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Charleston (WV) Daily Mail newspaper OpEd writer and rightwing blogger Don Surber has the bottom feeders over at his blog all stirred up by claiming that Obama fans supposedly called WV voters "Toothless Gun-toting, Poor, and Ignorant". But it turns out that he's actually the one who trashed us!
Leave it to rightwing blogger Don Surber of the Charleston Daily Mail to encourage Democratic candidates to play the Republicans' cheesy anthem by serial adulterer Lee Greenwood, God Bless the U.S.A., over the music of rock and roll legend John Mellencamp, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee who still writes great songs.
Greenwood, a draft dodger during the Vietnam war, wrote the song because he wanted to cash in on the patriotic fervor of President Ronald Reagan. He wrote the song for his love of green to cash in on the love of other people for the "red, white and blue."
Now I can see why a chickenhawk faux patriot like Surber loves the song but if Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton play anything by Lee Greenwood at a campaign appearance, I'm writing in Alan Keyes' name for president.
Surber also suggested John Denver's Country Roads, which proves even a blind squirrel can find the most obvious of chestnuts.
Sadly, No! mocks Charleston Daily Mail rightwing bloviator Don Surber so we don't have to.
But Surber might want to know these alarming statistics before he spouts off in blind defense about coal-burning electric plants in West Virginia:
A quick look at asthma statistics in West Virginia shows the great need
for such an effort :
-- Approximately 8.5 percent of West Virginians currently have asthma. This equals approximately 123,000 adults and 31,000 children. (WVDHHR, The Burden of Asthma in West Virginia, 2007)
-- West Virginia children had the fourth highest prevalence of asthma in the nation in 2003. (ALA, Asthma in Children Fact Sheet, August 2006)
-- West Virginia adults aged 65 and older had the third highest rate of asthma in the nation in 2006. (West Virginia Health Care Authority, UB-92 data)
-- 19.4 percent of adults with asthma visited an emergency room or urgent care center because of their asthma in the past year. (Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System)
Since Surber shows so little regard for the health of his own children, he'll probably disregard these inconvenient facts, too.
Did you hear the latest about right wingnut and Charleston Daily Mail blogger and columnist Don Surber? Does anyone know how he avoids prosecution? We're just asking.
In the comments of this Sadly, No! post, a commenter suggests an explanation for the poor work done by right wing columnist Don Surber of the Charlestone Daily Mail: either no one on the staff reads it before he posts (possibly saving him from his own stupidity) or the people he works with hate his guts. I believe both are probably true.
Surber does not seem to know the meaning of the word plagarism, even though he has practiced it.
We've outsourced mocking of Charleston Daily Mail rightwing blogger and "columnist" Don Surber to other blogs to save energy. The fine folks at Sadly, No! point out how Surber remains a day late and more than a dollar short when it comes to cashing the checks on accuracy.
In his current column, our Keats of the Kanawha offers up some standard anti-Gore fare: "Al Gore is a big fat hypocrite whose farts cause more global warming than the exhaust from a million SUVs":
It is difficult to take his sermons on the coming doom seriously when his mansion in Tennessee consumes 10 times the electricity of an ordinary home. ... Rather than lead by example, Gore and other millionaire celebrities engage in carbon offsets.
Once again Don is that late-to-the-party kind of guy, showing up when the liquor is gone and the guests have already left. He hangs around, nonetheless, boring the hosts until they finally kick him out at 1:00 a.m. I say this because on the same day as Surber's column, the wires were flooded with stories about Gore's recent renovations to his home:
Al Gore, who was criticized for high electric bills at his Tennessee mansion, has completed a host of improvements to make the home more energy efficient, and a building-industry group has praised the house as one of the nation's most environmentally friendly.
The former vice president has installed solar panels, a rainwater-collection system and geothermal heating. He also replaced all incandescent lights with compact fluorescent or light-emitting diode bulbs - even on his Christmas tree.
"Short of tearing it down and staring anew, I don't know how it could have been rated any higher," said Kim Shinn of the U.S. Green Building Council, which gave the house its second-highest rating for sustainable design....
There's a theory held by some that the Charleston Daily Mail's owners keep printing Surber as part of a deliberate attempt to run the Daily Mail into the ground so they can divest themselves of the weaker of the two Charleston papers without violating the Joint Operating Agreement. It's the only reason that makes any sense why a newspaper would publish his ill-informed rantings.
