Colmes on Santorum

Paul K. writes:

I certainly dislike a number of liberal pundits, but Alan Colmes has always struck me as particularly loathsome, not so much for his views as for his base character. That character was on display on a Fox News program when Colmes mocked Rick Santorum for taking his stillborn child home from the hospital so that its brothers and sisters could see it before it was buried. For once I was impressed with Rich Lowry as he took Colmes to task. In the attached screen-grab, we see Colmes leaning back, arm crossed, trying to look bored and indifferent as Lowry chastises him.

Saying that voters wouldn’t like Santorum once they learned more about him, Colmes had stated as an example, “Once [voters] get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his two-hour-old baby who died right after childbirth home and played with it for a couple of hours so his other children would know that the child was real.”

When questioned about Colmes’ comment, Santorum said: “It was so important … for the family to recognize the life of that child and for the children to know they had a brother. To some who don’t recognize the dignity of all human life, who see it as a blob of tissue … this is somehow weird, recognizing the humanity of your son. Somehow weird, somehow odd and should be subject to ridicule.”

By the way, I’ll never forget how despicably Colmes treated you when you were a guest on his radio show, deliberately twisting your words in the most shameless fashion.

LA replies:

What he did was despicable, but he didn’t exactly twist my words. He tried to make me responsible for something a Mexican writer had said. Namely the writer had (approvingly!) referred to Mexicans as a mass of insects (or something like that) moving relentlessly on the United States, and Colmes said to me: “Do you think they’re insects?” I was so shocked by his question, in which he was trying to associate me with a statement I hadn’t made, and requiring me to dissociate myself from it, that I refused to answer, and he and I were at loggerheads for a couple of minutes over it.

Colmes is one of the reasons not to watch Fox. It’s ostensibly conservative or at least non-liberal, yet keeps all these liberals on its on-air staff and Colmes is the worst. He is both base and remarkably stupid.

- end of initial entry -

Paul K. writes:

I recall the statement in question as being that Mexicans were making their way into the United States in a steady “ant-like” fashion. Colmes seized on this, accusing you of considering the Mexican immigrants insects. You tried to reason with him, explaining that someone can be described as doing something in ant-like fashion without being called an insect, but he felt he had clearly won the debate. What a slimy creep.

LA replies:

There aren’t many people I would say that about, but he really is.

LA writes:

You wrote:”For once I was impressed with Rich Lowry…”

In the screen shot you sent, Lowry looks like an adult for once, not like a gawky kid in a dorm room bull session.

Karl D. writes:

Some liberals themselves can’t stand Colmes. I remember some liberal referring to him once as the cartoon character “Droopy Dog” which I thought was spot on.

LA replies:

But Droopy Dog has some appeal. Colmes has none.

Karl replies:

Hah. True.

Paul Nachman writes:

Nicely assembled in this Allan Wall article:

“The Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska affirmed today that Mexico is presently recovering the territories lost in the past to the United States, thanks to emigration. ‘The people of the poor, the lice-ridden and the cucarachas are advancing in the United States, a country that wants to speak Spanish because 33.4 million Hispanics impose their culture’ affirmed Poniatowska …”” El Imparcial [23]” (July 3rd, 2001),

and:

“A peaceful mass of people, hardworking, carries out slowly and patiently an unstoppable invasion … You cannot give me a similar example of such a large migratory wave by an ant-like multitude, stubborn, unarmed, and carried on in the face of the most powerful and best-armed nation on earth.

I don’t remember if your article on “The Second Mexican War” included either of those quotes.

LA replies:

I think I quoted the second one, and that’s the one Colmes turned around and tried to make me responsible for. It was bizarre beyond words. Poniatowska was boasting that the Mexicans, proceeding as an “anti-like multitude,” will conquer the U.S. But Colmes, being a knee-jerk liberal whose only concern is that somehwere in the world someone is being “discriminated” against, instead of seeing the “ant-like multitude” image as the threat to the U.S. that Poniatowska intended it to be, saw the possible “discriminatory” meaning in the remark and tried to put me on the spot for it, simply because I had quoted it. This took PC pathology to a new level.

While Colmes is an extreme example, there are many liberals like him—people who are devoid of intellectual conscience and will stop at nothing to twist statements into a meaning helpful to the liberal agenda.

JC in Houston writes:

I think you’re referring to the comment by (Polish born) Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowsksa to the effect that

“The common people—the poor, the dirty, the lice ridden, the cockroaches are advancing on the United States, a country that needs to speak Spanish because it has 33.5 million Hispanics who are imposing their culture.” That said, whenever I happen to hear Colmes on Fox I switch off the channel. He is such a smarmy, smug ultraleftist, almost a caricature of the type.

Paul K. writes:

I looked up your post about your appearance on the Alan Colmes Show in 2006:

You wrote:

For example, when he kept going after me about the “ant-like multitudes” quote from a Mexican writer, demanding that I dissociate myself from a remark made not by me but by our enemies, which kind of blew my mind, which was why I refused to answer, afterwards I thought of the response I would like to have given:

“Alan, it’s not me, it’s a Mexican writer and a Mexican newspaper that describe the Mexican people as an ant-like multitude coming to take over the United States. That’s the way the Mexican people see themselves. That’s the way they understand themselves. So, given that the Mexicans speak of themselves as an ant-like multitude invading the U.S., what do you think that we ought to do about that?”

I wish I had asked him that.

Here’s another reply I wish I had thought of at the time. After he kept badgering me about whether I believed the Mexicans are an ant-like multitude, I finally said, “Of course the Mexicans are human beings, but they are human beings who don’t belong in our country, they belong in their own country.” That wasn’t bad, but here’s something that would have been better:

“Of course they are human beings, but they are human beings who are peons, and a population of millions of peons will turn us into a peon-like country.”

BTW, my response to the post was the first comment I made at VFR, if I recall correctly.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 03, 2012 12:08 PM | Send