Deleted Comments Of The Week: We Are Illiterate Illegal Parasites In Prison. Science Fact!

Since Disqus has brought us a bunch of new commenters (Hi! Welcome To The Monkeyhouse! Play nice! ), we'd just like to 'splain why we moderate comments in the first place, instead of allowing unfettered Free Speach: It's because we are big believers in the First Amendment, which gives us the right to run our little mommyblog/recipe hub/Pony appreciation society however the hell we want to. It's our parlor, and if we choose not to invite someone in because they're intent on muddying up the carpet and shitting on the credenza, or even if we don't like their Gadsden Flag t-shirt, that's our business. Don't like it? Do some Free Enterprise and offer the Editrix an obscene amount of money to buy the site so you can change how things work. (We hear she'll only sell if the staff get some pretty impressive golden parachutes.)

Our Star Deletion of the week goes to "Mike," who was kissed by the Banhammer of Loving Correction after a really tiresome stream of repetitive libertarian-inflected comments on our story about Richard Mack, the "Constitutional Sheriff" who didn't bother getting health insurance because he's a self-employed rabble-rouser, and didn't sign up for insurance through Obamacare because Tyranny. But now that he and his wife have serious healthcare issues, they've asked for donations, and are getting quite a few from bleeding-heart liberals (who are urging him to use the money to buy insurance on the ACA exchange).

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Mike wanted us to know that this is only right and just, because individual giving is admirable but taxation is theft, even if the tax-based system lowers costs and improves healthcare for more people, because what didn't you idiots understand about FREEDOM? We won't bring you all of his brilliance, because you can find it on pretty much any libertarian website anywhere. But here's a sampling; most of them posted as replies to other comments (which Wonkette does not allow). Let's start off with some First Principles:

• Let me try to explain this as simply as I can.

  I force you to pay for my medical care against your will: BAD

  I ask for help and you voluntarily contribute to my medical care: GOOD

  Given the difference between the way Jerry Lewis raises money for those in need and the way Barack Obama does, I'll take Jerry any day.

• There are two ways to get someone to do something for you, voluntarily or by force. Everyone here seems to think force is OK, Mack does not. If he signed up for ACA you'd all be calling him a hypocrite right now.

  Constitutional sheriff + unconstitutional mandate = not playing your game.

OK, buddy, if you're taking Jerry Lewis, then could you convince him to release The Day the Clown Cried? It needs to be seen. And if Richard Mack bought insurance through Obamacare, we wouldn't call him a hypocrite -- we'd call him slightly smarter than he used to be.

Ah, but what about the social contract? To live in a complex technological society where some will inevitably not be able to get famous enough that a GoFundMe campaign will pay for their dialysis, isn't healthcare just one more benefit of that social compact, like roads, education, the Internet? Don't be such a simpleton! Taxation is force, which is immoral!

• Libertarians don't want society's "benefits", they largely want to be left alone. You really need to educate yourself on the topic before spouting off.

• Enjoy them? I pay for them. More than they should cost and against my will. I'll be happy when we turn all of them off that government has no delegated authority to engage in.

• Just because you happen to like what government does for you, that doesn't mean everyone does. Just because you are OK with them exceeding their delegated authority, doesn't mean everyone is.

  "The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it."

  --John Hay:

Ultimately, Mike gets to the true Libertarian understanding of the social contract: There is none, only a lot of individual transactions:

• I'm happy to pay the cost of civilization to those who's products and services I choose to take advantage of. What I object to is being forced to pay for things I don't want or need.

Needless to say, there's the mandatory fetishizing of the Founding Fathers, who conveniently all agree with Libertarians because they ghostwrote Ayn Rand:

• We started off free. We made a horrible detour into tyranny then along came the United States and we moved back in the direction of freedom. We would continue making progress in that direction if folks would quit using the government's monopoly on the use of force to impose their will on others.

