians than which he so often crows he is better and more pure.
I liked this little turd nugget:
Interesting. For one so concerned with innocent life I’m disturbed at his silence on massacres in regions like Darfur. He is silent about the deaths of noncombatants in Iraq and Afghanistan (except when Muslims are killing each other; he enjoys dehumanizing them to imply American/Christian superiority). Thomas has made it glaringly obvious these many years that the lives of little Christian babies are more important to him than any others.
Fuck you, Cal. You don’t have to like abortion or gun control and I don’t have to agree with you. It’s time, though, that you decided to either be for all innocent life or none at all. You’re a fucking hypocrite just like the bigwigs you like to pretend you’re eviscerating in your column. Stop fooling yourself that “Big Media” is trying to promote gun control by reporting on shooting deaths.
But you won’t stop. This turbid ooze you submit to press will continue until your dying day, which, as far as I’m concerned, can’t come soon enough. Of course, no one should stop you, you’ve got every right. I just wish you’d leave our friends out of it, you vile, decrepit dog. You self-righteous, obnoxious moron. Fuck you and everything you are. I hope to see you hell.
This is a comprehensive list of just about everything/everyone receiving blame for the Va Tech shootings. The number of special interest bozos who’ve tried to cash in on the event is revolting.
My personal favorite is the anti-vaccination lobby.
And oh yeah, Cal Thomas is a jerk.
When I was a teen (mid-90s) I read his column fairly regularly. As a liberal-ish yet cynically-minded youth, I found some of his stuff refreshing in a straight-shooting kind of way.
Somewhere along the line either I opened my eyes or he went nutso.
Few columnists get me as truly angry and upset as he does. His cause/effect logic is non-existant, and the insinuations he makes on a regular basis are some of the most mean-spirited insults I see in print. He panders to . . . I don’t even know, honestly, maybe to people who hate liberals; to people who enjoy looking down at other people and use their own self-righteousness to fuel their desire to spit on others.
I haven’t read the column you’re quoting, but the excerpt surprises me not at all.
I started reading him the same way you did. Liberal-ish but looking for the opposite point of view. I think he went nutso long before I started reading him. I’m through with him now, though.
The only other well-known pundit I can think of who is so inflammatory and so impervious to sound logic would have to be Ann Coulter. Can’t you just picture her saying the line quoted by the OP?
He was already nutso in the mid-1990s. The Bristol Herald-Courier carried him, when I lived down thataway. I used to eviscerate his column before breakfast.
I used to read him in the late 80s, when his byline mentioned that he was a former VP for the Moral Majority. I do remember him memorializing his family’s cat, and he managed to keep abortion out of that column, but that’s the limit for him.
The only “comparison” he made is that they are different types of “violence”, which is certainly a debatable proposition, but I don’t see that as a tasteless reference. It’s not like he said that the VT massacre, what Imus said, and the outsourcing of jobs were equally tragic.
It would be similar to me saying “Skies are blue” and “Brides wear blue” and calling that a comparison of “Brides” and “Skies”. While technically true in the narrowest definition of comparison, that’s all that it is.
The OP didn’t link to the actual column, so it’s hard to say for sure… but from the quote in the OP it looks like it’s more than that. Looks like he’s saying that legalized abortion leads to a culture of violence-- as if violence weren’t just as much a problem before abortion became legal.
But what about using Virginia Tech as a rhetorical device to express indignation about a pundit you don’t like. Not defending Cal, but shit — fair is fair. Did he even mention Virigina Tech directly, or was the “shoot up schools” reference as generic as the OP has quoted it? Wouldn’t we have to split the difference between everything from the University of Texas to Columbine to Virginia Tech, all of which have been rehashed in the news of late?
His bow ties make my boy parts tingle, too, and I’m not even gay. That’s right: Cal Thomas has so much suppressed gayness that he’s actually giving ME suppressed gayness.
What I dislike about CT that stands separate from other conservative columnists is that he still asserts a hardline Christian orientation despite defending the lies and mendacity of the current administration, and makes sweeping generalizations based on the actions of some second-tier, low-profile Dems while more visible, powerful Republicans do the same thing (or very often worse) and rarely earn more than a footnote. Plus, he’s a full endorser of torture, so clearly the whole “Do unto others…” business has its limits.
He’s a paragon of double-standard hypocrisy fed by raging, blinding partisanship.
My response was to ArizonaTeach’s comment about other tasteless references, including one from Barack Obama. Apparently, it went something like this (taken from a right wing blog, as no one else thinks this is an issue, so it’s definitely not paraphrased in his favor, if it is not an actual quote):