Charleston Daily Mail chickenhawk and opinion writer Don Surber remains the most easily mocked rightwing blogger despite a lot of competition on the right vying for Teh Stupidest Guy On Teh Planets Award.
I look forward to watching Republicans and right-wing bloggers, after close to 8 years holding the lube while Bush and company give it to the Constitution right and proper, re-discover the grand old document...
snip
Let's see what Don Surber has to say:
Constitution? What's that?
After watching him excuse this administration for the past 6 years, I am not sure if he is joking.
Meanwhile TBogg takes the opportunity of Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend stepping down to remind readers of how Surber tried to blame the California wildfires on Al Qaeda.
As you may have noticed, we haven't been attacked during her four and a half-year tenure, if you don't count al Qaeda trying to set San Diego on fire last month.
Don Surber tried to equate a young boy under 12 playing with matches as the same as Al Quaeda and then threw his usual hissy fit to say he was right when lefty bloggers mocked him.
If Surber is so worried about the war on terror, why hasn't he enlisted? Blackwater's hiring.
Jay points out in a diary how the Charleston Daily Mail's rightwing truth distorter, serial fabricator and occasional plagiarist Don Surber is making West Virginians look like bigoted asses over news that author J.K. Rowling's beloved character Albus Dumbledore was gay. Surber, like other wannabe macho, routine hissyfit throwing, whiny ass titty baby Republicans, headed straight for the fainting couch over the news. As a counterpoint to Surber's gay bashing, I'm resurrecting my post on Daily Kos from Jan. 20, 2006 bashing the leading gay basher of all, Fred Phelps.
...
Ordinarily, a Strawman Surber post applying his low-brow pathology to a pop-culture story with a little prurient interest would be just another day at the tailspinning Daily Mail.
But having a national blog like Sadly, No point out his absurdity has him para-gushing Sally Fields - "You hate me! You really hate me!" as if honesty, dignity, and thoughtfulness are secondary to blog-hits.
Break out the Thunderbird, honey, we're paintin' Poca red tonight!
The sad part is that unsuspecting people think his pandering to the intolerant among us is home grown. Like we need that. I sincerely hope Betty Chilton follows Bray Carey's lead and kicks Surber to the curb like Stirewalt.
(Aside to Surber: It may just be that Rowling thought gay adolescents would like to have a literary hero, too, Dumb-Ass. If nothing else, it's enjoyable to watch the slowly dawning cognizance overcome intolerant hayseeds like yourself. Kind of like the dwindling metronome of headbangers reconsidering Judas Priest lyrics.)
As West Virginians, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard to counteract the stereotype and we don't need Surber exporting the ignorance decent people are trying to fight.
Go back to Cleveland or shut the hell up, Asshole!
(Aside to Bray Carey: The idiot who decided to show infomercials instead of what could turn out to be one of the best offenses in NFL history should carry Stirewalt's luggage to D.C. and stay.)
A key difference between the Scarecrow of Oz and Strawman Surber is the Scarecrow eventually got smart while Strawman Surber wages an eternal argument with strawmen.
Illustration by West Virginia Blue's "Jay."
You know you've reached a new low as a rightwinger when fellow rightwingers on the Wall Street Journal editorial board criticize you.
That's what happened yesterday when the rightwing Wall Street Journal editorial writers called the rightwing bloggers like the Charleston Daily Mail's Don Surber and his ilk an 'Internet mob' for their smears of the Frost family.
Unfortunately, that narrative was bolstered this week by some conservative bloggers. After the Schip veto, Democrats chose a 12-year-old boy named Graeme Frost to deliver a two-minute rebuttal. While that was a political stunt, the Washington habit of employing "poster children" is hardly new. But the Internet mob leapt to some dubious conclusions and claimed the Frost kids shouldn't have been on Schip in the first place.
As it turns out, they belonged to just the sort of family that a modest Schip is supposed to help. One lesson from this meltdown is the limit of argument by anecdote. The larger point concerns policy assumptions. Everyone concedes it is hard for some lower-income families like the Frosts to find affordable private health coverage. The debate is over what the government should do about it.
The Charleston Daily Mail's rightwing columnist and truth distorter Don Surber wrote this about the Frosts (whiskey fire link - we're not driving traffic to feed Surber's blog)...which was linked to by hatewing bloggers Michelle Malkin (whose column runs in the Martinsburg Journal, which like the Daily Mail has no editorial standards) and Glenn Reynolds.
