Weppner Vetted
Forget, of course, for a moment that insurers pay for Cialis and Viagra, but the predominately male, Caucasian, baby-boomer, “me-Generation” types who populate hate radio in America are outraged – OUTRAGED – that insurance might pay for contraceptives to prevent the natural outcome of Viagra usage.
And so it is that Kathy Weppner, a former host of an unlistenable train wreck of a hate radio show, is being asked to answer to a wider audience for a lot of the racist, nativist nonsense that she used to espouse and regurgitate to like-minded resent-porn enthusiasts, with impunity. When she announced, I wrote that Weppner:
… is not only going to be a tea partier, but is – quite literally – a low-information WBEN caller. “Kathy from Williamsville” is going to take her fact-free jingoism on the campaign trail. She is a walking, talking anti-Obama chain email, and anyone reporting on her should be sure to haveSnopes queued up on their mobile browsers. Seriously – there will be no point covering her campaign if you’re not able immediately to vet her pronouncements and cross-examine her on the inevitable fabrications and fantasies she’ll discuss. After all, she has a list of known communists, doesn’t seem to be ready or willing to represent Muslim residents of the 26th (hint: it’s the primitive blood lust), has declared “white guilt” to be “dead”, warned against a hyperinflation that never came, and – like Ronald Reagan – opposes Medicare.
The Buffalo News’ Jerry Zremski queued up Snopes and went through her on-air and online pronouncements. I won’t examine the entirety of Zremski’s thorough article here; it speaks for itself. But consider these points:
1. Weppner refused to be interviewed for the Buffalo News’ article; instead, she would only answer emailed questions. If a candidate for federal elected office cannot muster the courage or mental fortitude to be interviewed by the singular local paper covering her district, she’s fundamentally unqualified for public office of any kind.
2. She – or someone acting on her behalf – went through her “Straight Talk” website with a fine-toothed comb to remove any odd nonsense and otherwise to sanitize it for a wider audience. Her problem is that the internet doesn’t forget, and the Waybackmachine holds all the embarrassing secrets she sought to expunge from her record. I’ve written a lot of profane nonsense over the last 10 years, but I haven’t hidden a word of it. If you’re going to take a political viewpoint – even a controversial one – you defend it. You don’t run and hide from it when the rubber hits the road. She cannot defend her views. The expunged parts of her website are precisely what endeared her to the white omniphobes who support her for election. Now she’s trying to poo-poo them all away – all of her treasured opinions about the un-American, Muslim foreignhood of Barack Obama, all of her ridiculous nonsense about Islam being a genocidal religion, all of her promotion of Stepin Fetchit minstrelsy bullshit. Also, socialism on the march!
3. Birtherism – she can run, but she can’t hide. When it mattered, Weppner hosted lunatic birther Orly Taitz on her radio show and promoted her as a serious person. Now she says she acknowledges Obama’s legitimacy, but back then, she took a brown-skinned man with a funny name and single mom and assumed he was part of some half-century-long conspiracy to place a foreign-born person as POTUS.
I believe, at that time, Mr. Obama’s submission of a ‘short-form’ birth certificate was a topic of conversation nationally as there were many lawsuits attempting to see his long-form birth certificate. I found it interesting that there was such resistance to produce this when it should have been simple. Mr. Obama Is our President.
The demands for the long-form birth certificate were an unprecedented, racist troll. Do you always take the bait and feed the trolls?
4. Back to the minstrelsy – when asked about a blatantly racist opinion piece about “White Guilt”,
Asked if she saw that language as racially insensitive, Weppner replied: “I find your question as insulting as the stereotypes printed in this Philadelphia Inquirer editorial titled ‘White Guilt is Dead.’ …I was surprised the Inquirer printed this. Did you pose the same question to their editors?”
Weppner deleted the “White Guilt” article from her site so recently that it still appears in Google’s cache. (It was still online on March 4th). She did not add any commentary to it – she didn’t question the appropriateness of the racism in that article, or query why the Inquirer printed it. She regurgitated it – verbatim – in its entirety. She endorsed it. Nice try.
Weppner that very special confluence of hatred, bigotry, ignorance, & stupidity. She is, simply put, the prototypical, perfect tea party candidate. To that point, she’s still at it – uncritically regurgitating whatever conspiratorial nonsense she picks up from dubious sources:
“Should I assume the NEWS supports the Obama administration’s new proposal to have the federal government investigate and monitor how newsroom editors decide topics and how topics affect policy?”
Asked about that purported policy, Debra Gersh Hernandez, spokesperson for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said: “I have no idea what she’s talking about.”
No one does. No one has any idea what Kathy Weppner is talking about. She is the tea party’s excreta, and she’s running for Congress.