Village Idiot of the Day:, October 27, 2011: Bruce Hodgkins

IHC was in the middle of writing two related Village Idiot posts when we decided to check in on our favorite Reppies a little while ago. After reading Bruce Hodgkins most absurd post yet, we decided to hold up on those belated VIODs and jump Bruce to the head of the line. Bruce, you see, is bemoaning the enactment of child labor laws. I kid you not.

Here's what he wrote under OWS is all about redistrubuting wealth.we nearly rubbed our eyes in disbelief.

Child labor laws, took money away from poor families and established jobs to be taken by union workers. They took the rights of the parent to teach the work ethic to their children, even now a child must get permission from the government to work at McDonald's if the child is under 16.

Bruce, here's a look at what you miss so much:

t;



Thought I'd throw in some nifty worker housing.



Wait a minute . Despite your incestant rants against Communism, you never miss an opporutnity to praise the Chinese non-union slave cheap labor which you expect American workers to emulate. Like this:

You're more than a Villiage Idiot, Bruce, but since we pride ourselves in being family friendly, we'll leave it at that.

You Bruce Hodgins, are Village Idiot of the Day, October 28;, 2012.  And maybe for the rest of the year.

Village Idiot of the Day, October 21, 2011: Bruce Hodgkins

We're doing some catch-up this evening or should that be this early morning?

We've long been struck by the pure lunacy of Bruce Hodgkins aka bhodgkins.  Mostly, we think of him as a harmless crank in his dotage.  He is.  But sometimes his obstinacy in the face of truth is just difficult to comprehend.  Is he that self-unaware.  We all make mistakes.  We all mispeak.  We all post "facts" on Rep pages which...well, aren't facts.  Sometimes we know it.  Sometimes we know don't.

But what to make of Bruce's statement the other day during a worshipful Ronald Reagan moment claiming that  the United States "liberated South Viet Nam."  and his refusal to admit he is wrong. We dare say even Bruce's hero, Glenn Beck, would have a hard time spinning that one.

Where Did It All Go Wrong? Obama Does Not View America as a Great Country
bhodgins:
marleygreiner-Let's see, there is Europe, South Korea, South Viet Nam, Phillipeans, the entire South Pacific, Iraq, Bosnia, Eastern Europe, Russia, to name a few.

bendedominicis-What in the world are you trying say?

Last we looked, South Viet Nam does not exist as a country.  Viet Nam (the unified  country)  is a "communist country." To the right is a picture taken after the massacre at My Lai.  Maybe Bruce means the US liberated the South Vietnamese by leaving THEIR country.

To the best of our knowledge Bruce never served in Viet Nam, though he's the right age. Perhaps he had something better to do.  In fact, he never served in the military at all, though he loves to cheer on the troops as they march on to foreign soil soothers may enjoy the American Way of Life he so enjoys. At least as long as a Republican is in office.

It's a little belated, but we are thrilled to name Bruce Hodgkins Village Idiot of the Day, October 21 2011. (and for a few days before, too). 

Bruce Hodgkins (bhodgkins): An Appreciation

I Hate Canton got a late start Monday, so we'll jump right in.

Bruce Hodgkins, aka bhodgkins aka Hodgie, aka Hodgie-Baby is one our our favorite posters.

He's not malevolent like ocean and her incarnations. Like Bummy (see "characters" sidebar) you just can't hate Bruce. Of course you don't have to love him, either. He and Don Cirelli and TAC/Henry Rollins, have had more go-rounds than Starbuck's has coffeshops, yet, at least for us, there's a certain loveablity about the coot. A self-described conservative of some mysterious stripe, Bruce embraces, corporations, international banking, and globalism. (We're unsure about war.)

Systemic rot is not in Hodgie's vocabulary. If you're out of work, it's your own damned fault. You should have taken a second or third job, majored in something "relevant," saved more money, not bought that cell phone or DVD player, and kissed your boss' ass. Most importantly, you should have never joined that union.