This business of "affordable insurance" is socialistic. The Frosts found an "affordable" business building and an "affordable" 3,000-square foot house and an "affordable" private school. Why couldn't these yuppies afford to cover their own damned kids?
"Damned kids?"
Even if you don't like programs like S-CHIP, even if you don't like the choices made by the parents (which even the Wall Street Journal doesn't criticize), how vile of a human being do you have to be to refer to the children who suffered traumatic injuries in a vehicle accident as "damned kids?"
Keep in mind the Frosts made $45,000 a year - well below the $55,000 income level for a family of six in Maryland to qualify for S-CHIP assistance, and they bought the house in 1990 for $55,000. They are hardly 'yuppies' by any stretch of the imagination. The father works as a woodworker and cabinet maker while Surber has probably never done any manual labor in his life.
So even the arch-conservatives at the Wall Street Journal have no trouble with a family of modest means like the Frosts qualifying for S-CHIP. But Surber of course denounces them.
The meanspiritedness of the assault by Surber wasn't just about silencing those that speak out for Democrats. It was to send a message to people they see as their base that if you stray from the herd, this is how you'll be treated by us. Remember when George W. Bush was first inaugurated, a Washington Post reporter at an inaugural ball wrote that he realized the "handler" assigned to follow him as he interviewed guests wasn't there to watch him, but to watch what those invited from the Republican ranks said to him.
The rightwingers know that white, small business owners will identify with this family.
Here's a reminder of what now former Republican blogger John Cole wrote (via kos):
If you look through this family's dossier, it appears they are doing everything Republicans say they should be doing- hell, their story is almost what you would consider a checklist for good, red-blooded American Republican voters: they own their own business, they pay their taxes, they are still in a committed relationship and are raising their kids, they eschewed public education and are doing what they have to do to get them into Private schools, they are part of the American dream of home ownership that Republicans have been pointing to in the past two administrations as proof of the health of the economy, and so on.
In short, they are a white, lower-middle-class, committed family, who is doing EVERYTHING the GOP Kultur Kops would have you believe people should be doing. They aren't gay. They aren't divorced. They didn't abort their children. They aren't drug addicts or welfare queens. They are property owners, entrepeneurs, taxpayers, and hard-working Americans. I bet nine times out of ten in past elections, if you handed this resume to a pollster, they would think you were discussing the prototypical Republican voter. Hell, the only thing missing from this equation is membership to a church and an irrational fear of Muslims and you HAVE the prototypical Bush voter [...]
I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can't. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don't like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people's windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.
I'm registering Independent tomorrow.
God forbid Don Surber should lose his job when the Daily Mail eventually closes and he has to try to find enough money in the budget to pay for private insurance which can cost more than the mortgage each month in order to be covered should there be a catastrophic medical disaster in his family. He might have to rely on S-CHIP for his insurance even though he's striving to end the "socialistic" program - a program, by the way, that is popular with both Democratic and Republican governors across the nation. Perhaps then he won't think that it's socialism. Perhaps then he'll develop some empathy and understand.
But why would Surber attack a program so viciously that is designed to solve a real problem facing the middleclass? Why would Surber do this? In part it is because he receives wingnut welfare in the form of a Daily Mail salary for his "editorial" work when other newspapers concerned about accuracy, plagiarism and decency would have fired him.
Here's how he "updated" his post about the Frosts after other web sites fact checked his writing and demonstrated his falsehoods:
UPDATE: Desperate to stop the bleeding, Think Progress (via Memeorandum) said the Frosts pay only $500 per year in tuition and that they bought their house 16 years ago for $55,000 as a fixer-upper. That was the price of the Casa Poca 19 years ago and it hardly was a fixer upper. It was also hardly 3,000 square feet. Not addressed: The commercial building he owns. Just how TP came up with the info is beyond me. But again, priorities. Turn down free school, sign up for subsidized health insurance. Have 4 kids, live on $45,000 a year.
UPDATE: I just deleted 5 insulting comments. Liberals cannot argue the facts so they roll out the insults. I don't need the crap from anonymous libs. I made my point. Grandpa paid tuition? Why not insurance? No more comments.
