There are a few reasons why right wing politicians and their lower level minions like pundits, bloggers, commenters, Tweeters, and others are so mean.
Reason #1: It works.
Most people have a natural aversion to abusive talk There are a certain amount though that revel in it. They might take their bullying behavior from their personal life and bring it into political realm, and then finding that attitude somewhat successful, use it more or escalate it. For years people have tried to avoid being attacked on the web and there may be some (though good smart people are often attacked just because they are smart and good) that still run from it. By eliminating those good and smart people who can't stand such abuse, the right knows it gains an advantage.
Reason #2: There's money in it for creepy, mean people who may not be able to get jobs, have low level jobs, or even others why have office jobs or other situations where they can post mean stuff on the Internet while blowing off their main profession at the office. Hopefully, those types won't have jobs long. Let them earn their nickle a tweet dough from the stingy GOP backers. In fact, a couple of creepy bloggers in 2004 wrote enough lies to get John Thune into Speaker Tom Daschle's seat. I've read this also in mainstream news reports earlier in the millennium which I can't find now, but
here is a reference I can find now. I might not trust this blogger if I hadn't read the basic facts of the following quote in a CBS report earlier, and I have no idea if his or her allegations against Markos Moulitos are accurate:
Political campaigns and consultants are becoming increasingly
skillful at manipulating the mainstream press by planting stories in the
blogosphere. Despite this, the mainstream press remains credulous about
blogging. During South Dakota's U.S. Senate race between Tom Daschle
and John Thune, the Thune campaign put two local political bloggers on
its payroll. One got $27,000, the other $8,000. Their anti-Daschle
reports trickled up into South Dakota newspapers.
The lesson for a
campaign is obvious: Got a story you can't convince a mainstream
reporter to run? Leak it anonymously to a blog on your payroll. Then get
a local reporter to write a story on the controversial, gossipy, local
political blog. Soon everyone in town will be talking about the story
you leaked to the blog. Voila! Eventually a mainstream news organization
will run a story on the rumor that "everyone is talking about." Or
they'll do a "what people are buzzing about on the Internet" piece. And
no one will know that the blog post was a paid placement until after the
election.
If you see the long hours right wing haters work, and the creepy tactics they use, you know no one will ruin their lives for nothing. Maybe some are sitting in their corner offices playing the right wing game, but still they already have it good, and mostly get the kudos and privileges that being well off offers, why would you drag yourself down into the mud to do so?
Another piece of evidence I have is contact from what I believe was a paid troll. I once wrote a post on an AP report that mostly blamed Boston Big Dig contractors for myriad problems with the tunnel expressway. The fact that one of the partners was Bechtel who was also creating projects for the Bush administration in Iraq that were at the time being exposed as failures (Bechtel claims the Iraqis didn't run them well and it was the natives' incompetencies that led to the failures) may have led to my eager repetition of bad news. To make a long story short, I got an incredibly nasty reply from a "structural engineer" who claimed to have nothing to do with Bechtel, but told me of all sorts of reports (none to which he would link) that showed the glorious partners (okay glorious is my word) did everything right and it was all the fault of the government of Boston. By the end of the reply the writer was slinging verbal poo at me. So I couldn't resist since my comment box also offered the IP of the sender, I had to look it up. It was sent from the offices of Bechtel in Boston. First of all this man or woman wasn't or shouldn't have been an engineer. I believe he/she wasn't. His/her demeanor showed he/she wasn't or shouldn't have been in any area of command of such a trusted company, and I believe he/she wasn't. But somehow he/she was working at Bechtel, sending nasty notes to anyone (I assume) who repeated what was found in an AP report. Unfortunately my blog host of 51/2 years (blog-city) gave up last year on us private bloggers with our puny money and big demands and dumped us to work for business. I can hardly blame the staff there. Some of the bloggers were real jerks to the managers. But, I used to be able to link to that comment and my reply to him or her. It was hilarious.
Reason #3: By flooding the Internet with lies and abuse the GOP can even push Mainstream News to change their coverage of an incident to the right wing line. After all, mainstream news is owned and supported by the top 1%.
Who is biggest investor in the NY Times? The last I heard it was
Carlos Slim Helu', Forbes' richest man in the world this year, who made most of his money off Mexico, you know where poor people throw away their lives away working for drug cartels because it's the only job they can get, and from where people flee to the US in droves to take sub-minimum wage jobs.
It doesn't take a publication receiving many threats and lies from creepy right wing top dogs and their Internet minions much to start hiding news just after breaking it, because the right wing haters start yelling at the top of their voices. mainstream news' financial supporters really don't have that many ethics to protect, and are obviously into making big bucks over making sure their "news" is accurate.
