Libtards
A bear of Liddle brain
March 4, 2010 22 comments
Further to our discussion of constructions using the suffix –tard, Rod Liddle offers:
By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap.
Tragically, libtards is not an original coinage: it already boasts 136,000 google hits, but I must admit it has a certain brio. (Interesting that it is instantly comprehensible even with the attenuated prefix: you don’t have to say liberaltards.) I note without comment here that Charlie Brooker has described Liddle as looking like “a failed Womble who’s just been shaken awake in a shop doorway”.
What is the right epithet for a Rod Liddle, readers?
he’s a liddle dwad
Damn those liberty-obsessed Stalinists!
Something beginning with ‘c’.
I for one would call him a delingpole.
Liddle is comparable with former left-wing neocon blowhard Christopher Hitchens, and literary faux-hard man Martin Amis, I think. All trying to prove how tough they are with Clarkson-esque rants about “Broken Britain”.
Unitard? Penitard? Spectatard? This is fun…
Spectatetard? (too many t’s?) Torytard?
I don’t actually find it instantly comprehensible. It’s too easily confused with similar terms for the gibbering ultra-capitalist fantasists that call themselves libertarians.
My preferred term for Liddle is “Indy reject, aaaaahhhh”.
http://www.r-word.org/
http://tinyurl.com/fagtard
anyone know where Rod Liddle lives? He’s very down on North London here…
Comment 3 gets it right.
Charlie Brooker wrestled with precisely this question elsewhere:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWqvWFUj51k
I presume that the circulation manager of the Spectator might also be aware that the Guardian is not the only periodical to sell a lot of copies in North London, or to be popular among the middle class, snobs (the Spectator actually published Taki’s column, presumably out of a belief that the readers liked it), the arrogant, cowards etc etc
So, John Crace “loathes the country and the people who inhabit it“; is “hoity toity“, “bourgeois” and “Rusbridger’s adopted bastard offspring” because…he wrote a snarky piece about someone Liddle happens to like.
Right.
Anyway, that p’lit’cal correctness, eh? Just demonising and stifling alternative points of view.
The reference to “hat[ing] this country and the people who inhabit it” is telling. When Liddle’s bigoted posts on that Milwall FC fansite were publicised earlier this year, one of his defenses was that he was using a “different register” (or something: I’m paraphrasing) to that he would use in normal conversation. A register, one supposes, more befitting of that particular discursive context. Or, to put it another way, in order to ingratiate oneself with working class males (or, hey, maybe just Milwall fans) one has to be racist and sexist. So, in this scheme, it’s Liddle — viewing, as he does, the British working class as a timless locus of bog-brained prejudice — who “loves” the people of this country; and the lefties who are beset by a disabling, snobbish anti-racism.
Epithets for Liddle: I think “shit-for-brains” does the job.
Having said which, he was spot-on about proposed Islamist coffin protest in Wootton Bassett (his view being that the law and politicians should just fuck off out of it and allow people to get on with protesting, however objectionable their views to readers of the Daily Mail). If anybody is aware of Liddle ever having been right or even readable on any other issue, I’ll be glad to take the information on board.
I think he’s approaching the initial point to commence his Decent Death Dive.
Wanktards
Mm, that Brooker line has a little bit of genius to it. Why doesn’t his writing get more ambitious than columns?
Phew there I was wondering whether some of the annoying aspects of The Guardian might lead me to buy another paper and here’s “Le Rod” giving me the best of reasons. I’ve always found Rod a particularly odd name anyway so perhaps Rod is just a bit of a “Rod”.
One of the comments worries me, though. A reader praising Rod’s brief rant implies that as a Guardian reader, I’m in imminent danger of being blasted to smithereens:
“The only time that middle class socialists comes to their senses is when they’re standing in front of a firing squad, looking down the barrel of a rifle.”
I wonder if this means middle class bigotards are hard enough to resist coming to their senses or whether it’s the fact that they are the ones fantasising about having a rifle.