Bruce appears to get most of his news and news analysis from Worldnet Daily Jerome Corsi, and Orly Taitz. His favorite"historian" is Glenn Beck University and rightwing Texas Republican political operative David Barton. According to Hodgie, Glenn Beck has never uttered an untruth. Bruce thinks Snopes is a leftwing website. Rep commenters are leftwing liberal, socialist, communist pinkos: Democrats.

We occasionally agree with Bruce, but most of the time we, well...laugh at him. He's sort of an antebellum Protestant (may the Pope forgive him!) poker-up-the-ass, time machined into a 21st century vanity fair fighting desire, temptation, hedonism, atheism, bright lights, consumable goods, and welfare mothers. No matter how often his facts are documented to be unfactual, Bruce is always right. We think he spends a lot of his time swatting commies hiding under his bed.

We were especially amused to see Hodgie-Baby's comments Sunday under a Letter to the Editor, The Other Side of Dependency, Outsourced, then Part-time written by the improbably named Richard Pickles of North Canton (btw, he's real; IHC located him) grouching about outsourcing and crap jobs for those left behind lucky enough to get them, while corporations run unchallenged in post capitalist America.

Mr. Pickles wrote in part:

The part-time income (28 hours), a minimum-wage job ($7.40 an hour in Ohio) at the local burger joint, grosses just over the allowed amount of income to qualify for state cash assistance (around $400 a month).

Never having been in a situation like that, it seems difficult to imagine living there willingly. Multiply this hypothetical family by several million, and worrying about a few welfare cheats seems to miss the point.

With huge corporations paying no taxes at all, cutting the deficit off of middle-income people and the retired, and allowing the wealthy to get by with no increase, is also less than fair.

Mr. Pickles remarks must have given Bruce post-Communion gas. He whipped off the following comment

What is the matter with the liberal mind? Why can't people keep what they earn? It is un-American for the government to forcefully take money from one group of people and give it to another. Not only that, it is a stupid practice to take money from the job creators. corporations don't pay tax, they collect taxes from people that buy or use their products and services. Pretty soon the business becomes non-competitive and moves their operation out the country. How about lowering the income tax on the wealthiest 5% and eliminate corporate income tax entirely. Mr. Pickles would soon be back at work.

I Hate Canton actually agrees with Hodgie. Income tax is un-American, though we'd probably come up with a better phrase if we had the time.

We, however, find it difficult to support Hodgie's claim that corporations should be exempt from paying income tax because they create the jobs and "collect taxes" from people that buy or use their products and services." According to Bruce, it's OK (in a manner of speaking) for the government to dun taxes from individuals who profit from working for corporations (secretaries, mill hands, truck drivers, store clerks, landscapers, scientists, computer engineers, nurses, house painters, brick masons, mechanics) but it's not OK for the government to collect taxes on the profits that corporations themselves make from selling their goods and services, which are generated from the labor of those it's OK to tax. IOW, Bruce seems to think that only those who make money for corporations should have to pay income tax. Corporations that profit from the work of their employees should not. Next ,we supposed he'll tell us that we should all pay our bosses for the privilege of working for them.

Excuse us for a moment while we uncross our eyes.

Our original intention was to name Bruce our Village Idiot of the Day for May 22. He received the honor earlier this month for claiming that the Great Depression started with FDR when Herbert Hoover was clearly overseeing the country during the unfortunate events of October 1929. Besides, there are so many Hodgieisms that are deserving of daily awards. We apologize for keeping them from you while we were on hiatus.

IHC, however,decided to write a simple appreciation of Bruce. He has lot of awards coming so why not start out with a big I Hate Canton hug and go from there? After all, if it weren't for Hodgie, the Rep would be a much more boring place to visit.

Oh... btw. According to Intellius, Mr. Pickles, is 79 years old. As soon as the Walton family gets their Hodgkins Tax Break and Wal-Mart becomes a "non-profit," our letter writer can start a brand new career as a greeter.

Village Idiot of the Day, May 9, 2011: bhodgkins, Sourdough Sal

We've been so busy feudin', fightin' and a fussin' today that I lost track of time. Late this evening, though, we perused the Rep so you don't have to.

