Good grief, here comes Janeane Garofalo – a hurricane of political viciousness who deserves mention mainly because of what she exemplifies, a holier-than-thou, smarter-than-thou left-wing bigotry that is neither holy nor smart.
The entertainer – she acts and does comedy routines– exhibited her nastiness on a recent Keith Olbermann show on MSNBC. The subject was tea-party protests, a subject that invariably leads Olbermann to obscene suggestiveness on top of intellectual bafflement. This time out was no different.
While playing nonstop word games meant to link tea bags with certain sexual acts, Mr. Low-Brow showed a video of one such protest in which someone stood up and took after the spendthrift Bush administration while saying President Obama’s policies would have adverse consequences only for the rich. The crowd booed.
To Olbermann, here was proof positive that what really motivated the protesters was hate of Obama, which is blatantly wrongheaded. In addition to reading about these protests—did Olbermann? — I went to take a look at one, and I promise you there was no love of Republicans, whose spending policies were derided and booed.
The central theme was not that Obama is vile, but that his spending plans could be crushing for future generations, a theme echoed, by the way, by any number of highly regarded economists.
It is true, too, that Obama has tax proposals that could affect virtually every American – does Olbermann know that? Does this ballyhooed TV commentator have knowledge of news exceeding that of anyone who does as much as scan front-page headlines every day?
Maybe. His knowledge may very well exceed that of Garofalo, who referred to the protesters – apparently all the protesters – as racists.
There is, of course, absolutely nothing to base this infamy on except the facts that Obama happens to be black and that the protesters were upset at some of his ideas and actions. Is it now the case that if you do not like an Obama policy you are guilty of “racism straight up,” that you are a “redneck,” that you are “confused and angry and highly volatile,” that you are very stupid? To Garofalo, it means all of that and more, and that makes her bigoted and stupid.
Let’s think about bigotry for a second. The word refers to is a closed-minded, intolerant castigation of people who are different from you in what they believe or what they are – their social or economic class, maybe, or their racial or ethnic group. It means you prejudge people on this basis, deciding that those who think that way or come from some disliked group are all the same in some unworthy way.
Are there some right-wing bigots? Of course. But what gets less attention are the left-wing bigots like Garofalo who could not conceivably know whether people at these protests were racists and certainly not that most or all of them were. She could not know that they are stupid or confused or that most or any of them merited any of her slurs.
You run into left-wing bigotry all the time. If you fear the negative consequences of illegal immigration, you are a nativist and anti-Hispanic. If you have doubts about homosexual marriage, you are a homophobe.
If you believe in limited government for reasons of maintaining crucial liberties and some semblance of prosperity, you are a compassionless, greedy, selfish pig. If you are an evangelical Christian, you are an anti-science ignoramus.
If you are a conservative who supported President Bush on certain of his policies, you are war-mongering, rights-denying ideological cousin of the Nazis.
Thanks, Hurricane Janeane. Your nationally telecast windiness provided a valuable object lesson.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