Riiiiight. Because he's such an example of a master debater…
Only 14% of Kossers are insane
October 10th, 2007 by donsurber
Daily Kos asked its readers how many blogs they read. 14% said "only the Daily Kos." The results.
Posted in Lighten up | 3 Comments
But as a low man on the wingnut totem pole Surber's salary is probably lower than the Frosts' annual income. So when he attacks the middleclass, Surber is a Quisling in the economic war perpetuated on us by the Republican Party and other rightwingers.
And now even those whose boots he lick denounce him and his kind in the conservative blogosphere as an "Internet mob."
Since the extremist, rightwing rhetoric of Surber is hosted by the Charleston Daily Mail, that makes the Daily Mail newspaper part of what the Wall Street Journal called an "Internet mob."
As long as Surber works for the Daily Mail, it should be remembered that the Daily Mail smears and attacks middleclass families with injured children. Those "dubious conclusions" the Wall Street Journal mentioned were published online by the Daily Mail. A newspaper that employs someone with such a long history of "dubious conclusions" as Surber has no credibility.
Rush Limbaugh and the bottom feeders of the right recently smeared Iraq war veterans by saying those that spoke out against the war were "phony soldiers." Another veteran has joined the ranks of those opposed to the war. This time it's the former top general in Iraq:
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12- In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top American commander called the Bush administration's handling of the war incompetent and warned that the United States was "living a nightmare with no end in sight."
In one of his first major public speeches since leaving the Army in late 2006, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez blamed the administration for a "catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan" and denounced the current "surge" strategy as a "desperate" move that will not achieve long-term stability.
"After more than fours years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism," Mr. Sanchez said, at a gathering here of military reporters and editors.
General Sanchez is the most senior in a string of retired generals to harshly criticize the administration's conduct of the war. Asked following his remarks why he waited nearly a year after his retirement to outline his views, he responded that that it was not the place of active duty officers to challenge lawful orders from civilian authorities. General Sanchez, who is said to be considering a book, promised further public statements criticizing officials by name.
"There was been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders," he said, adding later in his remarks that civilian officials have been "derelict in their duties" and guilty of a "lust for power."
The White House had no initial comment.
Anyone with a brain knew the "surge" was just a way for Bush to kick the can to the next administration to clean up his mess.
Vulnerable Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, however, thought it more important to protect Bush's ego than protect American lives and national interests.
Remember this from her:
"Congress has the power of the purse, but it should not micromanage this war or any war by making decisions best left for those on the battlefield. I want our troops to come home, but I want that decision to be made by our commanders who are basing their decisions on the conditions on the ground and in what is best for the security of our nation."
Sanchez was the commander on the ground. He wasn't the one making the decisions. Bush, enabled by Capito and her ilk, hid behind the troops while thrusting them into a no-win situation.
Will Capito recant and apologize for her past remarks accusing those opposed to the war and for timelines for withdrawal were "aiding the enemy?" Is she going to say retired Lt. Gen. Sanchez is "aiding the enemy?"
Capito, who claimed to oppose the surge at one point, has voted with Bush every single time to keep the troops in Iraq.
"The administration, Congress and the entire inter-agency, especially the State Department, must shoulder responsibility for the catastrophic failure, and the American people must hold them accountable," General Sanchez said.
"Hold them accountable" means voting out Roadblock Republicans like Capito, who have voted against any efforts to try to bring peace to Iraq.
The Charleston Daily Mail's Don Surber and other rightwing chickenhawks are probably already working on their smears of Sanchez. After attacking a 12-year-old kid with traumatic injuries and his family, going after Sanchez will be a piece of cake for the 101st Keyboard Kommandos.
UPDATE: Instead of criticizing Sanchez, he criticizes a headline for accurately stating what the general said:
What he said: "The American military finds itself in an intractable situation … America has no choice but to continue our efforts in Iraq."
What was the headline: Ex-general: Iraq 'nightmare' for US
For the record, I agree with the general. We screwed up for several years. But we have no choice but to stay and win.
Here's what Sanchez said:
"There is no question that America is living a nightmare with no end in sight," Sanchez told a group of journalists covering military affairs.
Proving once again Surber is West Virginia's wanker.
It's weird how Surber says "we" must stay in Iraq to fight because the chickenhawk Surber isn't in Iraq. It's easy for him to say "we" must stay until we attain an undefined "win" because it's not his life at risk.
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