HGotW: Matthew Walther (& the NYTimes)

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with conservative, religious twats, and the motherfucking NY Times? You should be fearing the return of Trump in the fall, not paving the path for his return.

This dude totally clicks on the “Pussy in Bio” links on Twitter…

Date: Thursday, July 4th, the 248th anniversary of the “founding” of the country, and what does the paper of record publish? An OpEd penned by Matthew Walther, a twatwaffle associated with Hillsdale College, and an editor of The Lamp, a spooge filled journal on Catholic Literacy, that is currently titled “Why I won’t Vote”

Of course, it wasn’t called that yesterday when it was originally published, but instead, it has been re-titled a few times to address the incredulity and absolute fucking wall of criticisms.

This is version 2 of the title, from the Internet Archive

The original version, yeah, it is even fucking worse. Imagine the editors of opinion seeing this Wednesday afternoon around tea time, and saying “Yeah, let’s run with this…

Thanks to Wonkette for their great post on this:

Conservative New York Times Choad Proud To Not Vote, Please Don't Notice All The Times He Voted

Because “Choad” is the perfect term for this waste of a sperm and egg.

The article starts strong for an incel who is really upset that the Stacy’s don’t dig him…

Abstinence is having what I believe is called a moment. Everywhere a vast literature of self-denial proclaims the benefits of not drinking, not eating carbohydrates, not having sex, not watering one’s lawn. Practically the only thing from which the American people are not serially asked to refrain happens to be the one vice that I have managed to renounce, in my case with very little difficulty. I mean, of course, voting.

Not much of a surprise given the title jiu-jitsu the editors have executed. How does this religion soaked brain donor back this stellar opening volley? Why with how pointless it is to vote…

“Why does anyone vote?” I ask myself. The answer cannot be that we believe that by doing so, we will influence the outcome of an election. My vote, were it not withheld, would have no such effect. This is true even at the county or municipal level. The vote margins for the State of Florida in the presidential election of 2000 — the closest in modern American history — were in the hundreds, not the single digits. Voting is, strictly speaking, pointless.

So, let me get this straight, because the margins are always more than 1 or even a few votes, he extrapolates that ergo, his vote is meaningless, so whether he voted for Biden, or Trump, or Tulsi Gabbard, it is a wasted exercise.

I guess that he as a prototypical mediocre white male has divined that he really doesn’t need to worry about the results, and thus he can just take a pass…

Oh, what is that, he really votes afterall?

Color me surprised that he really isn’t practicing what he is preaching. Sorta like all those televangelists and mega church child-raping pastors…

I was going to write something like this, but instead, I will just copy-pasta it from The Wonkette’s article (c.f. above link) as Monsieur Walther also writes for The Conservative, and well, he had thoughts there where he bitched about the struggles to vote…

We know the Times is busy, but someone should really try to keep an eye on what its regular contributors are writing at other outlets. Like this piece Walther wrote for The American Conservative in 2022, after he had started contributing to the Times, where he discussed all the voting he has tried to do, only to be thwarted by his own laziness:

When I arrived at what I thought was my designated polling place, I was turned away at the door. According to the designated election watchers, a pair of gray-haired lady librarian Democrats of a kind that is now vanishingly rare, I was not registered in that ward. Moreover, they said, my driver’s license was expired. They simply could not allow me to cast even a provisional ballot.

So he tried to vote without looking up where, learned his lesson, and then got everything in order so he could vote in the next election, yes?

Ha ha ha, no. He moved to Washington DC for a few years, then moved back to Michigan, where a clerk at the DMV forgot to ask him if he wanted to register to vote while he was obtaining his new driver’s license. So then this happened:

This meant that a few years later when I tried to slip away from work for a few minutes to vote for Tulsi Gabbard in the 2016 Michigan Democratic Primary, I was once again denied my “voting rights.”

Pesky having to register to vote, to vote! Yr Wonkette would like to thank the anonymous and incompetent Michigan DMV clerk for her service.

Then there was this, written, like the rest of the post, in the haughty and snarky tone of one who discovered contrarianism at the age of 12 and has yet to outgrow it:

I am solemnly assured by Democratic politicians, including our president during his recent trip to Georgia, that both of these seemingly anodyne incidents were not the consequences of my own laziness (and low-grade criminality) but privations worthy of Jim Crow.