Will you be surprised that Mike is unimpressed that the Supreme Court said that the ACA was constitutional? That is because the Supreme Court itself has been acting unconstitutionally since 1803:

• Nice try. The Constitution does not empower the Supreme Court with judicial review, that assumption of authority was made by the court itself in Hylton v. United States (1796) and asserted formally in Marbury v. Madison (1803).

  Assumptions of inferred power are not Constitutional.

Oh, come now, don't pretend you didn't see that one coming. We bet you couldn't have predicted this, either: Among the few personal details Mike shared with us in his brief visit, we learned that he has "a degree in engineering" and has "been a professional in the aerospace industry for almost 30 years." Also, he is a member of MENSA, so you just stop calling him dumb, will you?

"ConservativeFactCheck" shared some similar sentiments on the same piece, albeit at mercifully less length:

if I can offer an alternate view... this is a big-picture item. ObamaCare may help people on an individual level, but at the cost of everybody's freedom.

Also... Sheriff Mack is getting the help he needs. It's not really irony; it shows that people can opt not to get health insurance and still get the help they need.

See? It's easy! All you have to do to get adequate healthcare in this country is to become infamous for advocating violence against elected authority, set up a GoFundMe, and people will throw money at you like crazy. If you aren't especially good at getting on national TV for suggesting that the women and children get shot first, then you may have a tougher row to hoe, but those are the breaks.

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On a totally different topic, someone with the Moniker "BigFurHat" didn't cotton to being told that Republicans need to "own" their loony wing -- the Glenn Becks, the Alex Joneses, the creationists and all. It was in a thread about James O'Keefe, but by then, no, O'Keefe wasn't even under discussion. BigFurHat was OK with "owning" creationists, because they're good people, unlike all liberals everywhere:

What am I owning??? Me monkey boy, is owning what? Religious people. How terrible that I have to own that.

Now own this:

The left is populated by felons, illiterates and illegals, all of which are parasitical.

Care to own that?

Why does the left insist they are made up entirely of intellectuals?

Why do they forget about their core constituency, which is largely people whose 3rd language is English, drop-outs, and the incarcerated.

Own it.

Damn, they're on to us. Maybe we'd better rethink holding our meetings at the Convicted Parasites ESL Tutoring Club.

And we finally got a visit from a follower of the Former Stupidest Man on the Internet, not that you could have guessed from her username, "For My Liberty." Or from the all-caps. For My Liberty didn't much care for our piece on a PPP poll showing that a lot of Republicans believe some pretty weird shit, such as the majority of Republicans who liked the idea of establishing Christianity as the national religion. WELL! Even though neither our piece nor the PPP poll actually mentioned the widespread belief that Obama is a Muslim, For My Liberty was pretty ticked off that we covered up the TRU TRUTH:

To the DUMB ASS Author of this piece...TYPICAL LIBERAL BULLSHIT---.TELL ALL THE FACTS!!! MAJORITY OF DEMS think the POS isn't a "Christian" either!! Guess that makes THEM "Idiots" and "Dumber than a hammer" too??? http: //www.thegatewaypundit.com... 

Well SHAME ON US for not including the results of a wholly different survey in an article that wasn't about that topic! Then again, both the Wonkette piece and the Gateway Pundit piece have "Shock" in the headline, so maybe For My Liberty thought that both articles were reporting on the respected work of the Shock Polling organization. And for what it's worth, that other survey, from 2014, showed that 45% of Democrats said that Obama was "Christian," while 17% thought he was "spiritual" and 26% answered "I don't know." The real news in the survey, of course, was that 54% of Republicans believe Obama is Muslim -- and only 10% of the Democrats surveyed thought that. The researcher also had some interesting thoughts about how the phrasing of the question led to some very different results from other polls, so while the Gateway Pundit story was garbage, the WaPo piece it was taken from was actually worth a read. So thanks, idiot who's dumber than a bag of hammers!

Still, we've learned our lesson. Whenever we report on a poll from here on in, we'll make darn sure we scour the web for some results on a completely unrelated topic from a poll conducted by other researchers.