Many of the lefty writers who analyzed Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate at the Venetian suggested that had the event been promoted as if it were a Vegas show, the marquee might have read “Fright Night,” or perhaps “Be Afraid…Be Very Afraid,” given how much the candidates hyped the threat of jihadist terrorism.
Amanda Marcotte
By Tom Johnson | December 10, 2015 | 9:09 PM EST
Between Christians and Muslims, which group poses the greater threat to religious liberty in America? To Marcotte, there’s an obvious answer: Christians. In a Wednesday Salon column, the lefty pundit claimed that “the big difference between conservative Muslims and Christians in this country is that only the latter have a massive, organized movement that is backed by an entire political party to force their theocratic views on the non-believers.”
Marcotte’s peg was Sean Hannity’s recent statement on his radio show that we ought to find out whether would-be Muslim immigrants to the U.S. favor sharia. Marcotte deemed Hannity’s remark “breathtaking in its hypocrisy,” given that Hannity, “like nearly all conservatives these days, is a strong believer in the Christian version of ‘sharia law,’ i.e. forcing conservative religious beliefs on the non-believers by law.”
Amanda Marcotte: ‘Terrorism’ the ‘Logical End Point’ of Conservative ‘Deep Sense of Entitlement’ to Women’s Bodies
By Tom Johnson | December 1, 2015 | 12:56 PM EST Anyone fascinated by strident pro-choice rhetoric finds that Marcotte seldom disappoints in that regard. In a Monday Salon piece pegged to the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shootings, the lefty pundit asserted that “terrorism…is the logical end point of [the pro-life movement’s] deep sense of entitlement over others’ bodies,” and that the movement “has been built on a lie: That it is about ‘life,’ when it’s clearly a movement of religious prudes who want to sneer at women they think are sluts.”
Marcotte added that “a movement built on a lie is bound to be one that’s wicked and dishonest in all its tactics, and that is what we see with the anti-choice movement. People who are willing to lie to get their way are not going to apologize and grow a conscience just because some people get killed for their lies…This shooting should be a reminder that the pro-choice side is the moral one, and not just because you never have to worry about some pro-choicer shooting up a crowd under the delusion of religious righteousness.”
Bloggers Blast GOP Presidential Candidates' Media Criticism: ‘Reality Has a Bias Toward Journalists’
By Tom Johnson | October 29, 2015 | 5:38 PM EDT Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio put media bias on the front burner at CNBC’s Republican presidential debate, but conservatives and liberals differed sharply on whether what was in the pot smelled appetizing. Several lefty bloggers turned up their noses at the idea that in last night’s event and in general, the media favor Democrats.
Amanda Marcotte: Paul Ryan Thinks Family Life Should Be ‘Reserved For the Elite and the Rest of Us Can Go Hang’
By Tom Johnson | October 24, 2015 | 9:49 PM EDT After Paul Ryan vowed that he wouldn’t reduce time spent with his family even if he became Speaker of the House, quite a few liberals accused the Wisconsin congressman of hypocrisy given that he has, in the words of one feminist site, “spent much of his political career fighting laws that promote realistic work-life balance for parents.”
Lefty pundit Marcotte believes that Ryan is even worse than a hypocrite. In a Thursday column for Salon, Marcotte asserted that Ryan’s “family time” stand “is a perfect distillation of the Ayn Rand-constructed worldview he has, where all the goodies are reserved for the elite and the rest of us can go hang…Increasingly, the Republican worldview is one where even basic things like love, connection, and other basic human needs are being reclassified as privileges that should only be available to the wealthy.”
Amanda Marcotte: Conservatives Increasingly Fed Up With GOP Establishment’s Demands For Political Correctness
By Tom Johnson | October 19, 2015 | 10:53 AM EDT In 1988, the Year of Dukakis, Rep. Peter Kostmayer (D-Penn.) told Congressional Quarterly that his party’s advice for liberal interest groups was, “Just shut up, gays, women, environmentalists. Just shut up, and you will get everything you want after the election. In the meantime, just shut up so we can win.” (They didn’t win.) These days, believes lefty pundit Marcotte, it’s the Republican establishment that’s trying to shush the party base…and the base doesn’t like it.