For you, a white man in Michigan, no. For Black Americans, particularly in Southern states like Georgia, where we once again would note is where the president was speaking? Yes, in those places there has been a concerted effort to deprive people of this right for over a century and a half on the flimsiest of pretexts. Christ, read any history book written since, oh, 1880 or so.

Huh, so it is like the Times has this douchenozzle on their stringer staff, periodically vomiting up a quasi-catholic centric OpEd to provide “balance”, but they did nada fact checking.

Look, because this cum-guzzler is too fucking lazy to properly register to vote, and to validate said registration, or even to report to the correct fucking polling site, he is suddenly an authority on the superfluous-ness of the act of voting, on the goddamn celebration of Independence day to boot! Christ on a crouton.

Back to the Times piece. He seems to wander around in the weeds of “civic duty”, and patriotism in some really fucked up ways:

If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, civic duty is surely the first. Some version of the civic-duty line is trotted out by the sort of do-gooder who hands out voter registration forms to strangers — an activity I find as off-putting as I would an invitation to sit down and fill out a handgun permit.

So, GOTV activities are as friction-filled as an invitation to fill out a handgun permit. What a fucking baby.

Oh, wait, so he finally gets to the obfuscated point. All this “civic duty” this, and “society benefit” that, he pops up with the fact that encouraging the youngs, and the low information voters leads to more liberal candidates being victorious.

Civic duty is also the implicit appeal of avowedly neutral advertising campaigns meant to induce young people and other so-called low-information or reluctant voters to cast ballots. Would it be too cynical to suggest that when MTV first encouraged viewers to “rock the vote” in the early 1990s, it did not envision a landslide re-election for George H.W. Bush? When activist stickers tell us to “just vote,” do they mean a straight Republican ticket? Surely if you thought a candidate was a harbinger of the end of democracy, you would urge anyone you thought likely to support him to “just do anything else.”

I am surprised he didn’t offer up the canard that the country went to hell when we extended the franchise to women. This waste of skin then hs this doozy to finish the piece:

Of all the arguments ever made to me in favor of exercising the franchise, I am fondest of the one about how people who don’t vote don’t get to complain about politicians. This is not because it makes sense to me. (Surely you are in the same position vis-à-vis a bad president whether you voted for him or not.) I like it simply because it makes me think of my great-grandmother. More than half a century ago, she would find herself saying to my great-grandfather: “Get off the davenport, buster. It’s time to go cancel each other’s votes.” (She was an aspirational Rockefeller Republican, he an unflagging United Automobile Workers Democrat.) As she saw it, voting was a kind of license that allowed you to say whatever you liked about the people in charge.

With all apologies to Great-Grandma Ruth, this seems to me not just wrong but exactly backward. Among the benefits of living in a country like this one — one of the few unambiguously good things, in fact — is that we are free to think anything or nothing about our leaders, who are in their present position not because they were crowned, anointed or even clever enough to carry off a coup d’état. They are there because of us, regardless of what millions of us did or didn’t do in November.

Wait, because his great grandmother and grandfather were opposites, that the family was a net nil is his reason to not vote? Or is it because he’s a lazy fuck? Or because he is a member of the patriarchy, and he probably expects his wife to vote how he fucking tells her?

Whatever my dude, you do you. I will finish with this final pull-quote from the Wonkette piece:

Maybe the Times piece should have been titled “Why I’m Totally Voting But Would Prefer It If the Mostly Liberal Readership of the Times Did Not Vote,” which seems to us to be much more telling about what is going on here.

Bingo.

What the FUCK is wrong with you NY Times?

Seriously, are you that butthurt because Biden refused to sit for an extended interview, apparently some birthright of Arthur Gregg Sulzberger that you publish this shite on Independence day?

Look, I pay for the Times, and I will continue to do so, because of the actual reporting, but the cast and crew of the editorial staff, and the stable (or is it a sty?) of opinion columnists is just the fucking worst

Seriously, you are all in on ensuring Trump is victorious in the fall, and you are paving the way to cash in on the hate reads.

I hope that when the partisan hacks on the currently constituted SCOTUS nullifies NYT v. Sullivan, and you suddenly need to raise your annual subscription fees to $10,000 per subscriber to afford the army of lawyers for all the cases that the conservative cretins are preparing to sue you for libel, well, you will totally fucking deserve it.

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