I don’t like Caleb Howe. But I love Twitter. And I use it all the time. To meet people, to form communities, to understand how people think. For me, Twitter is all about people. And every time I hit “enter,” I know every one of those 140-or-less-character messages I send is going to affect some of the 7000+ folks who are following my tweets. So I make sure that what I say has relevance, and even the tweets I send that attack people don’t attack people.
That’s one of my main issues with the thought process on the Right. Ad hominen attacks are how they go about their day. On Twitter, at Tea Parties, on Glenn Beck’s show, on RedState, the Right loves to attack you as a person. Not just your positions, your ideas, your beliefs, but you. And that’s where I draw the line.
I’ve made a lot of tough comments about, and too, a lot of people. But you’d be hard-pressed to find any tweet I’ve sent, or any blog post I’ve written, or anything I’ve verbalized, that attacked a person — how they look, their ethnic background, their orientation, who they are, as a person.
But back to Caleb Howe. As you probably know at this point, Caleb Howe blogs at RedState, one of the most right-wing blogs ever. Howe likes to get down-and-dirty, and, by his own admission, he likes to get down with the vodka, too. I’ll confess I didn’t know who he was until a few days ago, when I read how he had viciously attacked Roger Ebert via Twitter. You’ve read the piece over at Gawker, (or the other piece at Gawker,) or the one at Esquire, or the one at CNN… Yes, Caleb Howe knows how to make a name for himself. See, it was all a test. It was his “plan.”
Caleb Howe, on Saturday, decided to take on Roger Ebert by making fun of his cancer. Media Matters has screenshots of his actual tweets, but I’ll share a few of them here:
CalebHowe: I mean, honestly. How many pieces need to fall off @ebertchicago before he gets the hint to shut the fuck up?
CalebHowe: You know, @ebertchicago, I’m not as expert on flag etiquette as you. Tell me, which do I fly when you die of cancer?
I’ll leave it at that, though there are plenty more.
Caleb Howe represents the tea party movement, the right-wing radical movement, and the right-wing blogosphere perfectly. Don’t like someone’s stance on an issue? Call them a “goat fucking child molester.” What? Yup. That’s what Caleb Howe’s boss, Erick Erickson, who runs RedState but is also a CNN contributor, said on the news that David Souter was retiring from the Supreme Court. In fact, the entire sentence was, “The nation loses the only goat fucking child molester ever to serve on the Supreme Court in David Souter’s retirement.”
So, it should come as no shock that Howe would sink so low as to say of Ebert, “…he’ll be dead really really soon. So fuck him.”
I suppose, one could argue, that’s almost tame by comparison.
Anyway, it’s this type of rhetoric that serves as the daily fare by the RedState crowd.
Howe did, finally, apologize. In “I Don’t Like Roger Ebert,” Howe takes almost all of its 1372 words to actually apologize, saying that he “forgot about humanity.” Damned right he did.
But given the RedState culture of calling a Supreme Court justice a “goat fucking child molester,” of threatening to “pull out a shotgun on a census worker,” suggesting beating a politician “to a bloody pulp for being an idiot,” and demanding Americans “tell Nancy Pelosi and the Congress to send Obama to a death panel,” what can you expect?
Howe decided to appear last night on “The Stage Right Show,” a podcast that promised, “some serious “half hour of hate.” Howe claimed his “plan” to attack Ebert was “How do I hurt him?” The host laughed when Howe recalled his tweets about Ebert dying of cancer. “You were purposely being provocative because you had an end-game.” So? Justified? No.
Howe, on the podcast, mumbled something about how “Twitter’s off the record.” It’s not. (He and Erick Erickson, his boss, certainly should realize that by now.) He claimed his plan was to expose hypocrisy by riling up Ebert’s Twitter followers, by saying terrible things. His plan was to “trap them in their hypocrisy.” And he added, “my bottom line is that everyone’s a douche.”
Evidently, one of those “everybodys” is Oliver Willis, a blogger for the media watchdog Media Matters, which Howe and the host attempted to skewer during the show.
Later, after his Saturday salvo, Howe tweeted to those who criticized his heinous attack on Ebert (including your truly,) saying, “Ahh irony,” and “lol. Irony.” Because those criticizing him, to his way of thinking, were equally guilty as he. Proportion and intent, in Howe’s mind, evidently don’t matter.
What Howe didn’t get, and maybe, maybe does now, is that there’s a difference between attacking someone’s political positions, and attacking them as a human being.
But I don’t hold much hope. Given one of Caleb Howe’s most-recent tweets, I’d say he’s back to his old ways…
Ah, irony.