In both cases, dumb, not “vile”, IMO. The senatorial-candidate rapefest OTOH was to the vile side of the spectrum.
Not a candidate but people in the public at a GOP Primary debate, when Wolf Blitzer asked “should we just let the uninsured die?” and the unseen members of the audience shouted a hearty “yeah!”. No candidate on the dais rebuked them, *that *was craven.
Not a politician, but the whole MSNBC panel mocking Romney’s family for adopting a black child was pretty vile.
Oh my God, is the right wing media now fair game, because we’re gonna need a bigger message board. :rolleyes:
The part where he says he doesn’t care about them is not the vile part. The vile part is calling them uninterested in personal responsibility and having no care for their lives.
Acting like poverty is a moral failing is pretty vile.
Saxby Chambliss, questioning the patriotism of war veteran Max Cleland (who lost what, two legs and part of an arm in Vietnam?) in his campaign for Cleland’s Senate seat, ranks pretty high on my Vile-O-Meter.
How long ago did Santorum say all those vile things that got him onto Dan Savage’s radar?
Note that it’s not merely an implication, but a necessary precondition of this belief that he’s asserting that there are a vast number of women lying about being raped. Ignorance may be part of this attitude, but it is primarily misogynistic.
I was expecting more of a tennis match than this punching bag session…
Hehe.
I looked for more examples of vile (or at least offensive) statements made by liberal and/or Democratic politicians, because even if they’re few and far between in comparison, 1- doesn’t mean they don’t exist and 2- it can be interesting to compare the levels of vileness/severity.
Just making the deadline from 2004 - “I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia [Sen. Robert C. Byrd,** a former Ku Klux Klan recruiter**] that he would have been a great senator at any moment. . . . He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this nation.” – Former Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd (D.,Conn.)
In a 2010 issue of Esquire - Rod Blagojevich: “This guy, he was catapulted in on hope and change, what we hope the guy is. What the fuck? Everything he’s saying’s on the teleprompter. I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.”
But really, I haven’t found anything else all that outrageous. Most of the conservative sites/blogs who posted examples either had to go pretty far back (Roger Clinton and an entire section “In the Past” from before the Civil Rights Act??) or used quotes from people who were basically acknowledging racist power structures and attitudes with the, “YOU’RE the racist for seeing racism!” strategy. Seems to support the theory above.
Could you give some examples? I heard about Richard Dawkins a lot before I ever saw or heard him speak. Based on the description from religious people, I had envisioned this barely-contained enraged psychotic guy screaming and spitting all over anything religious I could see. And then I saw him, and read some of his work, and it turns out he’s this quiet little polite British guy who actually makes very well considered statements that are what I’d consider to be pretty calm, rational, and rather mild.
Yeah, pretty much. He’s mainly confrontational, which is sometimes sort of… not very nice. He says stuff like:
[QUOTE=Richard Dawkins in the The God Delusion]
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
[/QUOTE]
This makes Christians unhappy, which is understandable. Sometimes you see him saying things like that to Christians and he seems so harsh about it that he might not always be a very good advocate for atheism (which is apparently his goal).
But vile? I can’t think of anything vile he has said, not off the top of my head anyway.
I’m not sure if this couple of comments counts as “vile” but it treads the line. And the second one displays a disappointingly second-grade level of understanding of how this kind of discourse works.
He said something worse about Islam somewhere, I think, but my google skills fail me.
There’s this, which he wrote in response to an atheist woman saying guys who invite women to their hotel rooms while in an elevator generally thereby make the women uncomfortable:
He said some pretty bad stuff about how people who were victims of homosexual sex abuse in England at boys’ schools basically weren’t really harmed and it was just a bit of an annoyance. He later apologized for this in a way which I thought worked, but others disagreed.
nvm
Merely because you agree with it doesn’t make the vile go away.
Please explain the “vile” that you see, then.
I may have looked clueless, but when several other republican candidates doubled down on the idea and defended what they said then I have to go for vile.
“All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”
I can’t say it strikes me as vile at all. By pointing out the middle ages, he’s saying that Islamic cultures used to be on the cutting edge of scientific, cultural, and generally civilizational advancement. At some point, partially due to religious fervor and fundamentalism (and at least partly because the Mongols fucked their shit up in a way that takes a millennia to recover) they turned from their advanced status to being some of the most repressive, backwards places in the world. I understand your knee jerk reaction is probably just to associate anyone casting dispersions on Islamic dominated cultures as bigotry, but it’s not as if he’s working from an Anti-Islamic position, but rather an anti-religious one, showing what religion can do.
As far as Elevatorgate, there’s a long thread on the SDMB, but suffice to say I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that essentially he’s probably right to mock what is essentially an extreme case of first world problems. Whether you disagree with him or not, compared to some of the things in this thread, and some of the actual vile things that people say, I don’t think you could reasonably put this remotely in the same category. “Vile” is well beyond merely “inflammatory”
I’m not sure if this couple of comments counts as “vile” but it treads the line. And the second one displays a disappointingly second-grade level of understanding of how this kind of discourse works.
He said something worse about Islam somewhere, I think, but my google skills fail me.
There’s this, which he wrote in response to an atheist woman saying guys who invite women to their hotel rooms while in an elevator generally thereby make the women uncomfortable:
[/QUOTE]
I agree that there is more vile coming from the right than from the left.
Maybe not vile, but certainly not smart:
‘‘No, no. I have been practicing…I bowled a 129. It’s like – it was like Special Olympics, or something.’’
—Barack Obama, making an off-hand joke during an appearance on ‘‘The Tonight Show,’’ March 19, 2009 (Obama later called the head of the Special Olympics to apologize)
‘‘The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries.’’
—Barack Obama, Tampa, Fla., Jan. 28, 2010
>> Rick Warren: “…Now, let’s deal with abortion; 40 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. As a pastor, I have to deal with this all of the time, all of the pain and all of the conflicts. I know this is a very complex issue. Forty million abortions, at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?”
>> Barack Obama: “Well, you know, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.”
“I had learned not to care. I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though. …”
— Barack Obama
“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
— Barack Obama
I’m sort of amazed that with all of the legitimate things to comment on, somehow we’ve strayed so that about 80% of the thread content is either not about American politicians, or if it is, they’re just “lol derp derp other side is dumb!”, not anything vile. The post preceeding mine is particularly ridiculous.