Ezra, you bitch:
It is spectacularly unfortunate that the qualifications Andy demands from a President are a mere moderate hostility to homosexuals and an idiot savante-like reliance on the words “terrorism” and “Al-Qaeda”. Don’t put him in a concentration camp and repeat Osama Bin Laden’s name like a Buddhist mantra and you’ve got the critical Sullivan endorsement. Ah Andy, can you do no better?
Crooked Timber has two posts up about Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn’s smears against Max Cleland, one by Ted Barlow and a followup by Chris Bertram. Both drew a lot of Bush and Coulter apologists trying to excuse the smears; reading them made me think about how Bush and co use patriotism.
What I (once again) realised is that Bush and his apologists for the most part only use patriotism as a political weapon, rather than being genuinely patriotic. A genuine patriot would respect Cleland for going to war for their country and would respect him even more so for the sacrifices he made by doing so: the loss of three of his limbs. Genuine patriots would not belittle these sacrifises in order to glorify their own side.
But clearly, this is what Bush and co have been doing. Bush and very many of his cronies have never had to make the same sacrifices as Cleland made and in fact have gone out of their way to avoid having to do so. At the same time, they have also gone out of their way in creating the image of Bush the uberpatriot, while bludgeoning political opponents with it.
Which is why John Kerry and Max Cleland are so dangerous to Bush now. Because they have made sacrifices and their patriotism is more than skindeep. Because they’ve learned their lesson when Cleland lost the Georgia senatorial election in 2002 when he was smeared as anti-American. Kerry and Cleland know that Bush will again try this strategy and as recent events have shown, they are ready for it.
D-Square Digest is going to provide a much needed service:
As part of my New Year’s Resolution to pick a really nasty fight with someone, and as a potential supply of more regular updates, I’ve decided to become a “watcher“. I believe that this was all the rage in weblog circles about a year ago.
Anyway, I want to do it, and nobody convinced me that there were better targets for a jihad than Stephen den Beste, so I picked him. It also helps that, as far as I can tell, he’s incredibly thin-skinned (see my comments board somewhere for proof). Now, I thought of doing “Smarter Steven den Beste” (note that part of my strategy is not to use a consistent spelling of his first name), but that would probably completely dominate my blog, and besides “fisking” is like so five minutes ago. (Being a “watcher”, however, is retro and cool).
Besides, people don’t necessarily want a Smarter Stephen den Beste. Part of the joy is watching a man who knows nothing about anything except the innards of mobile phones trying to understand a complicated world around him with no sources of information other than the Internet. What people want is a Shorter Stephen den Beste; one that doesn’t take about ten thousand words to get from A to halfway through the downstroke of B. So I’ll be posting one-sentence summaries of posts on the USS Clueless, on a reasonably regular basis, until I get bored.
Counterspin on Den Beste’s objections to the Rittenhouse Review’s campaign to boycott Little Green Footballs
Den Beste’s real worry is that Jim’s attempt to boycott LGF will actually work. His rationale appears contradictory. On the one hand, he supports Jim Capazzola’s right to de-link from LGF , and his right to try and convince others to do the same. But…he somehow [inexplicably] moves from the right to not associate with those with whom you disagree, and the right to try and convince others to dissasociate with those of whom you disagree, to “coercion.” I’m not sure that Jim’s attempt to boycott LGF amounts to “coercion,” simply because he refuses to link to anyone who links to LGF. Isn’t that his right as well?
Pandagon also commented:
Jim is perfectly within his rights, and the cries of censorship are nothing but cries of “Wolf!”, essentially saying that the exact same activity, frequently practiced without even the reasoning of Jim’s declaration, is okay when done by conservatives, but a worthless bit of grandstanding when done by a person with a privately operated website.
Anyway, this is the dumbest argument to come down the pike in the ‘ole blogosphere for at least a week or so. What Jim is doing is equivalent to boycotting the advertisers of a TV or radio show you don’t like. For example, I don’t buy balding products or magical vitamin cures, contact debt consolidation services, or purchase Bose speakers, which is my little way of putting pressure on the conservative media.
This is a silly argument, typical of Den Beste’s blowhardness and pompousity. does he really believe a call to boycott is tantemount to censorship? Does he really believe boycotts are wrong? If so, it’s a good thing he wasn’t in the Civil Rights movement in the sixties and fifties….
But can be yours free!
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