Bronze-level articleFun:Really embarrassing liberals

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Liberalism is based on the precept that a government should tend to the peoples' needs. Sadly, some liberals do a very good job of making other, saner liberals embarrassed to share their side of the political spectrum. Others make us all, liberal, conservative, and patriopsychotic anarchomaterialist alike, embarrassed to be members of the same species. Here's a few:

Contents

[edit] Sexual antics

  • Most male Kennedys of a certain generation.
  • Barney Frank and his ex-boyfriend's day job as a pimp.
  • Bill Clinton's unseemly affair with a subordinate.
  • Elliot Spitzer, who while governor of New York allegedly consorted with prostitutes (other than politicians).
  • John Edwards' denial during the 2008 campaign, and subsequent admission, of an affair with a woman who "worked" for the campaign. [1] Made much worse because the affair went on while his wife had terminal cancer.
  • Gary Hart, who blew his electoral chances in 1988 aboard the yacht Monkey Business. Or, rather, his mistress Donna Rice "blew" his election chances (bad pun intended).
  • Anthony Weiner, Democratic congressman from New York, who used Twitter to send a woman a photo of his...honestly, with that surname, the punchline pretty much writes itself. We wish this scandal had never ended, as we solidified our attention as it expanded.

[edit] Criminal antics

  • Ted Kennedy[2] waiting most of a day before reporting to the police that he drowned his date.[3]
  • Bill and Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster and 50 other people, and then tried to palm it off as a suicide. Ken Starr, despite his 5-year mission to prosecute Bill Clinton for any crime, didn't think it was worth pursuing.[4] Hint: joke.
  • James Traficant, former Democratic Congressman from Ohio. Expelled from Congress and convicted of taking bribes and corruption. Compared himself to Maximumus Decimus Meridius.[5] Also known for his bad hair and for ending floor speeches with "beam me up."
  • William Jefferson, former Democratic congressman from Louisiana, who hid bribery money in his freezer.
  • The former Democratic governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich (we don't know how liberal he is, but he's a Democrat), was arrested on December 9th, 2008 on charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, and solicitation of bribery. He was attempting to sell his appointment of the Senatorial seat vacated by President Barack Obama to the highest bidder, thus managing to further embarrass a possibly (hopefully, changefully) more honest politician in the process.
  • Former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards. As the bumper sticker went when the choice for governor was between Edwin Edwards and David Duke, "vote for the crook - it's important!" Another favorite is "vote for the lizard, not the wizard."
  • W.A. "Tony" Boyle, who had his rival for the United Mine Workers of America presidency murdered in 1969 after defeating him 2-1 in a rigged election.

[edit] Political antics beyond the call of duty

  • Pandering to vaccine hysteria promoters by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
  • Senator Ted Kennedy's opposition to the Cape Wind power generation project because, well, it would spoil his view.
  • Al Sharpton, and the whole Tawana Brawley thing.
  • Huey Long, who brought free textbooks and paved roads to Louisiana, but at the cost of his becoming a virtual dictator of the state, with one of the most corrupt administrations imaginable.
  • Richard J. Daley, mayor of Chicago for 21 years. We all know what happened in 1968.[6]
  • Cynthia McKinney for general nuttiness on several counts.
  • Jerome Armstrong and MyDD, which for its first few years was an astrology blog trying to pick election winners and hot stock investments by consulting the stars.
  • Arianna Huffington and The Huffington Post, for promoting vaccine hysteria, pandering to New Agers, and other batshit views.
  • Dennis Kucinich for his UFO sightings and hanging around with Shirley MacLaine, and for suddenly reversing his position on abortion one week before announcing a run for President.
  • Governor Richard Lamm (D-Colorado) for declaring that the elderly and terminally ill have a "duty to die".
  • Governor Ray Blanton (D-Tennessee) ran a brisk business selling pardons, setting off a moral panic that the lame duck soon-to-be-ex-governor might empty the state prisons entirely in his last few days in office. To prevent this, his successor, Lamar Alexander (R) was sworn in a few days early through some loophole in the state law. His would-be successor, Jake Butcher (D) who lost to Alexander was caught with his handses in the cookie jar a few years later in a banking scandal. Thanks a lot you two crooks for turning Tennessee overnight from a solid "D" state to a solid "R" state.
  • Jerry Brown is a New Age flake and one of the few perennial candidates to actually get elected to multiple seats. The people of California elected him governor for a third term, after last being in the seat in 1983. Dennis Kucinich, who will never make it higher than congressman, and Richard Lamm, who will never again be elected to anything, could take a few lesssons in successful New Age flakery from this guy. Jello Biafra wrote a funny song about him.

