This time, I was not able to wrestle my fingers to the floor. One of my usually nice, previously smart, woke lawyer and theater associates who is a relatively moderate TDS victim tried to write a sort-of reasonable response—I guess you would call it “restrained”—to the following rant by one of his friends, whom I fortunately do not know and would hide behind a bush if I saw coming. Not to be overly redundant, but I have to point out that she is the kind of toxic maniac conservatives, Republicans and irresponsible Americans have allowed to get a grip on the levers of power.

I don’t know the jerk but I told her (she’s a retired nurse who probably murdered her Republican patients) off in a comment anyway, because clearly all of her friends are as ethically inert as she is and she deserves the truth even if she wouldn’t recognize it if it came with instructions.

Before I post this thing (hold on to your head!), here are the rules of the Toxic Asshole Diagnosis Challenge.

I identified 26 separate unethical, dishonest or mind-meltingly stupid assertions in the post. I didn’t count standard partisan opinions that I may believe are wrong but are within rational bounds. I scored each with a Toxic Asshole number between 15 and 2 for a perfect score total of 219. Obviously the numbers are subjective and reflect my own personal level of nausea.

Purely stupid statements only get a couple of points. I’ll start you off with 10 free points: both times the screed resorts to calling anyone who disagrees with her “privileged” are scored a 5. The “privileged” tactic, which we’ve discussed extensively here in the past, is a cheap and dishonest tactic progressives use to disqualify anyone who disagrees with them without having to actually rebut the critic’s points.

Ready? Here we go: