- "rot in hell. You got there forty years too late."
- "A truly vile man, with a despicable career, who willingly, cynically chose to work for the destruction of America’s public life and for those who labor - and have in large part succeded - to overthrow our Constitutional system."
- "Ah, the condescending prep-school Republican. He was a walking stereotype."
- "than a bad case of halitosis . . . "
- "Did I mention no sense of humor? None."
- "Loathesome, and now dead."
- "a supercilious, pompous jerk."
- "It did seem in the last couple of years that he had finally started to figure out that conservatives shouldn't actually govern, that they were more comportable sniping from the sidelines.
Took him nearly 80 years to finally get that right. The man was really slow."
- "What I recall of his tainted logic was an interview of him published in Playboy sometime in the late `60s or very early `70s, in which the interviewer asked him his opinions on recreational drugs. When he said that he had tried grass, but it didn't do anything for him, the interviewer sort of leapt at the next question, which went, roughly: "since you're such a believer in law and order, how did you feel about breaking the law in order to experiment with marijuana?"
His answer was very illuminating. He said, "ah, but, I didn't break the law. I smoked it on my sailboat out past the three-mile limit."
The interviewer went on to another topic, but, I read that and thought, 'very convincing, and yet, it's deceptive. The crime isn't use, but, rather, possession. Unless he had it helicoptered in to him from Mexico while hovering outside the territorial limit, he had to have acquired it in the U.S. and brought it with him.'
This is the way conservatives invariably think, and it's the substance of their illogical approach to law and society."
- "(He once wrote)
"Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals."
I understand that, after hearing that a friend of his, the odious Roy Cohn, had contracted AIDS, he changed his mind. Fair enough, but most of us sober up and think better of our most repellent ideas before publishing them in the first place.
Spectacularly rotten judment combined with a gratuitously violent nastiness. Those are his most influential bequests to the conservative movement. And every day they do homage to these character traits, and indeed, to his entire enormous legacy of pretentious snobbery, bigotry, homophobia, and stupidity.
I would tell you what I really think of him but I thought I would go easy today."
- "Uh uh theeeeeuh,, uh qawestion iz uh, uh, iz uh not not,, uh not what one say’s uh uh but uh what itiz one uh uh, uh does in the mattuh uh uh of discretionry issuues uh uh that is to saay uh uh......"
- "Someone as supposedly brilliant as him should be considered even more culpable than all of his supposedly less-brilliant heirs for espousing a morally decrepit and pragmatically batshit insane conservative ideology, precisely because he should have seen more clearly than his followers where this ideology would lead."
- "In the end the ideological children he begat turned out to be monsters. Gargoyles who have now fully taken over his cathedral, shit in the holy water and used its cross to build a bonfire onto which they have hurled just about everything he held dear."
- "all of the seeds of hate, spew, lies, death, suffering, destruction, and misery were present in the early conservative ideology given loudest primary voice by him. The fact that he was personally clever, witty, intelligent, eloquent, and an all-around nice guy who always bought a round at the local watering hole doesn't change the fact that he planted, watered, and nurtured these seeds.
"
- "He was an articulate and rather disingenuous man, one who truly was a bit off his rocker.
Anyone who watched him on television, flicking his tongue almost like a rattlesnake and rapidly blinking his eyes, couldn't doubt he was a bit unbalanced and simply enjoyed conflict and argument for their own sake.
He was a vital part of what critic Robert Hughes has called "America's culture of complaint."
The culture of complaint is one in which the combat is enjoyed for its own sake with little meaningful discussion happening and little desire to achieve understanding or change.
It is a verbal form of Rome’s gladiator battles, and just about as intellectually meaningful.
His television show also frequently put up debaters who were supposed to represent two sides of an issue but, to the observant watcher, clearly did not. That is to say, he often loaded the dice.
Further note on his infamous exchange with Gore Vidal many years ago on American television, tapes of which the American network likely will never release or has destroyed out of fear of lawsuits.
Vidal did call him a "crypto-nazi," a personal attack which at least had the merit of being about politics (as well as being true).
He called Vidal "faggot" on national television, a personal remark having nothing to do with politics and revealing very clearly the kind of prejudice that motivated him.
He had no class, except an assumed fake-quasi-British accent which he managed to permanently acquire from a short stay in Britain.
The man was a fraud, a second-rate intellect, and not especially ethical."
- "This man's instincts told him blacks and whites should be segregated. It took about a decade and then he changed his mind. That's how I'll remember this first class bigot.."
- "So who will now becomes the archetype of 'Pompous Ass'?"
The central question that emerges... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.
This is using every mechanism of logic and rhetoric to aid and abet racism and segregation, then claiming it is for the greater good. If written by a lesser mind, it'd be vile. From him, it's odious to a fault. More so because it was written just a dozen years after WWII. The bastard literally became a walking, breathing, vivid counterpoint to Godwin's law, my anachronism notwithstanding. Read his essay and tell me: knowing what he knew and coming from the era and his 1940's European schooling, how can one shy away from tying his name with that of racial superiority's other vile proponents? To invert an old Irish blessing, I hope the devil knew his time had come before his soul got out from behind that desk.
(written for 43sb.com, crossposted here because too many progressives blogged praising this SOB)
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