Diptych

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Fan mail from some flounder



Gadzooks! It turns out that someone actually read one of my posts! That person not only read it, but took the time to write a long and detailed comment about it. I've got nothin' lately, so I'll take the liberty of examining it in some detail. The commenter's part is bold, I'm plain text.

My post was the one about bloggers of the left who juxtapose quotations from famous personages for political effect. In it, I raise a quandry:

"
The question for today is "Why don't conservative bloggers waste their time on on satisfying entertainment of this kind?"
"
Conservative bloggers tend to "waste their time" on facts and logic rather than on entertainment. I'm sure if the left had any facts or logic on their side, they'd do the same.

Frankly, I was sort of disappointed with this opening. I thought that I had (subtly? no.) granted that I consider this form an ineffective polemical tool, and I was hoping for more than "right legs good; left legs bad."

As it is, I don't blame them for jumping up and down and shrieking "Hitler!" all day long. And robotically repeating the same threadbare talking points: That poor Billmon character, mechanically reciting "illegal war, illegal war, illegal war". Sad, really.

I apologize to Billmon for dragging him into this. He hardly needs my sorry ass to defend him, but I named him, so...

A search of the archives at Whiskey Bar turns up four instances of "illegal war". The most recent is in the context of the Downing Street Memo, in which the Brits unambiguously question the legality of Bush's war plan. Two others refer to Reagan's Nicaraguan Contra war, and the last is talking about Nixon's Cambodia. Kudos to Ford and Bush I for being Republican presidents who did not wage illegal wars! Happy now?

"Illegal"? No, Congress approved it. What the left means by "illegal" has nothing whatsoever to do with law, just as what they mean by "Hitler" has nothing to do with Hitler. They think "legal" means "whatever I want", and "illegal" means "whatever I don't want". Quite literally, they cannot understand what "rule of law" means. They're children.

Unless I'm mistaken, the legal procedures of Iraq were satisfied when Saddam invaded Kuwait. The Reichstag was fine with Hitler's invasion of Poland. And so on. I know the Right doesn't like to talk about International Law, but the US has signed some treaties and stuff that the Constitution says oughta be binding. Here, don't take my word. Look at Article VI, clause 2:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

As for the meaning of the word "legal", yeah, the jury's out on that one all right. The Bush administration's position is that the word means whatever the President says it does. I'm serious. Look it up. Even Jay Leno has weighed in on this:

"According to the “New York Times”, last year White House lawyers concluded that President Bush could legally order interrogators to torture and even kill people in the interest of national security - so if that’s legal, what the hell are we charging Saddam Hussein with?"

At the end of the day, all any of their babble means is "I HATE THEM MOMMY, I HATE THEM, BUT I DON'T KNOW WHY!" It's because they're better than you, sweetheart. That's why.

At the end of the day, we're tired and grumpy. By the way, who's "they"? You mean right wing bloggers? I'll bet they're tired and grumpy too, at the end of the day.
What's hilarious about that poor witless Billmon creature is that, according to his sidebar, he's reading a great deal about the actual, historical Hitler, and he still quite clearly hasn't understood a word of it. Hitler killed his opponents, the administration dares — has the actual, DIVINELY PROHIBITED TEMERITY — to disagree, publically with their opponents:

The opponents, on the other hand, are "divinely prohibited" from publicly disagreeing with the administration.

Same thing, right? Maybe a slight difference in scale, you know, but really, fundamentally identical. THE PARALLELS ARE STRIKING! THE TIMING IS SUSPICIOUS!

Okay, you've got me there. In fact, maybe there's a campaign slogan in that:

BUSH - Not as bad as Hitler!


Last year, one of your imbecile British brethren compared the firing of Colin Powell to the Night of the Long Knives. With a straight face, as far as I could see. So apparently anybody who ever fired an employee is... Hitler. Because Hitler had ten and a half million people killed, and that's pretty much the same as letting one guy go with severance pay and a good reference, right? Talk about "amazingly similar"! Jesus, IT'S IDENTICAL!
It's beyond parody, is what it is.

It wasn't a Brit, it was Sidney Blumenthal, and it wasn't just Powell, it was the partisan purges in the Department of State and CIA. It's called a 'metaphor'. Look that up, too. See, Hitler and Bush both eliminated people in government who might have opposed their plans. Blumenthal thought that was a bad thing:

"The dictation of a political line has conquered policymaking. Since the United States emerged as a world power, the executive, because of immense responsibilities and powers, has relied upon impartial information and analysis from its departments and agencies. But vindictiveness against the institutions of government based on expertise, evidence and experience is clearing the way for the intellectual standards and cooked conclusions of right-wing think tanks and those appointees who emerge from them."

The left is a lost cause. All they seem capable of is a weird sort of deranged, incoherent, infantile shrieking. And they're all shrieking the same damn risible gibberish, in unison.

"As a party and as a movement, we will fail if we continue to go it alone or change messages daily. We can only succeed when we work together and talk together and stick together as a team. Only through a movement-wide effort and constant repetition can our voices unite in perfect harmony."
~ Frank Luntz, Republican MessageMeister

Look at this hallucinatory bullshit from Billmon: "...the GOP is monolithic -- not to mention monochromatic -- and getting more so all the time." He's hopelessly out of touch. Wouldn't know reality if it bit him in the ass. Look at the numbers, stupid.

I've looked at some numbers on this, and the 'monochromatic' charge holds up pretty well. Out of context, 'monolithic' sounds wrong. The GOP is a screamin' crazy quilt of disparate interest groups. Corporatists, fundies, poser libertarians, middling apolitical types, power-drunk local (and national) autocrats, you name it. I'm not sure what Billmon meant by that, unless maybe he was talking about 'message discipline'.

You're turning into fringe crazies. Look who's recycling lefty rhetoric these days. Because your rhetoric makes sense to Duke. His kind of sense.

That's funny. Trying to palm off David Duke on the left. You really don't want me to start listing right wing nutjobs and the things they say, do you?

Here's a concept you can't even begin to grasp: Reasoning by analogy is dangerous, because reality is very, very complicated; so complicated in fact that even intelligent people draw fundamentally wrong analogies more often than not. Anybody as stupid as a leftist has no hope at all.

At last we've arrived back at the beginning. I think I started the conversation referring to these juxtaposed quotations as a waste of time. In that, I am truly vindicated.

Analogy is great for reassuring ignorant bigots that they were right not to waste their time learning to think.
# posted by Anonymous : 8:30 PM

Okay. You done? Oh, no, apparently not...

Since you're a poor stupid leftist, I should clarify that last remark, to make sure you "get" it: You, like all lefies, are a desperately ignorant bigot. Your "values" are a set of blind, unexamined hatreds.
# posted by Anonymous : 8:33 PM

Well, if you say so. Now what about you?


- posted by de Selby @ 9:01 PM
Comments:
Did you notice, in all that frothing, how remarkably little of actual substance he managed to grunt out? The same captious point -- "The Left is bankrupt!" -- being made over and over again... Which left? Bankrupt in what way? He never elucidates.

This is what comes comes from inhabiting a world (in this cipher's case, Right Blogsylvania) in which no one ever quietly and rationally sits down and reviews the basic assumptions of his beliefs. I believe RightLand is far more guilty of this than LeftLand, but unfortunately I see the same tendencies over on this side of the fence, too.

Way too many strawmen walking around out there. Way too many.
# posted by Blogger Neddie : 3:16 PM
 
Oh... and welcome to my blogroll.
# posted by Blogger Neddie : 3:18 PM
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

Powered by Blogger