You, Too, Can Be Terry Krepel
21 September 2009
— an Update to THIS
COLUMN
As we’ve discussed previously in Stiletto, Terry Krepel is a
somewhat… shall we say rationally
challenged liberal
blogger whose tiny tripod page serves as the virtual headquarters for
his self-appointed “watchdog” function — an alleged mandate that he
takes very seriously in his “job” to “criticize the critics.”
Pursuant to this weighty mandate, Terry monitors those
nefarious conservatives — among them, he seems to be most excited
about Joseph Farah and WorldNetDaily, for whom I write a
weekly
column called Technocracy
— who dare to inflict their libertarian, conservative, and Republican
-compatible opinions on readers of the Internet.
As it turns out, it’s very easy to be Terry. The
ConWebBlog is a trainwreck from which I simply cannot turn away.
Almost every post is so easily shot down, refuted, knocked
over, or otherwise pushed around that I feel like a sixth-grade bully
on an elementary school playground. (Come to think of it, there’s
probably something to that comparison, as Terry Krepel exhibits a level
of reasoning ability more appropriate to a small child than to an adult
commentator.)
After shamelessly indulging my sense of masochistic horror by
reading ConWebBlog repeatedly (no doubt causing Terry Krepel’s hit
count to surge, which I suppose cannot be helped), I came to the
conclusion that there’s a very simple formula to being Terry.
You, too, can be Terry Krepel, and we’re going to show you
how. Simply follow the seven guidelines herein and your posts
will be indistinguishable
from Terry’s. Ready? Let’s begin.
1. Use the word “Tout.”
Use it a lot.
A perusal of Terry’s blog produced the following
list. Judge for yourself. On
the
first page alone of ConWebBlog on 22 September, a scan for the word
“tout” produced the following quotes and headlines written by Terry
Krepel:
-
“…was translated by the MRC as a ‘touting’ of Lenin…”
(though we’ll grant this one is a quote) -
“A Sept. 21 Newsmax article by Dave Eberhart touted a
speech by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher at the…” -
Washington’s Sept. 15 column was yet another act of
literary fellatiio on Michael Savage… touting an invitation by the
Cambridge Union Society…” -
NewsBusters Touts Another Dubious Poll
-
“A Sept. 17 NewsBusters post by Terry Trippany touts a
Towers Perrin survey claiming that…” -
“But like the similarly anti-reform Investor’s Business
Daily poll NewsBusters touted earlier in the week…” -
“…A Sept. 17 interview by WorldNetDaily/Radio America’s
Greg
Corombos of Peter Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union touted the memo
while failing…”
Clearly, touting
is very, very important to Terry Krepel. You
cannot expect to be Terry Krepel unless you use the word “tout” as
frequently as possible.
2. Use the word
“whitewash.” Use it a lot.
In a similar vein, Terry uses the word “whitewash” constantly.
This is somehow significant in the way that what you see in a
Rorschach test is significant, but I’m not sure what that really means.
It may mean that Terry’s mother did not hug him enough. I
don’t know. I’ll spare you the list. A casual reading of a
few
pages of
the ConWebBlog will suffice to substantiate this point.
3. Use the word “lie.”
Use it a lot.
Allow me to paraphrase Terry Krepel’s blog:
Conservatives lie. Republicans lie. Everyone at
WorldNetDaily lies. The people who write for NewsMax are lying.
Libertarians are liars. Everyone who voted for George W.
Bush is a liar. Everyone who didn’t vote for Barack Obama is a liar.
Anyone who criticizes President Obama is lying. Oh, and
they’re all racists. All those liars are also racists. But
more importantly, they’re liars. Everyone who has ever disagreed with
me, Terry Krepel, is a liar. Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. Lie,
lie-ty-lie, lie-diddly-lie. Liar. Pants on fiar. Lie.
You lie. Everyone who isn’t me lies. You’re all
liars. And racists. But mostly liars. Conservatives
lie. Lie.
There. Refer to Rule 4.
4. Whenever you disagree
with an opinion, call it a lie, even
if there’s nothing to substantiate this claim. Refer to Rule 3.
In Terry Krepel’s irrational universe, any opinion with which he
disagrees is automatically a lie. It doesn’t matter if there’s
nothing to substantiate falsehood on the part of the person at whom
Terry is pointing an accusing figure. No, the mere act of
disagreeing with Terry is prima facie evidence of a lie. We talked about this in this column.
5. Feign outrage.
If you cannot address an opinion,
seize on an irrelevant passage used for emphasis, and pretend to find
it strange or upsetting.
On Friday, September 18, Terry Krepel titled one of his blog
posts,
“Erik Rush Discovers Gay Sex.” He quotes a passage from one
of
Mr. Rush’s columns in which Rush says, “Apparently, shouting at the
president is objectionable, but his collectively sodomizing the
American people in perpetuity is acceptable as long as it is done with
a sense of decorum.” Terry further objects to a previous Rush
column in which Erik says, “Indeed — like the proverbial cellblock
rapist, our president is ‘ramming’ as much of his Marxist agenda down
our collective throats as quickly as he can.”
This, according to Terry, is an outrage, and a homophobic
outrage at
that, for Mr. Rush clearly has an obsession with gay sex acts.
It
could not possibly be that the idea of your goverment “screwing you” is
a common turn of phrase in popular culture; it could not ever be the case
that Erik Rush thinks we are being force-fed Marxism by the president
and he is using colorful language to make that point graphically.
No, in Terry Krepel’s outraged eyes, it must be that Erik Rush has
only just ‘discovered’ gay sex.
Now, using Terry Krepel’s often incorrectly employed “logic,” Terry Krepel is a racist and a homophobe.
This is because Erik Rush is black, and any criticism of a black
man or woman, an organization that employs black men and women, or a
president who happens to be black is always racism, at least according to Terry Krepel himself.
But… wait. There’s more. It seems
that the title of one of Terry Krepel’s most recent entries should
actually read…
Terry Krepel Discovers Oral Sex
…because, it would seem, it is okay to use colorful language
for
graphic emphasis when your targets are those eeeevil conservatives.
Terry Krepel makes no attempt to hide his hypocrisy when he
posts
the following article, apparently objecting to a positive commentary on
Michael Alan “Savage” Weiner:
I mean, not to put too indelicate a point on it, but
“fluffing” is
the practice of …er… preparing the actors in porn movies for their scenes,
and of course Mr. Washington’s alleged (and hopefully metaphorical)
fellating of Mr. Weiner is the act of oral sex. Exactly how
is
this different than using the metaphorical language that Erik Rush did
in the column Terry Krepel found so horribly, horribly objectionable?
The answer is, it isn’t. It isn’t different at all. Terry Krepel is just a hypocrite. In the world of Terry Krepel, you see, all
pornographic
metaphors are equal, but some pornographic metaphors are more equal
than others.
6. Be blissfully unaware
of sarcasm, metaphor, and idiom. Take everything
literally, then claim it’s a lie. Refer to Rule 3.
This brings us back to Rule 5, but Terry employs this method so much it deserves to be heard again.
7. Refer to Rule 3, because
conservatives lie. Did we mention that conservatives lie?
Because conservatives lie.
By following these simple guidelines, you, too, can be Terry
Krepel. It isn’t that hard. It really isn’t that
hard at all.
It just isn’t terribly pleasant, is all. >>