Sunday, September 10, 2017

#1894: G. Gordon Liddy

Although he is mostly a ridiculous and toothless source of hilarity these days, George Gordon Battle Liddy is something of a legend, and certainly deserves an entry. Liddy is a conservative talk radio host, ex-convict and disbarred lawyer, but used to be a an FBI agent, operative in Nixon’s 1972 election campaign, and was one of the Watergate “plumbers”: he was for instance (co-)responsible for concocting “Operation Gemstone”, the plan to break in to the Watergate hotel and wiretap the DNC. He subsequently served a four-year prison sentence. Apparently Liddy’s personality served as the model for “The Comedian” in Alan Moore’s Watchmen.

On his current radio show, Liddy promotes various types of nonsense about guns, feminism (“Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when [Judge Sotomayor is] menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then”), racism (the “vast majority” of Hispanics areshort,” “squat,” “little Indians”), Muslims (such as this one), gold, and other wingnuttery, and he was for instance a champion of the birther cause back in the early days of the Obama presidency, and notably falling for virtually any piece of conspiracy mongering, almost regardless of how silly or easily falsifiable. Liddy falsely claimed that there is a “sworn statement from the stepgrandmother” saying Obama was born in Kenya and thus an “illegal alien”, for instance. He has also made some interesting allusions to FEMA concentration camps that Barack Hussain Obama (a “communist” who “doesn’t like the United States” and is “not one of us) is/was ostensibly supposed to use to lock up white people. Joseph Farah sometimes fills in for him.

Liddy doesn’t like gay people either (of course). Here is his 2010 discussion of issues regarding “normal people” and “homosexuals” co-mingling if DADT is repealed.

There is a fine G. Gordon Liddy resource here.


Diagnosis: Laughable moron with little capacity for basic critical thinking and – importantly – even less of a capacity for morality. Probably more of a curiosity than a real danger, but there are plenty of people like him out there.

1 comment:

  1. Liddy is a classic. He should have been entered in the Encyclopedia much earlier. But the fact is that there are so many loons of the classic and vintage variety that we can't get them all done in a timely fashion. When you add all the modern loons it becomes a huge task.

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