So… I was on Olbermann last night. And I made a gaffe—that is, I told the truth, per Kinsley—and the angry emails have been pouring in ever since. Here’s an exchange I had with a right-winger…

From: pz99999@XXXXXX.XXX
To: Dan Savage
Sent: Tue, Sep 1, 2009 7:38 PM
Subject: you are the savage love guy, small world

Dan,

There is a local paper in St. Louis, MO called the River Front Times. I use it to start my bar-b-que coals. And I sometimes read a section called the Savage love just to see what new levels of depravity you will stoop to. I was watching MSNBC fascist propaganda this evening and I saw you on there with Olberman that nasty little man.

I got news for you, you can believe your own baloney but people are pissed off at the democrats and also the republicans. Your an idiot, if you can’t fuck it you are not interested so I won’t try and explain how Obama is a continuation of the progressive fascist movement of the early 20th century. Yes fascist you retard, fascism is a product of the left not the right. Nazis were what, “National SOCIALISTS” You dummies are talking about the protesters because you are afraid of them and rightly so. They are going to throw this government out of office one way or another. You don’t understand people that will die for their principles because you hold nothing sacred. There a a lot of us that are not religious but we respect those nice people that you scorn. I wouldn’t give a squirt of Olberman’s leaking piss for anything thing you say or write. You are a nasty little man, a pathetic loser that makes his living talking about pac king fudge. Your disgusting.

From: Dan Savage
To: pz99999@XXXXXX.XXX
Sent: Tue, Sep 1, 2009 7:41 PM
Subject: Re: you are the savage love guy, small world

“you’re disgusting.”

dan

From: pz99999@XXXXXX.XXX
To: Dan Savage
Sent: September 2, 2009 4:25 AM
Subject: Re: you are the savage love guy, small world

that is a ironic coming from you! I don’t fault you for being different but you are bitter like an old woman. You attack everything good and descent because it damns you. You are a pustule of the first order. Keep spouting your crap because you are lighting a nation on fire that will take it back from you nasty little fascists.

From: Dan Savage
To: pz99999@XXXXXX.XXX
Sent: Wed, Sep 2, 2009 9:30 AM
Subject: Re: you are the savage love guy, small world

“decent.”

dan

From: pz99999@XXXXXX.XXX
To: Dan Savage
Sent: September 2, 2009 9:54 AM
Subject: Re: you are the savage love guy, small world

well you got the picture.

From: Dan Savage
To: pz99999@XXXXXX.XXX
Sent: Wed, Sep 2, 2009 10:10 AM
Subject: Re: you are the savage love guy, small world

“well, you got the picture.”

unless you’re trying to sound like Yoda: “Well you got the picture, young Skywalker.”

dan

From: pz99999@XXXXXX.XXX
To: Dan Savage
Sent: September 2, 2009 10:18 AM
Subject: Re: you are the savage love guy, small world

your wonderful. the earth revolves around you. you make me wet.

From: Dan Savage
To: pz99999@XXXXXX.XXX
Sent: September 2, 2009 10:24 AM
Subject: Re: you are the savage love guy, small world

“you’re wonderful.”

xo
dan

101 replies on “Was It Something I Said?”

  1. as usual dan’s political analysis is off.
    why would the right kill obama?
    he is the gift that keeps on giving.
    he will give the gop what it could never get on it’s own- control of congress in 2010…

  2. No comment on the TPM guy quoting you calling right-wingers “bat crap crazy”? I don’t think I’ve ever seen the phrase “bat crap” in your columns, ever.

  6. Lord Basil: Here’s some trite bathroom graffiti to counter your addled confusion regarding gay conversion:

    “My mother made me a homosexual.”
    “If I give her some yarn, will she make me one too?”

    Good shirt, Dan – but the collar needs to be a button-down to lend stylish gravitas.

  7. As an African-American, I would like to thank you for saying what you said. The overarching threat to the President’s life has long been discussed in my community, but never put as bluntly or correctly as you did last night on Olbermann. So again, thank you.

    In truth though, this is the second time, you’ve had to come onto National Television and lend sanity to the Race debate in this country. I still remember and honor your appearance on Colbert waaaay back in November when you were the first person in the nation to come out and say the divide over Prop 8 was generational and not racial. You really, really helped calm things down. Instead of two minority groups who SHOULD be allies, you got us all focusing on who really screwed things up in regards to Prop 8. Thanks again.

  9. “Pac King Fudge,” is that a relative of Pac Man?

    You are a pustule of the first order.

    I didn’t realize there were different orders of pustules. Is that determined by size, painful throbbing, or what?

    @10,

    Great. There goes my afternoon.

  14. Gurldoggie @39 commented:

    “Good responses Dan, much like the ‘talking to you is like talking to a bedpost’ responses of Barney Frank at his town hall. Take every opportunity to demonstrate the childish lunacy of these right wing clowns.”

    A few corrections. First of all, Mr. Frank likened talking to the woman to talking to a dining room table, not a bedpost.

    Secondly, Mr. Savage’s response was to private email and is not at all similar to Mr. Frank rightly responding to lunacy in a public forum. What Mr. Frank did was prevent a loon from taking over the town hall meeting. What Mr. Savage did was provide the loon with a greater audience.

    Along with the narcissism he reveals in his need to mention being on a television program, Mr. Savage’s decision to post the private emails demonstrate his own pettiness while his own email responses clearly demonstrated Mr. Savage’s childishness.

    The fact that Mr. Savage has a predilection for this sort of childish repartee reflects poorly on him. Swearengen @ 2 hit the nail on the head. Mr. Savage is part of the problem.

    To save the fanboys the time “he’s a bad man, don’t read his blog.”

