So, Garofalo’s new web mascot decided he’d better comment on the whole Kos dustup after all — not directly, mind you (there’s advertising revenue to consider here), but rather in that glancing, elliptical way favored by smug wannabe-hipsters drunk on their own preening irony. Unfortunately for Atrios, the dainty slap he takes barely leaves a mark — and even his most rabid readers practically ignored it, skipping past in a race to hear themselves froth and screech.
…Which is too bad, really, because the entire “comment” is a flaccid attempt to excuse Kos’ transparent schadenfreude (without actually coming right out and excusing it, of course, because again, irony is hip, cowardice is cheap, and ads do bring coin) by inferentially juxtaposing it with an exchange on FOXNews — another in a series of wimpy and predictable Donk “defenses” that begin, “yes, but look at what the Republicans said…”
Well, I saw the FOXNews report in question. And while John Gibson did indeed suggest civilian contractors need be crazy to drive around Fallujah in an SUV — and while his guest did indeed make coarse (and to my mind, rather silly and regrettable) remarks about “Darwinian Selection” in commenting on their deaths — the sleight of hand Atrios relies on with his post is to set up an implied equivalency between Kos’ billious venom and the exchange on FOX, a comparison so profoundly disingenuous that Atrios cannily eschews editorial gloss, hoping instead that the mere suggestion of a similarity between the two commentaries will do the mitigating for him. Clever boy.
But exactly how is questioning the judgment of those four contractors even remotely close to saying, in effect: “screw ’em, the only good mercenary is a dead mercenary”? Because face it: the subtext of Kos’ post is that the rampaging mob who torched and mutilated those four civilians should be forgiven their trespass (they are, after all, poor nabobs defending their country from rich corporate profiteers) — and that it’s quite okay to exult in the death of Americans if you think it’ll lend force to your anti-war cause; conversely, the subtext of the FOX exchange (pulled from a much longer interview) was that these aid workers made a stupid decision that ultimately cost them their lives — insensitive punditry, to be sure, but hardly the same thing.
I’m convinced Atrios knows this, too. But intellectual honesty, it turns out, is expendable when your sole reason for existing (well, aside from the fabulous cocktail parties!) is a visceral hatred of Bush-lovin’ “wingnuts” — God-humpin’ scourge of the noble brown man and enemy to all that is good and pure.
But who knows, maybe if it earns him him a pat on the head, a piece of bacon, and a nice long belly scratch from Janeane, it’s all worthwhile…
[update: MaxSpeak chides Instapundit for offering up a steady stream of selective outrages and facile generalizations…in a post that generalizes about (among other things) “the rot infesting InstaPundit’s blogroll.”
Because, y’know, do as I say, not as I do.
Max concludes: “Put simply, Reynolds is the leading purveyor of modern McCarthyism on the Internet. He is a daily source of cheap shots, pot-kettle criticisms, and two-cent sanctimony.”
That’s right, “McCarthyism.” And yeah, me neither.
Particularly comical are the shrieking groupies masturbating all over Max’s comments section (“You’re a god to me, now, Max.”). If this is where purveyors of high-minded intellectual “nuance” go to root, they’re in luck: because the ground at Max’s place is already thick with the kind of high-grade horseshit in which liberal shibboleths grow and spread like so much useless stinkweed.
Hat tip: Walter in Denver
update 2: Excellent post here]
If you liked that you’ll love this:
http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/000289.html
Very good post. I had also noticed the rather feeble attempt by the substitute high school gym teacher from Philadelphia to protect his ass, while offering up a few bones for his ever rabid fans.
And in the Link provided by “Walter” to the attack on Professor Reynolds by the ever voluble bloviator, Max Sawicky, one can see that Max has very cleverly balanced the desires of HIS rabid loons by attacking one of the Left’s favorite targets, while offering up a relatively mild rebuke to their beloved Kos.
Hey all, thanks for visiting my “high-grade” site!
I don’t think I rebuked Kos at all. I just disagreed with him. It is possible to disagree with somebody without casting him or her as a moral leper.