In the case of George W. Bush's truncated service in the Texas Air National Guard (TANG), there was plenty of evidence that he actually got out of finishing even that draft dodge by failing to return to TANG to finish his service. At first, Mainstream news was all over the evidence, affirming it and investigating it, but the right and their creepy Internet ghouls came on full force, making claims that the papers recovered, were in fact, created on Microsoft Word (not available at the time) because of fonts quirks in them. The fact turned out to be that some military offices did have typewriters that could do such fonts and tricks as used in the memos proving Bush had ditched his last months of service by not returning after graduating from Harvard Business School.
Also, everyone involved who testified had told at least one person that, even if the memos were fake, the facts in them honestly represent the was W was treated while at TANG. He was given every privilege they could give to the son of a very important person and he probably had not adequately finished his TANG service. But CBS fired the woman who broke the story and later got rid of Dan Rather, one of the best newsmen ever, right up there with Edward R Murrow the guy who made courageous reports from wartime London only to have his career destroyed in the 50s because he wouldn't join the right wing hunt for "commies".
(The previous paragraph was indented for emphasis, not because it was copied from another source.)
Also see the indented paragraph in the money for bloggers section about how South Dakota bloggers were able to get Tom Daschle out of office.. It is harder for bloggers today to grab some GOP dough, as the news system is a little more skeptical of bloggers (okay they, in fact, hate us), but still good reporting is punished these days not only by bloggers, but also by the RNC and mainstream sources know their mostly conservative backers do not look kindly on anything that bolsters liberal claims. After first learning facts and reporting them, many reporters or their superiors walk them back in the face of criticism from the right.
Reason #4: Being a creepy Internet hater troll is a really bad and dangerous lifestyle. It is well known that exercise is important, yet the mean right wingers I've known in real life tend to be tweakers, or fat, showing they spend way too much time on the Internet. Late night on politcal hashtags is a tragic parody of reality with right wing haters predominating every one they've ever learned about. These people are spending way too much time online working for those nickels a tweet, quarter a forum post, or maybe a little more for an actual blog post (if they can manage that). I also suspect heavy meth or cocaine use among late night Internet troll. It would explain a lot about their lack of decorum or at least control. Some have worked their way up into more prominent r/w "news" jobs or created their own, but sometimes they don't even live very long then, because their focus on making it in the world of right wing hate talk is a dangerous lifestyle. I'm guessing most in the biz are trying to work enough to get to a place where they can afford some medical help to compensate for their dangerous addictions and avoid the fate of some.
Reason #5: The hunt for money becomes even more intense once right wingnuts get beyond the tweeting posting stage and/or want to break into the mainstream blogging, but if they want to do something really mean they will get help. The man who exposed the young House page that received sexually explicit tweets from then Republican representative Mark Foley had his name hidden in news reports, but one middle aged loser wanted to expose him and soon did. Later reports told how a prominent r/w blogger passed him information on how to see Google's cached information. (Okay you may already know this, but he didn't.) So success, and the out of luck right wing blogger, was able to expose a young Republican aide because the young man had come forward to support an even younger son of Republicans who was objecting to Foley's communications. Isn't that great, they dragged 2 of their own teens into the mud because they were pissed that Mark Foley got exposed as a sexual predator?
Yeah, pretty mean and creepy.
I've been fighting the lies from the right since the 1997 run up to the impeachment president Clinton. It is now said that the impeachment and removal charade was all manufactured to get Clinton to push for and sign the Gramm, Leach, Bliley Act, an important piece of legislation in creating the collapse and Great Recession of 2008. When I first heard of the legislation, I searched for the reason it was installed as law. Did the Republican controlled Congress ("Speaker" Gingrich was gone by the time the act passed, but the leaders that remained were just as nasty) get a veto proof majority? In fact they did. But I searched out more just in case I hadn't seen the entire picture, and in fact found that Clinton pushed Democrats to vote for the act. I thought he was just pandering to fat cats, like his Treasury Secretary, because Hillary had announced about that time her intention to run for a Senate seat from the great state of Wall Street (you know, New York) as a step (we learned later) towards running for the presidency. But others say that Clinton had to make a deal with Republicans to push for the bill so they would vote against removing him from office after the ludicrous Impeachment trial. This shows how dangerous it is to allow Republicans to gain power even in the House and Senate. No, at long last, they do not have any decency left. It is all greed and lust for power.
That's why, even if I have to go down in the mud with the paid right wing haters and trolls, it's for the future of all of those who are not the minions of the 1% and their right wing hate squads. If we ignore them, mainstream news doesn't and is free to repeat their lies. Our push back to the public and to mainstream publications helps keep right wing money from overwhelming the news system. It's a difficult job, but someone has to do it.
