Wednesday, September 12, 2007

DEAR RIGHT-WINGERS: IT'S CALLED "GOOGLE." EVEN YOU CAN AVOID LOOKING STUPID BY USING IT.

(Greetings, Carpetbagger Report readers. I tie this to Limbaugh at the end of the post.)

The right-winger blogger Gay Patriot fakes outrage at MoveOn's "General Betray Us" ad:

...I have spent the better part of the day struggling to find the proper words to express my own outrage not only at this ad, but at the New York Times for agreeing to publish it....

His first commenter ups the ante:

I wondered the same thing while contemplating "Who the HELL is Tom Lantos and what's his military experience?"....

Who the HELL is Tom Lantos? Oh, he's led a fairly ordinary life:

Born the only child of upper-middle class Jewish parents in Budapest in 1928, Lantos grew up during a time when Hungary was slowly being taken over by the Nazis.

...When he was 16, German troops invaded his homeland--and along with them came Adolf Eichmann, with orders to exterminate the Jewish population of Hungary.

... Lantos and other young Jewish men were sent to work camps.

... Once, Lantos escaped from the camp but he was caught and "beaten to a pulp."

Desperate with what his life had become, and feeling he had nothing to lose, he tried another escape. When a guard wasn't paying much attention, he disappeared.

...He eventually found refuge in a Budapest apartment building rented by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and under Swedish diplomatic protection.

... Wallenberg put Lantos to work helping out in an elaborate anti-Nazi underground, delivering a bottle of medicine or loaf of bread to Jews Wallenberg had in hiding throughout Budapest.

...As the war entered 1945, life in Budapest deteriorated. It was under constant shelling and the Germans and Russians engaged in house-to-house fighting. Then, at 3 a.m. on a cold January day, a Russian soldier burst into the safe house where Lantos was staying, liberating the teen-ager and his many housemates. By mid-January, the German army pulled out, leaving the Russians in control of the city. But Lantos' relief was short-lived--a search for his mother and the rest of his family ended in vain. They had all been killed....


But you're right -- Lantos never served in the military. He never, say, joined the Texas Air National Guard and protected Lubbock from Communist invasion. So who the hell is he to challenge this administration's policies?

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(By the way, I'm ignoring the fact that both the blogger and the commenter identify themselves as gay. There's nothing particularly gay about what they write -- it just seems like GOP boilerplate, with, in the commenter's case, an extra dose of ignorance. And please note that no one in the 64 comments that follow the first one bothers to correct the record with regard to Lantos.)

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(Via Wonkosphere.)

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UPDATE: Good Lord, I had no idea that "Lantos has no military experience" was a Rush Limbaugh talking point. These people are shameless.

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