Sean Hannity has had enough of your coarse, cruel discourse.
Well, this is just great. Apparently Andrew Cuomo said a
thing, and now all of conservative America is upset with the
thing because the
thing is a direct challenge to their existence, and probably the first step in mass deportation of conservatives, and almost certainly like slavery, and screw it because they're just gonna go self-deport if the mean politician says a mean thing in their presence because that is not how politics is supposed to work, everybody knows, and saying something that will upset a conservative tummy in even the most fleeting of ways is The Worst Thing That Could Possibly Happen and—fine, already, what did Cuomo say that is
the worstest thing anyone ever said about conservatives ever?
The other day, Cuomo gave a radio interview in which he made the unremarkable point that the kind of Republican who wins elections in, say, Alabama, likely would have something of a tough row to hoe in New York.
"If they are extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York," Cuomo said in a radio interview Friday. Cuomo defined "extreme conservatism" as being "anti-gay" by opposing same-sex marriage rights, opposed to abortion rights and favoring legalization of assault weapons. Cuomo officials later said the governor's remarks were aimed at "extremist" conservative Republican candidates.
What, that's it? That's got National Review and the
Washington Post editorial page and the good folks at the Breitbart Memorial Tinfoil Hat Club all a-swoon at the depths to which our discourse have sunk? Good God, I can see now why they can't get a McDonalds cheeseburger without scrawling out a quick editorial comparing three separate things on the menu to slavery—these people are the wiltingest wilting flowers in the history of wilting flowers.
More on Cuomo and Hannity below the fold.
I suppose liberals have it a bit easier. The long years have fairly inured us to things like White Houses tensely noting how political beliefs other than their own are un-American or French-sounding or aiding the enemy and or whatnot, or having prominent national politicians telling non-conservative presidents of these United States that they probably ought to stay out of their states if those presidents know what's good for them, or various members of supposed actual news outlets making it a decades-long personal quest to assert that the soshalists and lib-ralls are this close to undermining are whole American way of life, on account of how some public pool somewhere is letting Muslim girls swim without patriots being able to ogle them, or because somebody said that maybe immigrants perhaps are not all melon-calved drug smugglers looking to do us harm, or because someone somewhere suggested that maybe allowing mentally unbalanced people to shoot our schoolchildren is something that we ought to maybe-just-maybe look into patching up, if possible.
But no, Andrew Cuomo said a mean thing, defined as not letting Tinkerbell sprinkle magic election dust on their fellow conservatives even if those conservatives were counting on Andrew Cuomo personally driving Tinkerbell to each of their houses to do it, and—no, sorry, I cannot even pretend to comprehend what the Michael Gersons of the world are going on about now. Gerson titled his own tsk-tsk effort "Andrew Cuomo silences the opposition" as if Cuomo saying a dismissive thing about conservatives is akin to Cuomo outfitting each of them with cement shoes. The word of the day, children, is maudlin:
Cuomo does not deign to argue with New Yorkers who oppose abortion, support a maximalist interpretation of the Second Amendment or defend the position on gay marriage held by Barack Obama when he was first elected president. These extreme views, according to Cuomo, are fundamentally illiberal and foreign to the values of his state. Such positions are not to be engaged with and refuted; they are to be marginalized.
Oh, heavens—what
is our discourse coming to. It is almost enough to make a truly patriotic person want to shut down the government and/or secede from the union and/or propose that perhaps Hillary Clinton wanted those people in Benghazi good and dead because
reasons.
There is, however, some good news in all of this. The good news is that Andrew Cuomo was so very, very mean on a radio program that Poster Child for How American Political Discourse Should Be Conducted Sean Fucking Hannity has announced that he is leaving the state of New York forevahs rather than put up with such cruelties:
"Now I want to tell you something - I was born and raised in New York," Hannity said. "I want you to know that and I can't wait to get out of here. I really can't. I don't want to pay their 10-percent state tax anymore. I live in the second-highest property taxed county in the entire country in Nassau County. I can't wait to sell my house to somebody who wants it. I can't wait to pay no state income tax down in Florida or Texas. I haven't decided yet, but I'm leaning Florida because I like the water and I like to fish."
Go, Hannity. Flee quickly, before the Cuomo Camps arrive. I promise you 10,000 individual New Yorkers will volunteer to help you pack your bags, and you can move to a new American political utopia like Texas or Florida where the genteel and not-at-all batshit crazy conservative politicians would never think of abusing the national discourse by saying marginally rude things about people who think ever so slightly differently from themselves. Maybe you can build a lovely mansion next to the Rush Limbaugh homestead, down in the part of the nation that will someday be a warm and shallow sea if the lib'ral scientists succeed in melting the polar ice caps in the worldwide conspiracy to make conservatives look bad, and you and he can hold cotillions and tea parties and piano recitals together and moan about how politics has really just gone all to hell ever since people started being
rude on the goddamn effing radio. Whatever
shall we do.