Mark R. Levin
This month’s addition to the asinine shitpile has such a twisted idea of patriotism, he’d sue the government if it tried to regulate fireworks that backfired on kids. As president of the notorious Landmark Legal Foundation, Mark R. Levin has positioned himself as the new ideologue behind the conservative push for a new hard-right, antiliberal, antiunion, antiregulation America that rimjobs the rich and fucks over the rest of us.
Levin is the quintessential scumbag lawyer. His foundation has tried to use the courts to shut off funding for vital agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Education Association, claiming they’re political organs in disguise. In 2007 Landmark nominated an actual corrupt organ, Rush Limbaugh, for a Nobel Peace Prize. No shit.
As a talk-radio pit bull and phony political theorist himself, Levin has carefully cultivated the fine art of name-calling like a connoisseur of fertilizer, mixing shitheel meanness and academic euphemism to make his turd blossoms bloom. His rantings range from lazy sub-Rickles insult humor like calling Hillary Clinton “her thighness” and redubbing NOW the “National Organization of Ugly Women” to beard-stroking characterizations of “the Modern Liberal” as a “statist.”
What the fuck is a statist? Well, reading Levin, it would seem to be anyone who doesn’t hate the federal government as much as he does. Levin’s into the all-or-nothing mindset, so thinking the federal state might be good for something—like helping those who need it or stopping corporations from wrecking the planet we live on—is the same as worshiping it like a drooling, dead-eyed cult member. That’s why he picked a word that sounds like Satanist. Ain’t he clever?
It’s about as surprising as crap in a toilet that Levin gets his sphincter sucked by Fox News whenever he farts. Need someone to peddle the myth that Obama’s tax proposals will hurt everybody and that people earning over $250,000 a year aren’t rich? Call Levin. Need a nonscientist science-hater to talk about how global warming is good because it will stop a new Ice Age? Call Levin.
He once infamously spun a report in Nature magazine to claim it said “greenhouse gases (like carbon dioxide) could actually be the key to averting the chill,” so we should “just leave it alone.” Levin left out a key piece of info: The report’s authors warned explicitly against warping their words. The “findings do not mean we should stop fighting warming,” they emphasized.
The episode was a stark illustration of Levin’s favored method: Start with a rickety agenda, then cherry-pick things out of context from people smarter than you to shore it up, leaving out anything that doesn’t fit. It’s lazy and dishonest, but perfectly in character for this particular donkey’s ass.
Levin pulls the same shit in his books, honing it in Liberty & Tyranny and bloating it to farcical extremes in his follow-up, Ameritopia. Why do we care? Because these books are instant bestsellers and treated like Bibles by the hard right. The Levin gospel is worming its way into our nation’s spongiest brains like some sort of mad cow disease.
Behind all of his regurgitations of great thinkers like Plato and Locke, Levin’s just another antigovernment stooge crapping out the fantasy that the federal government is a big oppressor. Idiots who live on blind anger eat this shit up because it gives them a big target to be mad at. Life sucks because of the government. My wife won’t blow me because of the government. But you don’t hear a lot of people bitching about the government when their Social Security check arrives or when Medicare keeps them from croaking. In Levin’s view, those programs are stages in the “unmaking of America” drafted by evil “masterminds” like Presidents Roosevelt and Johnson.
Levin counters the need for government by claiming that Americans are noble people who angelically blend self-serving individualism with compassion. Leave them alone and they’ll do the right thing. Who’s being utopian now? How many of Levin’s ideal Americans sit in Wall Street’s greed-driven boardrooms or in the offices of health insurers deciding on who should get care and who should be left twisting in the dirt? Levin’s true assholery lies in making valid points about the dangers of utopian thinking that would apply to any political party or system, then gluing them ineptly to his own antiliberal platitudes. We all want our government to act like the perfect neighbor: Leave us the fuck alone until we need its help. That’s true no matter who the President is. But Levin knows that nonpartisan analysis is headed for the pulp bin the day after it comes out. Spewing angry, lopsided dogma devoid of all nuance? That shit pays all day long.
There are, of course, people who pray for utopia every day. They just have another name for it: heaven. So why isn’t Ameritopia about the Religious Right’s dream of turning this country into an antifreedom theocracy? Because that isn’t Levin’s agenda. He writes sentences like “only an army of drones is capable of building a rainbow to paradise.” No, he’s not talking about Billy Graham’s mindless hordes or even crazed Justin Bieber fans. He’s talking about people who fight for social causes!
According to Levin, “the Modern Liberal believes in the supremacy of the state, thereby rejecting the principles of the Declaration [of Independence] and the order of the civil society.” We’ve met plenty of liberals, including ourselves. Not one of them would salute “the supremacy of the state.”
That is, unless it decides to defund Mark R. Levin by suing his lying balls off. Then we’re statists for life!
