Actual Avatars In Use By Nuts
It’s difficult to imagine people who are moved to such thorough hatred, and who spend so much time making so much of the imaginings they cobble together, yet this is the nature of Palin-Hate, 2011. On Twitter, Facebook, and in the blogosphere, there is a tiny but cacophonous chorus of weak-minded people who pursue every rumor, and every piece of gossip they can dig up about Sarah Palin, her family, and her supporters. Dis-satisfied with reality, they’ve gone off in search of their own, and there is no end to the vile hatred driving them. As Stephen Hanks demonstrated Thursday, there’s no rational rhyme or reason behind their wretched behavior, and nothing turns them from their religion of rage. They are nearly as relentless in their propaganda as it is impotent in its effect.
In writing a blog, you learn a bit about your audience, and one of the tools for this is a list of the sources from which viewers arrived. Links to your site are posted in various places by people with various motives, and the engine that serves up your site tallies them, giving you an idea about your audience. One thing that happens is that you can back-track to the public pages on which links to your site have been posted. It is through this method that I first discovered the tiny universe of Palin-haters who write blogs composed of nothing but venom. There are only two things that prevent them from entering the realm of comic relief, the first being the hate with which they are consumed, and the second being the fact that there are real people who are the objects of their attacks.
What you quickly discover is that most of their traffic is made up of their own group, and few others. You will find that the author of one Palin-hate blog posting comments with regular and reliable frequency on the posts of another of the same mind. It’s a circle of hate, and most of them seem oblivious to the fact that except for the occasional passerby, they’re talking almost entirely among themselves. The shrill conspiracy theories and the verbose ad hominem attacks circulate around their universe, gaining a momentum born of and constructed by pure, seething hatred. More, when they discover a fellow Palin-hater not yet part of their circle, they invite them in. When Stephen Hanks accosted Bristol Palin last week, once his Twitter identity became known, it prompted some from within that vile universe to invite him to their sites, as if inviting a long lost friend over for a football game and a beer. Instead, the opposition he received apparently caused his subsequent “Twitter-cide,” because @sickofpalin(Hanks’ username) is no longer in existence.
This morning, I toured one of these sites. I would almost feel badly for the woman who authors it, if she wasn’t such an obnoxiously despicable person. She used the incident with Bristol Palin as the launchpad for an all-out photographic assault on the Palin family, particularly and specifically its women. In looking around her site, I noticed that she’s not very smart, frankly, and she tends to comment on subjects in which she has no demonstrable expertise. To read an economic critique of Governor Palin authored by a woman who demonstrates in each sentence that she understands nothing of the subject matter is a rare treat. Any who had obtained a passing grade in introductory college economics could have debunked her every claim within a couple lines, but her audience, similarly illiterate, consumed the worthless information and proclaimed the author a genius. None of them had the foggiest notion about the subject at hand.
The fact of their ignorance served as no obstacle, because the object isn’t to tell a truth, or provide real information, but to create a wellspring of defamation, upon which they can draw for the sustenance of their hate-fueled souls. What you come to understand as you read their commentaries is that they have nothing else. Literally. These are empty people. They are so shrill because the echo in the vacuous chambers of their small minds provides them the company no decent people would ever provide.
Let me tell you how juvenile they really are: Most of you are familiar with O4P and C4P. They refer to the commentary section of C4P’s articles as the “Pee-Pond.” I kid you not. This is the nature of those childish haters who sneer while they smear. Reading their remarks, one almost expects at any moment to encounter the question “I know you are, but what am I?” They brag about getting on the inside of the “Pee-Pond” and using that venue to plant seeds of doubt about Governor Palin. They pass rumors faster than any grapevine you’ve ever encountered. If no delicious rumor presents, they simply make one up. If no new smear is readily available, they invent one, and then urge each other on.
This may be the lesson about this loud but tiny segment of indecent people: They have no real reach, and no real voice, but they make a ready audience for the purveyors of Palin-hate. One could sabotage these buffoons in a month if one wished to do so, but why bother? Their every syllable is a damning indictment and refutation of their own character. As Mark Twain remarked famously:
“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
With every post, and every new conspiracy theory concocted about the Palins, they remove all doubt. Don’t sweat these people. They’re their own worst enemies.
