Happy Valentine’s Day: An Obscene Phone Call From A WIngnut

As part of my ongoing daily-letter-to-the-editor-on-climate-change resolution (now over 400 letters without missing a day!), I sent something recently to the Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal. It was printed this morning and can be read here .

This evening I arrived home after spending much of the afternoon in a snowball fight with my daughter and one of her friends.

And the telephone rang.

And without further ado, the caller at the other end exploded into an obscenity-filled rant about “you Mother****ing liberals,” threatened to kick my ass, and continued in a single run-on sentence (that included a few words about how “it’s ‘weather,’ not ‘climate,’ you liberal P**ce of S**t” before hanging up.

*69 yielded a telephone number, and I did a reverse lookup on the number. Google is your friend.

The telephone number showed up on a bunch of those “who’s behind the unwanted call” websites (invariably delivering obscene screeds in response to something in the paper):

March 5, 2008:

called and left harassing vmail over letter to editor in milw journal

October 30, 2008:
Received a nasty four-letter studded screed from a male at this number after my opinion letter appeared in today’s Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel. Glad to know I’m in good company.

December 15, 2008:

Guy left a message in response to my wife’s editorial in Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel. He was excessively obscene, and he used derogatory sexual language when referring to my wife. Then he starts calling Obama the N-word, which was strange because the article had nothing to do with Obama. It was also not particularly political in content. The guy has issues.

June 25, 2010:

My wife picked up our home phone and inquired as to who was calling after finding a voice mail for myself. When she called back,a man with a very rough voice he started screaming at her, shouting epithets and profanities about my views expressedin a recent letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal.
I have reported this to the Village police department, visited the Distrct attorney’s office and after doinig a special google search, received a cell phone # and name. I urge anyone abused by this possible lunatic to immediately notify the phone cppmany and local law enforcement officers. Based on CCAP, a person with the same name was the subject of a violation of a domestic abuse injunction.domestic abuse injunction and could be dangerous.I will be sharing evidence of this with the Village police this afternoon.
If you value your rights of free speech, I urge you to do everything in your power to punish this political ticking time bomb for your own safety and the safety of our communities

Wow.

I looked further. Lo and behold, there was a real-estate listing for a house for sale by owner, with that number listed.

This 3100 square foot single family home has 4 bedrooms and 3.0 bathrooms. It is located at 6****** Ln N*********, Wisconsin.

Entering that address brought me a name, and the name was connected to a rant in a Wisconsin blog. Check this out :

Soglin you are a cut and run liberal piece of shit, from the 60’s to your mayorship of the peoples Republic of Madison in the 80’s and 90’s. Bush HAS never lied the 46 billon need for our valient war in Iraq is TOTALLY neccessary, and unlike your socialist mind would never be spent on socialized medicine, welfare programs etc, even if there were no war. That is the true disconnect of your clueless arguments. The only nightmare is that you continue to be a coward. The world is already in WW111 you cluesless idiots, we are in the beginning stages of a 100 years war on our fight on terrorism. We can not appease, listen, understand, feel there pain etc, terrorist must be hunted down, destroyed by whatever means possible, and Bush and patriotic Americans have a blank check to do it. Soglin, your like Neville chamberlain at the 1938 Munich Conference when Hitler was appeased, in the name of “peace” cowards like chaimberlain and your ilk were responsible for 10 of millons of murders, the holocust etc, because the world did not start WW11 in 1938, rather than September of 1939. Soglin, you and your liberal ilk are guiltu of treason.
T******** K********
(address redacted)

New Berlin, city the supported Bush in 2004 by a 74-26% margin

This is definitely my guy. And tomorrow I’m going to the police in my town with all this information, and I’m filing a complaint against Mr. K*******.

Hope your Valentine’s Day was less eventful than mine!

The Very Definition of Conservative Veriphobia

My letter to the Jakarta Times got picked up by a Colorado Conservablogger.

This is a good one, friends. It’s headlined:

“The Very Definition of America-Hating Liberal Guilt”

Then he cites my letter published in the Jakarta Times a few days ago.