  16. You were awesome on Olbermann, Dan, as usual. (It’s kind of hysterical that one of the greatest voices of reason in this debate over the past 8 years is a man primarily known as a sex-advice columnist. That tickles me to no end).

    I only wish you were on TV like this more often—like, every day!

  18. Fantastic showing. And I wish you or others at the Stranger would post notice on the slog when you are going to be on TV!! And then post the video!! You give us hope while we trudge through these battles– You help keep the fire lit. So don’t be so quiet about it here, please!

    (and how did the HBO taping go?)

  20. @20 – I’m not even going to respond to your… umm… views of facism through the ages. I will, however, question your math on the Senate issue. There are currently 59 Democrats in the Senate and two left-leaning independents. Only one-third of the Senate is up for election in any given even-numbered year. There are currently 16 Democratic senators up for re-election in 2010. Two are retiring, and one is deceased. That’s a total of 19 seats that the Dems could lose, bringing them to a minimum of 30 remaining seats, barring, of course, any deaths, resignations, etc. between now and November 2010. And that 30 is also dependent on the 12 Republicans up for re-election maintaining their seats. I don’t think you’re going to see that happen. Best of luck, though!

  22. @47: In fairness, there *was* a genuinely socialist (though still racist, anti-semitic, and gratuitously violent) wing of the Nazi party (look up “Strasserism”), but their position was repudiated early on at the Bamberg conference in 1926, and they were conclusively defeated (and a substantial number of them murdered) shortly after the Nazis came to power in the Night of the Long Knives/Roehm Purge.

  24. Very funny; and your advice in your Letter of the Day was quite kind as well.

    Happy you are having a good day and happy to have you around. Just generally happy today.

  25. I love that this person uses “pustule” as an insult. Now, that’s some biblical sounding stuff right there! Perhaps Dan should get an exorcism?

  26. “why would the right kill obama?
    he is the gift that keeps on giving.
    he will give the gop what it could never get on it’s own- control of congress in 2010… “

    Conservatives don’t understand why the majority of US is unhappy with Obama. It’s not because he’s not conservative enough.

  28. I was delighted to see you on Olbermann last night. Damn, you were an excellent guest.

    You certainly are correct about the Right’s not so hidden agenda: Send out the subliminal message to their deranged members: Kill him.

  30. #66.

    (It’s kind of hysterical that one of the greatest voices of reason in this debate over the past 8 years is a man primarily known as a sex-advice columnist. That tickles me to no end).

    Yep. Dan is certainly one of them. Another of the greatest voices is a comedian who got his start on MTV. It tickles me too, but it also scares the shit out of me.

    You were fantastic on Olbermann last night, Dan.

  34. Kudos, Dan. I think you’ve graduated from far-left, queer, sex-specialist crackpot to respected moderate-left pundit, since you didn’t once talk about sex or sexuality politics and instead were called upon merely to criticize the right. Heck, it may have been this milieu shift that piqued the ire of your objectors. I see a national political career in your future, if you want it.

    To all, remember that one has to take anything that Lord Basil says with a proverbial grain of salt.

    Rationalwiki had a great article on Nathan Poe’s adage, but the link is dead for now.

    When I was in political science, soviet communism (note lower case), was the extreme of liberalism; the extreme of conservatism was fascism. Regarding National Socialism, quoth Wikipedia, “As a generic concept, National Socialism opposes capitalism, communism, democratic socialism and liberalism.”

    Of course, this model, one used in political science academics in the 1990s associated moderatism with liberty and extremism with social control, but this would indicate that the US is no longer a moderate nation. If one associates the median (or the mode) with the mainline rather than the moderate, the contemporary US is then still quite conservative, notable since our leftists are still progressives (i.e. leftist Republicans) and the term liberal is still considered derisive.

  35. Notes to self – do not wear white shirt while reading Savage Love. Do not drink coffee while reading Savage Love. Do not snort coffee through nose onto said white shirt while reading hysterical Savage Love.

  36. When I got to ‘fascist propaganda’ I was pretty sure of what the letter said without even finishing it. I did finish it just in case my presuppositions were incorrect and… nope, I was right. Blah blah anti-American agenda blah blah blah.

    I’m surprised you humor these letters, Dan. Most of these people are total nutbars, like ‘holding signs on the street corner screaming about the apocalypse’ nutbars.

  37. It just blows my mind that some people out there really believe that Fascism is a product of the left–especially Nazi fascism! Nazis are not socialists. Anyone with half a brain knows that political party names don’t mean shit. North Korea is officially called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and no one would call them a democracy.

    And anyone who falls back on the liberal/conservative political dichotomy as “the gospel” is an idiot. Those labels are a gross simplification of political ideology and don’t make any sense. On some issues, “liberals” want more freedoms (e.g., civil rights), on others they want less freedom (e.g., guns). Same is true for “conservatives”. Sometimes liberals want to conserve something (e.g., the environment) while at other times conservatives want to liberate something (e.g., industry regulation).

  39. #20 They use the force of government, because if they tried relying on the ballot, they would be soundly rejected.

    I see… so how was Lala Land this past November? I hear tell that it is enchanting in autumn.

  44. I was in the gym when Dan came on Olbermann and I could not hear his comments (I will listen to them at lunch time), but one of the women in the gym was thoroughly impressed by Dan’s look and demeanor! I had the pleasure of telling her that he is 100% gay and happily “married”. The crestfallen look on her face was priceless! It kept me smiling through my entire workout.

    Dan – I love your column and the effect you have on all sorts of people.

  46. 84
    If DoorKnob Licker is now seen as a “respected moderate-left pundit” it is testament to how intellectually bankrupt the Left is…

  47. After the November election, we in Europe just assumed that we could stop worrying about your religious crazies…does this really reflect the mainstream political debate on e.g. your healthcare policies, or is it a question of a few marginal (if dangerous) radicals?

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