By contrast, I doubt a day goes by when InstP fails to cast “the left” as a veritable leper colony.
I’d also like to compliment JG for this very apt summary:
“MaxSpeak chides Instapundit for offering up a steady stream of selective outrages and facile generalizations… “
Exactly!
yr pal,
max(speak)
Hey saw-icky (emphasis on ick), I want value in comebacks.
That was more min(speak) that max.
Why, because MoDo already does that act. She is funny to listen to. But you, when you do it, your’re just a poseur,
Ah, the icky in sawicky. Talk about wit. Takes me back to 4th grade.
Actually I wasn’t offering humor, but a couple of points. Sorry if I threw you off. cheers.
Well, no one’s ever questioned my ability to summarize, Max.
Agree or disagree about the Atrios post? Intellectual honesty check…
Well, I will raise your kindergarten to my grade 4. I liked grade 4, at least people were honest with themselves.
J.G.
I think the check bounced on Atrios and Max’s account.
I thought it was neat how atrios managed to pretend that the whole thing began over a comment on someone’s diary thread (you know, it’d be tough for us to be responsible for every comment from every commenter).
Especially since it was a blog post with many comments added to it, until Kos got caught & started losing revenue & thus the resulting hiding of the post (without notation) into a random diary thread. How brave.
Yeah, atrios, it was just a comment & everyone’s going crazy over just a comment. I knew you were partisan to the max, but I didn’t consider you to be a liar……until now.
If you insist on judging Atrios’ post as a judgement on Kos, it is clearly lacking. But who said Atrios is obliged to provide any such judgement? Everybody picks and chooses what they decide to focus on. Nobody writes about everything.
[Similarly I think you read all sorts of sh*t into Kos’ remarks, the deconstruction of which would take more time than anyone has.]
Kos was not giving the Sermon on the Mount, or the State of the Union. He’s only a blogger. Why is it a sin for Atrios to merely allude to Kos’ remark in order to make the point that a) this has stirred up more dust than it merits; and b) outrage over this sort of thing is often selective.
Suppose I chose some great moral question that you had failed to expound upon, and I denounced you for your callous neglect. That would be dumb, wouldn’t it?
I happen to think the topic itself is important, so that’s what I concentrated on. Atrios didn’t, and that’s his prerogative. For what it’s worth, I think Kos’ statement was wrong-headed, but I also think he’s well-intentioned, dedicated, and usually constructive. Glenn Reynolds, on the other hand . . .
Cheers.
[excerpted from a longer email I sent Max]:
I believe […] that Atrios wanted to comment on the Kos dustup, and that his take on the whole matter was something along the lines of “what’s the big deal, so he went over the line, we all do it.” Which is fine: I never read it as an intended moral rebuke to what Kos said; and Atrios, as you rightly note, was under no obligation to speak on the subject at all (except for any perceived obligation he may have felt through marketplace forces, which is more your domain [to comment on] than mine).
But he did speak to the subject—perhaps by allusion, […] but [via] a particularly pointed allusion, I think. And it was this I was reacting to, because I believe the connection he was trying to have his readers draw [between Kos’ comments and those on made on Fox] was a false one, and one that—because it’s the one HE chose to use—provides some insight into his thoughts on the matter.
Remember, I reacted to what Atrios said. I didn’t call for him to make a statement. Sure, had he been silent on the matter he would have been attacked from some quarters for not denouncing Kos’ statements. But not from me. I don’t feel the need to condemn Cal Thomas or Ann Coulter [though I might, of course], so Atrios has to make his own decision about who or what to defend.
And I believe he was defending Kos here, if only obliquely, by setting up a false comparison. I could be wrong, but such would be an interpretive failure—one I don’t believe I made in this instance.
So we’ll have to agree to disagree. But I do thank you for taking the time to respond.
I think what Max knows is that dissing Prof. Reynolds is a very effective means of getting attention and traffic. Doing so also has a facile appearance of “bravery” and “independence of thought.”
