Sunday, May 6, 2012

Don't you love inflammatory political internet comments? I love them.

A fun little link showed up on my Facebook feed today. (Actually--wait, how many of my blog posts start this way? Good heavens, I think I have a Facebook addiction...) That link leads to this cartoon.

Now, we here at Expert Textperts have had a few choice things to say about the 2012 election, and I don't feel like this particular cartoon is any more or less of a valid commentary on things as anything we might have written. In fact, the cartoon itself isn't what caught my eye about this particular link.

No, it was the comments at the bottom.

Now, I'm tempted to spend time on how many of them could easily be brought back in time a presidency and, with a simple name change, be equally applicable to someone else...

"I think you have the wrong President Bush."
--Former President Bush
...but even this, however, is still quite tame. Don't worry, though, gentle readers, for we soon shall see the depths to which these comments go.

In fact, it soon devolves into my personal favorite brand of internet comments: the kind where the WRITER emphasizes CERTAIN WORDS by writing them in FULL CAPS, as though trying to VISUALLY PORTRAY the traditionally-auditory RANT STYLE of human conversation.

Examples (with my own colorful commentary in italics):

"THIS MORON WANTS ANOTHER FOUR YEARS FOR WHAT TO TAKE THIS COUNTRY DOWN MORE THAN THIS DIRTBAG HAS ALLREADY TAKEN US??"
Say what you will, I think the real victim here is this person's poor "shift" key.


"HE should not even be in the office of the president of the USA because by his own admission, BY HIS FAKE birth certificate, he is NOT A NATURAL BORN CITIZEN....his father is British....DEFINITION OF NATURAL BORN CITIZEN.....BOTH PARENTS HAVE TO BE AMERICAN CITIZENS.... we need to IMPEACH THE LAIR"
Let's see what we have here--words emphasized via caps-lock, a stunningly outdated reference to birther arguments, and to top it all off, they misspelled "liar." This...this is beautiful.

"[Name of previous commentor] You are so right. He will lie steal and cheat because he is good at it. That is how he got elected last time. The Dumbocreeps stuffed ballot boxes, the SEIU rigged voting machines like they did in Nevada for Harry Reid, The Black Panthers sat outside polling places and wouldn't let people in unless they were voting for Obumber and it may be worse this time. IF he gets re elected I believe we all need to insist on a recount. We also need to force the voter ID law so that illegals can not vote. Why not go all the way and refuse to put him on the ballot since he is not a Natural Born Citizen BY HIS OWN ADMISSION."
 Let's go step-by-step through this one, shall we?
1. I think the "stuffed ballot boxes" thing is probably a reference to the whole ACORN scandal, in which case it's too bad the author of this comment didn't do the two-minute Google search that I did to find this very even-handed breakdown of the whole issue. Basically--ACORN wasn't in hot water for voter fraud, it was in trouble for voter registration fraud, as perpetrated by a few of its 13,000 paid canvassers.
2. The Service Employees International Union (or SEIU) isn't exactly the most savory lot (see Wikipedia's list of controversies for them), but aside from accusations against them in the Harry Reid election, the only thing I found about them and the 2008 election was that they were the single biggest financial contributor to President Obama. Prove me wrong in the comments section if there's something else to this.
3. Ah, the Black Panther scandal. I remember seeing the Fox News stories about this. According to PolitiFact.com, while it's true that one or two men did in fact stand in front of a polling place in Philadelphia (and that one was, indeed, carrying a night stick), it's doubtful that that was what was responsible for Obama's 8-million-vote lead. Don't get me wrong--I'm not endorsing voter intimidation, and I think it was wrong of those men to do that--but it wasn't the gamechanger some people think it was.
4. I'm not sure which I like more--the twice-insulting "Dumbocreeps" (It's like "Democrats," but more stupid!) or "Obumber," which I can only guess comes from the movie "Obumb and Obumber."

 Ah, the internet. I love it.