“Hiding their true motivations is the rule, not the exception, when it comes to the right,” wrote Marcotte in a Thursday column for Salon. “Conservatives will give you any reason under the sun for their views, except the real one…[But] increasingly, conservatives are rebelling, eager to say what they really think, even if it hurts them politically.”
Amanda Marcotte: Iran Deal Has Republicans ‘Trying to Get Attention By Screaming’ That ‘We’re All Going to Die Now’
By Tom Johnson | September 14, 2015 | 4:45 PM EDT Lefty pundit Amanda Marcotte grants that so-called political theater usually dovetails with the beliefs of the politicians and activists who perform it. Among the exceptions: some Republicans’ insincere, “comically overwrought meltdowns” over the Iran nuclear deal.
Those histrionics, Marcotte declared in a Wednesday Talking Points Memo column, are meant “to stir up irrational fears to be harped on for the rest of the election season…Pointless obstructionism for the sole purpose of sticking it to the Democrats and mindless demagoguery about the nefarious Middle Eastern threat to convince voters of your manhood…are joining together to create a massive, misshapen beast that represents everything that’s gone wrong with politics in the 21st century.”
Amanda Marcotte: Fox News Sexism Inspires Conservatives to ‘Scream…at Bitches Who Don’t Know Their Place’
By Tom Johnson | August 27, 2015 | 10:46 AM EDT A great many Fox News hosts and contributors publicly criticized Donald Trump’s latest Twitter swipes at Megyn Kelly. This raises a major pot-kettle issue, claims lefty writer Marcotte, in that these high-profile personalities who objected to Trump’s sexism work for a channel that disseminates one sexist message after another.
“The position at Fox News and elsewhere in the conservative media on women who talk back to men, or even just have the power to talk back to men,” wrote Marcotte in a Wednesday column for Talking Points Memo, is that “they are to be put in their place, with a vengeance. Any woman who has been targeted [by] the right wing flying monkeys of Twitter can attest to how well the audiences have absorbed this lesson. Screaming at bitches who don’t know their place is both a sacred cause and just a rowdy good time, in right wing circles…No one should understand this better than the people at Fox News. After all, this is the monster they created.”
By Sarah Stites | August 4, 2015 | 2:27 PM EDT
How dehumanized have abortion’s most rabid defenders become? This afternoon, abortion apologist Amanda Marcotte, a radical feminist writer for RawStory, made the ultimate in frivolous – not to mention idiotic – analogies. She tweeted: “Hating PPFA is, in this sense, no different that getting mad that someone uses food stamps to buy strawberries.”
This, in the face of the latest video showing Planned Parenthood executives discussing selling aborted baby parts (and PP workers picking through fetal remains like butchers) is almost unimaginable moral obtuseness.
By Tory McClintock | July 27, 2015 | 3:44 PM EDT
Slate writer Amanda Marcotte claimed this week that a drop in the number of teens having sex is the result of encouraging teens to use birth control and engage in sexual behavior. Meanwhile, she posited, education encouraging abstinence couldn't possibly, ever, in a zillion years, have anything to do with it.
By Tom Johnson | July 14, 2015 | 2:14 PM EDT
Since Scott Walker is both a “threat to reproductive rights” and a deceitful doofus, he would be an unusually dangerous Republican presidential nominee, argued lefty pundit Marcotte in a Monday blog post for Slate.
If the race pits Walker against Hillary Clinton, the Wisconsin governor “could give her a real run for her money,” wrote Marcotte, “because Walker does a much better job than most of the Republican field at lulling low-information voters into thinking he's a moderate…[If] female and young voters…don’t realize that Walker is a scary woman-basher, they might not mobilize in the numbers Clinton needs. That's something Walker will be counting on.”
By Tom Johnson | July 1, 2015 | 11:19 AM EDT
Though both Jonathan Chait and Amanda Marcotte approve of same-sex marriage, they differed on Monday in their assessment of the case against it. Chait, of New York magazine, claimed that anti-gay-marriage arguments have been pitiful and consequently were doomed from the get-go. He declared that “preventing gay people from marrying each other serves no coherent purpose. Allowing them to marry harms nobody.”
Meanwhile, Marcotte argued in a Talking Points Memo column that same-sex marriage helps to “redefine…marriage as an institution of love instead of oppression,” and that the anti-gay-marriage forces are clinging to the idea that marriage is “about dutiful procreation and female submission.”