I think this because I assume he isn’t so ignorant as to really think “McCarthyism” is an even remotely appropriate charge to level at Reynolds, even by the (extraordinarily loose) standards by which modern day lefties determine who deserves to be subjected to that (increasingly tedious) accusation. I could be wrong, of course.
If you assumed the thankless task of scouring my archives, you would find occasional cannonballs at IP, mostly in my first 6 mos of blogging. I did a poll once and my readers told me they weren’t much interested in IP, Kaus, or Andy.
None of the IP posts got the reception this one did (except for one he responded to). It was not predictable. The difference is that Atrios linked to it. Once or twice a month he links to me, and my traffic triples for a day. I like that, but I can’t predict what he will see fit to plug.
You could see that of the trackbacks, three are from right-of-center sites (incl this one), and one from ‘centerfield,’ whatever you think that is. So it wasn’t only lefties who took notice.
I actually know a fair amount about McCarthy. Part of it is family history. I don’t toss out that accusation carelessly.
As for ‘independence of thought’, LOL. There’s nothing uncommon about dissing IP. Finding something of merit on his blog, THAT would be real independence of thought.
So far you’ve done nothing but “toss out that accusation carelessly”, or at least lightly. It’s especially light on argumentation; you’ve presented not so much as a shred of a whisper of a shadow of back up, just a flip remark which I’m sure your readers ate right up.
Time was, a comment like that would, by its very nature, demand that it be supported by a case. No-one with even a modicum of intellectual honesty would stoop to McCarthy’s level and fling such incendiary charges about without also supplying strong evidence to support it. Nowadays, to the great misfrtune of our public discourse, the word’s been so denuded of meaning by leftie overuse (along with such other fixtures of leftie “debate” as ‘extremist’ and ‘racist’
that, when one of you hurls it, it’s of no more import than my grandmother’s weekly grocery list – and contains rather less rational content.
Max: I thought McCarthy was guilty of making wildly false accusations of communist activity among high-ranking members of the U.S. government.
So how, exactly, is reprinting and commenting on the exact words Kos posted come out as “McCarthyism”? It seems to me to be “fair comment and criticism.”
Not to overstay my welcome here, such as it is, for anyone interested I elaborate on this issue in today’s sermonette on my site. With JG’s permission, I’d be happy to copy it here for you all to tear apart, like a bunch of hound dogs with a pork chop.
’s fine with me, Max.
OK.
[aside to Joey—my McCarthyism charge went to a long stream of Reynolds’ posts and his moral standing in the political realm, not narrowly to his remarks about Kos. As for the original McC, he was backstopped by and encouraged a plethora of non-governmental organizations who harrassed innocent people.]
(post follows)
* * *
I’ve been asked in civil terms, after some inanities (note to PW readers, from commenters on my site), to defend my assertion that Professor Glenn Reynolds is the foremost purveyor of McCarthyism on the Internet. I am happy to engage on this level.
Senator Joseph McCarthy used his position to direct an unending stream of slurs at people either engaged in unpopular, legal activity, or people falsely accused of engaging in such activity. Even in these terms, his fidelity to the facts was absent. Despite McCarthy’s complete lack of any executive authority, there were real consequences to his campaign. A good reference is The Great Fear by David Caute. Backstopping McCarthy, of course, was the notorious J. Edgar Hoover, who had very real executive authority as director of the FBI. Private sector support came from a variety of vigilante type groups, including the John Birch Society, who undertook direct harassment of Americans.
What does this have to do with Glenn Reynolds? Within hours of the WTC attack, assorted characters began blaming “liberals” for exposing the nation to danger. Most memorably, Andrew Sullivan raised the “Fifth Column” flag. Reynolds has been a dedicated promoter of blanket slander ever since. To be critical of Bush’s war in Iraq, to fail to exhibit the right feelings at the right time about terrorism, is to be an enemy of the state.
