Speaking of John Edwards... Didn't Ann Coulter hint that maybe he plays the bassoon.
Posted on 03/08/2007 11:40:55 PM PST by conservative in nyc
The Dixie Chicks have a movie, Shut Up & Sing, coming out today, and, to keep things lively, they're staging a grudge match with the worst site on the Internet, political-rhetoric division.
"The fat chick will only drive traffic to this site," writes one poster to the site.
"The Frenchy Chix can't get a gig in a gay bar in Ithaca," writes another.
Others chime in with more corruptions: Chubby Chicks, Ditsy Twits, Vichy Chicks.
"Yep typical liberals," says someone else. "No character."
This is Free Republic, an exercise in political extremism that, despite being and something of an anthropological train wreck, keeps popping up square in the mainstream.
Most recently, it has resurfaced as a villain in the Dixie Chicks movie, which traces the fallout from lead singer Natalie Maines's infamous 2003 London declaration that she was embarrassed that George W. Bush was, like her, from Texas.
It was a bad time to be anti-war, and Americans are touchy about being criticized on foreign soil at the best of times. The "grassroots" backlash that followed -- orchestrated, in part, by the people at Free Republic, who mobilized their large and largely disgruntled membership -- saw the band savaged in the press and at the box office.
The site is a venerable and storied Web forum for American arch-conservatives. Funded by member donations, it was founded in 1996 as an anti-Clinton grandstand, and soon became a place where members could post news stories and discuss them -- though "discussion" might be the wrong word. More often, it's a kind of pantomime, where the name of the game is to cheer the good guy and boo the bad guy every time he creeps on stage.
Freepers, as the sites denizens are known, are the good guys. The bad guys, according to site founder Jim Robinson, are practitioners of "liberalism, socialism, fascism, pacifism, totalitarianism, anarchism, government enforced atheism, abortionism, feminism, homosexualism, racism," and "wacko environmentalism."
So it is that, day in and day out, Freepers attempt to outdo each other in posting the most pungent, juvenile reactions to stories. Articles containing an opposing viewpoint have the words "BARF ALERT" appended to their titles. Slurs are encouraged. When the first same-sex Canadian soldiers were married last year, the story garnered 73 angry responses, ranging from "Disgusting and despicable" to "I'd resign my commission before performing a ceremony to marry a couple of bone-smugglers" to "Let's see what happens when the Canadian military has an AIDS epidemic on its hands."
It's a hateful place that, if the world was working as it should, would be relegated to the Internet's endless fringes, where conspiracy theorists and pyramid-power believers roam the wasteland. But what's interesting about Free Republic is that, despite having attracted a crowd of the most paranoid, xenophobic and reactionary characters the political landscape has to offer, it continues to find itself in the news.
For instance, during the 2004 U.S. presidential election, it was central to the network of websites that uncovered the forged memos about Bush's Vietnam service that appeared on CBS News and ultimately cost Dan Rather his job. (Paranoia, in this instance, paid off.) Later, and less admirably, Jerome Corsi, the co-author of Unfit for Command -- the hatchet job about John Kerry's military service that crippled his campaign -- was found to be posting racist, sexist diatribes on the site.
And then there was the flap about the Dixie Chicks, spurred on by zealous Freepers. Thanks to their movie, Free Republic is getting another moment in the sun. Not helping things was the band's manager publicly calling Robinson "a coward" for refusing to be interviewed for the film. ("I am jealous of you Mr. Robinson," declared one Freeper in response. "You have been singled out and attacked by America's premier Entertraitors.") These, ladies and gentlemen, are grassroots at work. There are a lot of organizations out there that are in the business of whipping their members into a lather and unleashing them on corporations and politicians alike.
But if Free Republic has a virtue, it's that, unlike other pressure groups, it's transparent: You can see the cogs turning, the anger mounting, the members joining the half-baked me-too condemnations that will surface on tomorrow's news agenda. It's like a glass ant farm for zealots. It's a little stomach-turning, but man, they're diligent little things. It's hard not to stare sometimes.
It seems to depend on the time of day/week and the thread topic.
Then there are freepers who apparently call on other freepers to bully a dissenter into submission......
Speaking of John Edwards... Didn't Ann Coulter hint that maybe he plays the bassoon.
They left out "fierce, warlike tribe".
Well done!
None of us reall cares what the moonbats think about us, but as I have said many times before here - they are watching us and feasting on our general nastiness over here.
FR is considered "extreme" conservativism, and not properly recognized as more mainstream conservative voter opinion, because the socialist utopians are so blind to believing that theirs is the ONLY way.
FR is the mainstream. The left thinks that Rush Limbaugh is "extreme" as well. The audience wouldn't be as large if it only represented a fringe. When one half pretends that the other HALF shouldn't have a say ("conservatives should be like children in days of old, seen and not heard"), they may be shocked to realize we DO have a voice even if the MSM tries to shut us out.
Everything canadians do is funny (and pathetic at the same time), and most of it is unintentionally so. Check out any canadian newspaper on the internet. Just read the headlines to start laughing. Go on into the articles and you can roll on the floor.
Any time the Globe and Maiil is on your case, you are headed in the right direction. Keep on.
Read para #6.
The University of Toronto should ask for his degree back.
Is CTV government owned? I didn't know that. I know CBC is, but I thought CTV was privately owned. Not that it makes a dime's worth of difference. CTV seems like it owned by the CMA (you had to be there).
Yeah, but at least he used spell check. (groan)
EXACTLY! :)
Pay them no mind. Everything looks little to canadians. They are somehow built to view the world that way. Nobody pays them any mind for the most part, so they are put off by that. They live cheek by jowl with the greatest and most successful country in the world, and they are REALLY put off by that. Their entire country runs by monopolies. And their national elections can only be described as "Saturday Night Specials". They are being slowly strangled by their unions - both public and private. They hate WalMart. I'll stop now, but believe me I could go on....
Heck, some on the "other side" might even be "converted" with logic and reasoning when they see it in its "natural" state of free discourse.........
He finally made it to the big time.
More people will read this here on FR than would have ever read it on the G&M.
I never heard of Mr Tossell, or even the G&M before...probably would have never read any of his "stuff" had it not appeared on FR.
We are being talked about ping.
This guy is an "English Major" - thinking outside the box is heavily discouraged, if not an outright criminal offense. They're working on that too.
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