To refresh your memory, I wrote:

As a US citizen, I must accept responsibility for my own nation’s abject failure to take responsibility for its actions.

As the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases and as the enabler of a consumerist lifestyle which, if left unchecked, is absolutely certain to submerge the planet in giga tons of toxic trash, the United States has been the driving force behind the climate crisis.

Unfortunately, my country’s responsibilities are unlikely to be met any time soon, for we are in the grip of a political crisis brought about by a national exaltation of demagoguery and ignorance.

Thus our governing bodies are riddled with arrogant men and women who dismiss scientific expertise as irrelevant, preferring the comforts of ancient superstition.

Global warming’s realities are terrifying. But as citizens of ocean states can attest, ignoring those facts will surely lead to outcomes beside which our nightmares will pale into insignificance.

Warren Senders
Medford, Massachusetts

And here’s Colorado Right’s response, with my interpolations:

So we start off with a line that could be lifted from just about any Barack Oprompter speech outside the US apologizing for their country.

Whereas Conservatives know that taking responsibility, either for your own actions or those of your country, is totally wimpy and self-hating! America doesn’t have to take responsibility for what it does, because WE’Z NUMBAR WUN!

Indeed. We’re Number One in the production of trash, for one thing, which is another way of saying America is tops in the world at subtracting value from things (that’s what trash is, right? Stuff from which value has been removed.).

Anyway, USA ROOLZ, just because we can.

Next:

Breast beating about how we use lots of energy since we manufacture and consume so much that our economy is still 20% of global world output. In other words – we generate more economic activity and energy in 2 days than the entire country of Indonesia does in a year. Yeah, that’s something to be really sorry about.

And how much of that manufacturing and consumption is for stuff that, y’know, actually adds value to the world? Just because you pay money for the gas you burn while your Hummer idles outside the coffeeshop doesn’t make it an actual contribution of anything except greenhouse gases.

And the point I was making is of course that if we’re the ones generating all the pollution, we should be the ones taking responsibility for cleaning it up. And, furthermore, if a country like Indonesia, with a carbon footprint that’s less than a rounding error, finds its actual existence imperiled because of rising sea levels (triggered by climate change brought about by greenhouse emissions), then we have a moral responsibility to address the problem, rather than just shouting “USA ROOLZ!!”

Which loops me back to the issue of responsibility, addressed above.


Islamic foreigners think the US is Satan anyway – so knocking your own country as “a national exaltation of demagoguery and ignorance” and “riddled with arrogant men and women who dismiss scientific expertise as irrelevant” will make them feel so good about you. Of course you little knock about ancient superstition – does that include say Islamic beliefs about having 4 wives and marrying off your 9 year old girls?

When faced with irrefutable facts, what do you do?

YIKES SKAREEE MOOOOOOSLIMS!!!!! ZOMG!!!! OH NOEZ!!!!

Mind you, I hold all the Abrahamic sects in more or less equal regard.

Here’s a conditional for you: If America’s founders had been Islamic schismatics in search of a new place to carry on their particular version of their particular version of the tribal creed, and their descendants had written a secular Constitution with a First Amendment just like our own back in the late 1700’s…and modern America was filled with fundamentalist Islamic historical revisionists who were trying to argue that “America has always been a fundamentally Judeo-Mohammedan nation”…and they were denying climate science in the bargain — why, I’d have written exactly the same letter.

And here’s the one sure thing Warren – when Islam takes over America you will be one of the first ones up against the wall. Regardless of how much you grovel from your centrally heated and air conditioned, 24 hour per day electrically provisioned, suburban house that any Indonesian would chew off their arm to live in.

When Islam takes over America? What on Earth are you smoking?

I swear, Conservative Islamophobes are the biggest bunch of bedwetters I’ve ever seen.

On the other hand, when Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh are submerged or rendered uninhabitable by rising ocean levels, there will be millions of climate refugees, all extremely pissed off at the industrialized West for very good reason. Where will they go? YIKES OMG!!!

Therefore, the best way to avoid an Islamic takeover of America is to fight global warming. Q.E.D.

The ball’s in your court, Spiro.

This article has been crossposted under my Username at Daily Kos.