The most pertinent current example is the InstaPundit mantra, “they’re not for peace, they’re just on the other side.” The Kos flap is another one, witness the use of the construction “rot infecting much of the left.”
Now who or what exactly is “they” or “the left”? In truth, it is nobody and everybody. The left is first diverse, and second without coordination. Nobody on “the left” is responsible for anyone else on “the left.” So generalizations about morality on “the left” (or “the right”) are bankrupt. Slurs along these lines are an exercise in politics via marginalization of those who think very differently, and intimidation of those more moderate.
Kos is a Democrat. Are all Democrats part of “the left”? Is there some disproportionate “rot” akin to Kos’ statement about mercenaries among Democrats as opposed to Republicans? It’s idiocy.
The groundless generalization is Reynolds’ counterpart to McCarthy’s guilt by association. A more specific guilty-by-association case was the manfactured flap over Cruz Bustamante and MeCHA.
And today from Reynolds, we have this:
Kennedy’s remark is certainly getting a lot of play around the world, and it can only embolden our enemies and imperil our friends. And as an old Washington hand, Kennedy must have known that it would get that kind of attention, and have that kind of an effect. No wonder Powell is upset.
As a professor of law, GR should understand that the right to dissent is an all-weather prerogative. One could imagine legitimate curbs if the country was in a real struggle for survival. We are nowhere near a Civil War or WWII situation. It cannot be denied that criticism of a war effort undermines the war effort. That is an inescapable cost of democracy. The country is founded on the principle that decision-making should be more costly than it would be under autocracy. Efforts to stigmatize criticism as beyond legal bounds are McCarthyism.
Reynolds is a big fish in the small pond of blogs. I did qualify the limits of his audience to the Internet. That’s probably giving him too much credit. After all, there are Town Hall, NRO, and other outlets. The much greater sources of McCarthyism of the type I’ve been describing are of course talk radio and the Fox Network.
It is the country’s good fortune thus far to lack a genuine McCarthy, meaning a demagogue specializing in political hate speech who holds an important public office and dedicates his energies to encouraging the persecution of innocent people. Ashcroft seems to be made for this role, but he has yet to seriously assume it.
So that is my principal beef with Professor Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, and their legion of imitators. If anyone wants to smoke the peace pipe and discuss terms of civil, adversarial discourse, we would be happy to oblige. As an act of good faith, we might consider McCarthyism of a leftist variety.
Probably the most vivid case was during World War II. The Communist Party engaged in an unrelenting campaign against critics of that war. However bankrupt, much of that anti-war criticism was no more out of bounds than the rhetoric of peace movements today, but the CP neglected no opportunity to depict such people as unpatriotic. It could be argued that in a real struggle for survival, some intolerance was justified, or at least understandable, but there you had it. Of note is the fact that this sort of rhetoric paved the way for the CP’s own persecution after the war was over. Their wartime patriotism and the heroic military service of their members did them little credit in the eyes of their enemies. The pick-axe swings both ways, comrades.
More recently we had the New Left. A common practice was brow-beating opponents with loose charges of racism. I did it myself. I would classify this as akin to McCarthyism. It didn’t much work as a recruitment tactic, but it did intimidate critics. Long-term it has been a disaster. People who felt they had sand kicked in their faces by the campus bully went on to fuel massive, conservative grassroots movements. We got Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and worse now.
At the end of the day, I suspect that civility turns on big, unrelated factors. If the Bush political machine goes down in flames due to high policy failure, the left is going to get less civil and the right (minus hyper-hysterical wingnuts) is going to get more polite. That would be predictable, but only mildly amusing.
If Iraq becomes a genuinely huge quagmire that engulfs both major parties, the stage would be set for new politics and new parties. That would be interesting.
Alternatively, my preferred scenario would be for Iraq to somehow, miraculously disappear as a concern. Don’t ask me how. That would put Bush in the same position as Churchill after WWII, when the English people said thank you very much for a great job, now please go home. That would put critics of unregulated capitalism back where we were on 9/10/01. Teamsters and turtles, together again. Most interesting of all.