Firedoglake: racially insensitive
Look, I could care less about whether or not Bill Clinton invited enough bloggers of colour to his little shindig or not because frankly, anybody who thinks Clinton (either one) is the answer to America’s problems is an idiot anyway,[1] but I have to say that some of the fallout has been interesting… And I don’t mean the Ann Althouse thinks breasts are inherently sinful or whatever: she has to learn to deal with her own hangups and not bother the rest of us.
What I’m talking about is the response to Liza of Culture Kitchen, who first pointed out there were no Black or Asian bloggers at the event. It seems that one Trex of Firedoglake was less than happy with this and decided to teach her a lesson by, well, by showing he could be a much bigger asshole about it all than she supposedly was. Some attempt was made at refuting her argument, but mostly it was just willy waving of a particular petty sort, with the worst being this paragraph:
So, Liza, dear, before you go assailing your betters and making Jane stand in for every blond white woman who ever pissed you off, maybe you should head back to eighth grade English and, you know, learn to spell and to write in a linear fashion. Although judging from your other posts that I read, mediocrity may be a chronic condition for you. Still, I bet you could get a long way on locker-slamming and hair-flipping among the other 13 year olds. Hell, it got you your own post here tonight, courtesy of Yours Truly, and I guess that?s something. You just might have a future in this blogging thing, although I think you might be more at home on LiveJournal or MySpace where you can post lots of photos of yourself to distract from your decidedly tepid prose and numerous grammatical faux pas.
Now is it just me, or does this have some nasty racist undertones? The big white man putting the little Black woman in her place? Hell, I might just be reading too much into this and this is just “Trex” sucking up to Jane Hamsher by rabidly attacking a critic. It all certainly reads like the prose of an underling or stooge hoping his ferocity in defending her will impress the boss, not an uncommon phenomenon amongst blogs popular enough to form a clique.
In its own way then Trex’s “defence” helps confirm Liza’s original criticism. The event wasn’t inclusive and as soon as Liza drew people’s attention to it, if abrasively, she was attacked in a mauch more nasty manner than she had done in her own post, with the complaint (a valid one, as far as I can tell) lost in the shuffle.
Nice going.
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[1] They still support the fucking War on Iraq!