[edit] Racial faux pas

  • Hardcore punk bands Black Flag and Minor Threat, for the songs "White Minority" and "Guilty of Being White" respectively. Also the Clash, whose song "White Riot" is sung now by the far right.
  • Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) for joining the Ku Klux Klan as a youngster. Unlike some other people, to his credit he quickly got over it.
  • Jeremiah Wright, for various anti-Semitic remarks.
  • Jesse Jackson, for a long, long list of anti-Semitic remarks: calling New York City "Hymietown", saying he was "sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust", and claiming Richard Nixon had been inattentive to black poverty because 4 out of 5 of his advisors were "German Jews". He also wanted to cut Obama's nuts off for some odd reason.
  • James E. "Billy" McKinney, former Georgia state representative, for giving this reason why his daughter Cynthia lost her congressional seat in 2002: "J-E-W-S".

[edit] General media idiots

  • David Icke, the great white hope of the English Green Party. Until he appeared on a chatshow telling people he was the messiah. He's since recanted that claim but he's made worse ones since. Something of a go-to for conspiracy theorists.
  • Robert Kilroy-Silk, former British Labour MP, talk show host and TV presenter. No one's quite sure when he swung to the right... On 4 December 2004 a man threw a bucket of manure over Kilroy-Silk before he was due to make an appearance on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions? This was after comments such as "We owe the Arabs nothing" and that Ireland was a "country peopled by priests, peasants and pixies". The latter comment was in 1992, when he was still Labour. In response to accusations of racism, his PA said "He is not a racist at all - he employs a black driver."
  • Who needs Hertz Rent-A-Mob when you have Medea Benjamin[wp]. Besides disrupting Henry Kissinger or Ken Lay's Enron Congressional testimony, or Wayne Lapierre's NRA press conference after Sandyhook, or heckling George W. Bush, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu and John Kerry, getting her arm broken by Mubarak's goons can't stop her from getting her face in front of a TV camera.[2]

[edit] Religious antics

  • Tony Blair for believing that the best way to build a cohesive multi-cultural environment is to promote religiously segregated schooling.
  • Oprah Winfrey, peddles all kinds of New Age trash, uncritical Obama fan.
  • Hippies & New Age Travellers - have a bath you long haired pot smoking tie-died crypto-Hindu freaks!
  • Malcolm X, who discovered the truth about God from Elijah Mohammad[wp], only to discover the truth about Elijah Mohammad costing him his life.

[edit] Batshit craziness

  • Ward Churchill calling 9/11 victims "Little Eichmanns"
  • Pandering to political cults on the far, far left: New Alliance Party, Lyndon LaRouche, Workers World Party, Maoist revolutionary poseurs, etc.
  • Che Guevara worship - particularly those who wear the t-shirts and buy the posters without even attempting to understand the poltics of the man.
  • Zeitgeist, the movie
  • Thrive, the movie. Aka "Son of Zeitgeist," libertarian edition.
  • PETA - proving how good intentions can just go so, so, so wrong...
  • Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
  • Those who give environmental protection a bad name: hard greens (of the sort who see humans as a plague on the planet, and/or want to shut down all industrial and agricultural activity), those who pander to or glorify ecoterrorism, those who make rash predictions of impending ecological doom and gloom (population crash and die-off, oceans rising 20 feet, etc.), and those who favor mysticism over science-based environmentalism.
  • Crazy Earth-worshipping heathens that believe in Gaian Theory and other nonsense.
  • The Animal Liberation Front, for believing that releasing domesticated lab rats to die in the wild is good for the welfare of the animals or that mink will fit in well with the natural ecosystem of the surrounding areas.
  • Allen Ginsberg for allowing NAMBLA to use his name.[7]

[edit] Genocide denialists

  • Harold Pinter[8]
  • John Pilger[9]

[edit] Miscellaneous

  • Barack Obama, for using the word "change" so often that he managed to confuse 46% of America into voting for John McCain.
  • Patrick Moore who made some outstanding contributions to science, and some not so good ones elsewhere. Was a Liberal, once, and then moved to right.
  • You (yeah, you, you know who you are!), for insisting on making deadly weapons illegal, suing to make unhealthy personal choices illegal (like smoking and trans fats), suing left and right because something offends you, and making the mainstream rip their heads off to meet your demands.
  • Anti-royalists in the UK who insist that if the Queen was removed then magically, overnight, all world hunger would end, everyone would be equal, murder would stop, wars would end and so on... when in reality it would just save about 2p each and make London's landmarks considerably more boring.
  • Assorted rock stars who fly around the world selling millions of pieces of plastic - and then lecture us about the environment.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Washington (AP) August 8 2008 [1]
  2. Is the late senior senator from Massachusetts going to end up in every category eventually?
  3. Additionally, said date occurred while he was married, see "sexual antics".
  4. This isn't actually true.
  5. When?
  6. "Except maybe those of us, ya know, born after 1968." Perhaps you don't know what happened in 1066, 1492, 1776, 1914, or 1939, or on 22 November 1963, either. Stuff that happened before you were born is called "history", and education is learning about it.
  7. http://www.nambla.org/ginsberg.html
  8. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/jul/26/warcrimes.balkans1
  9. http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vp01.cfm?outfit=pmt&folder=4&paper=1115
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