We initially thought that pensions might be an interesting topic to discuss today, but we glazed over in no time, as if we'd been boning up on real estate law or memorizing Latin declensions. We'll leave that discussion for those who care.

We next took a look at unions, and found this gem from bhodgkins (Bruce Hodgkins). We won't quote his entire rant, just the opening lines. We initially thought Bruce was referring to something uswapal had written earlier so we looked before we leaped. We didn't think uswapal was THAT dumb, and we were right:

bhodgkins

Union Have Benefited All Amerian Workers
uswapal-You are a waterfall (I was going to say fountain) of fake history, false information, For instance, FDR' new Deal created the depression and extended its length.

How Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal created the Great Depression when the stock market crashed in October 1929 when Herbert Hoover was president; and the county was deep under water when FDR took office in 1932, puzzles I Hate Canton immensely. Maybe Franklin and Eleanor got bored playing bridge with Mother one weekend at Springwood and decided it would be fun to tip over the economy and bounce the pesky Hoover out of office. Albany is so dreadful in the winter, anyway, doncha know.

While there is room for legitimate debate on how Roosevelt's programs helped or hindered recovery, we've never heard anyone actually claim that FDR caused the stockmarket crash. Maybe Bruce got his info from his favorite "historian" David Barton, the same David Barton who once claimed bizarrely that Thomas Jefferson's cousin, John Randolph (1773-1833) was the first Muslim member of the US House.

Bruce is capable of much better work than this though, so we delved further into comments and hit pay dirt: Mailman's nomination of Sourdough Sal for another VID award. We're lazy and like it when people do our work for us. We scrolled up and sure enough...in discussing the stike on Osama bin Laden, Sal wrote:

Sourdough Sal:

Where Was "Proper Burial" for Victims?
Obama did NOT have the 'stones' to order a special ops team. I heard that not only did he know OBL's whereabouts since August, that he dragged his feet so long that Leon Panetta and Hillary Clinton overrode the gutless worm and ordered the hit on OBL. He tried to abort the mission and couldn't because it was too late. Panetta had this mission in the works for months. By the way we SHOULD drop nuclear weapons on Mecca and Media and put an end to this nonsense once and for all.

The whack job muslims hate and want to kill us no matter what we do. We will be hated and envied all over the world no matter what we do. The only ones in this country that cares what others think of us and want to stop us from defending ourselves are the liberals. We should have rolled OBL's body in bacon bits, put his body in a giant pigskin and buried him under the 50 yard line of Giant's stadium. Let OBL wait for his 70 'virgins' in misery!

We haven't done a thorough 'net search, but we discovered that this bombshell about Clinton's and Panetta's bloodless coup was published in the conservative Pajamas Media (and carried in numerous rightwing sources), and that tracked back to Jim Allen's Obama, Osama, and Wagging the Dog in the Canada Free Press and more rightwing websites. (Do, at least, read the Pajamas Media article for some serious crack based journalism.

At least we know now where Sal gets her news. We're just surprised that Sal, Hodgie, ocean, just s Tom, and all the rest of the self-proclaimed constitutinalists aren't complaining about this very unconstitutinal action on the part of underlings. Or, maybe it's a Bohemian Grove thing.

We're tried tonight after a long day of hassling other people, so we hereby give Bruce Hodgkins a 2nd place VID for taking history where it has never gone before. We expect Bruce to climb to the top of the award heap in the next few days.

First place goes obviuosly to Sourdough Sal, and with it, our dog-eared copy of Dr. Strangelove.

###

We've added a temporary feature to our daily report: an update on the hinky link the Rep has been using since a February story about Super Bowl commercials was published online. We awarded the Rep the VID on May 2 for its technical faux pas. in which the same comments appear under a different article nearly every day.

Go to the "Opinion" tab on the Rep's front page, click Story Comments, and scroll down. If you hit the link, though, it will take you to the current story, not the Super Bowl story, and germane comments if posted.

May 9, 2011: What Does Memorial Day Mean to You?