Glenn Garvin, The Miami Herald
I've got an idea for a new video game. I'm going to call it "Bloodsucking Progressives Must Die." Heroic tax-resisting players armed with crowbars will be able to bash in the heads of redistributionist parasites like President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Paul Krugman, George Soros, Nancy Pelosi, Warren Buffett and Rachel Maddow. (To satisfy unquantifiable but undeniable right-wing sexual kinks, Maddow will be dressed only in her underwear.) Can you say fun? Liberal blood and brains flying everywhere!
Just kidding, of course. A game in which conservatives savagely beat in the heads of their political opponents would be wrong. Even worse, it would be intellectual property theft, because liberals already beat us to it. "Tea Party Zombies Must Die" is the latest hit game on the Internet — and this time, I'm not kidding.
Created by the noble progressive thinkers at StarvingEyes Advergaming, "Tea Party Zombies Must Die" is pretty much the game I just described, except with all the political iconography reversed. The "tea Party zombies are walking the streets of America," the game site warns. "Grab your weapons and bash their rotten brains to bits! Destroy zombie Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, the Koch Brothers and many more!"
They're not kidding about that "many more" part. If Brit Hume, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity or any of the blond Fox News anchors annoys you, here's your chance to slaughter them. Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck, too. If you think it's easier to kill people who don't believe in global warming than to argue with them, there's a "Climate Change Denial Zombie" just itching to have its skull cracked open.
If you suffer from Left-Wing Misogynist Syndrome and want to sexually humiliate Michele Bachman before you beat her to death, she's conveniently clad in just her bra. If you hate poor people who aren't suitably grateful to the welfare state, use your crowbar — or, at "higher" levels of the game, your Uzi — on the White Trash Redneck Birther Zombie. There's a suitable target for every species of left-wing class, gender and race bigotry.
Ordinarily, I might be inclined to say that getting all a dither over a little bit of satire gone off the rails smacks of silly political correctness. Politics, I might be tempted to say, is for red-meat eaters (zombie reference definitely intended), and fiercely tasteless ideological advocacy is definitely one of the things the First Amendment was designed to protect.
But that was before my re-education this year after the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Remember how sternly we were lectured by the chattering classes over that? Giffords, they told us, was set upon by an assassin because her congressional district was marked with a gunsight on Sarah Palin's Web page of "targeted" congressional districts.
Even when the gunman was revealed to be not a tea party activist but a nut job named Jared Loughner with no discernible political agenda, liberal media insisted that Palin was the one who really pulled the trigger. In one five-hour span, MSNBC mentioned her 166 times, Loughner only 18. "Violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate," Krugman warned in his New York Times column. "And it's long past time for the GOP's leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers."
If referring to a congressional district as "targeted" is an open call to murder, you'd think a video game that urges players to bash out the brains of political and media figures would be denounced as something approaching genocide. But since the existence of "Tea Party Zombies Must Die" was disclosed this month on the Pundit Press website, there's been a mysterious silence from liberal media. (Prominent exception: Keith Olberman, who on his Current TV show said of the game, "There is no place for this.")
Likewise, Obama — who called for a shift in political debate to "a way that heals, not a way that wounds" after Giffords was shot — didn't raise a peep when he was introduced at a Labor Day rally by Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa screaming of Republicans: "Let's take these (SOBs) out!" Words turn into bullets, apparently, only when uttered by Republicans.
Footnote: Since liberals have had such a gleeful good time boycotting advertisers who support Beck and O'Reilly, it seems only fair that conservatives get the opportunity to do the same with clients of StarvingEyes Advergaming. Hey there, Sears, Motorola, Mountain Dew and UPS? How many Republican zombie brains have you bashed today? And GM — good to see you're putting those taxpayer bailout dollars to good use!
ggarvin@miamiherald.com
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