House of Eratosthenes

Fellow Right Wing News contributor Robert Stacy McCain has a excellent dissection up on The American Spectator of the latest meme zipping around that sacred oracle of wholesomeness and wisdom that is the Huffington Post. One Geoffrey Dunn, who claims to be the father of a special-needs child, bitterly resents Sarah Palin for having once offered to represent special-needs families in the White House. And that she’s pro-life. And that he’s found a few unfortunate comments on some right-wing web sites, which he’d like to fasten to her good name.

I’m not entirely clear which among these three he finds most atrocious.

There is something very ugly happening out there in the hinterlands these days–a brewing cauldron of racist anger being directed at President-elect Barack Obama as he and his family get ready to move into the White House. It’s a mean-spirited bigotry that is finding its way onto the internet and right-wing blogs across the country. It makes for a troubling portrait of a significant cross-section of the American polity as Obama prepares to take the oath of office as the 44th President of these United States.

Nowhere have these tendencies been more out-front and prominent than at TeamSarah.org, a website organized by “a coalition of women dedicated to advancing the values that Sarah Palin represents in the political process.” Men, according to an exclamatory notice, are welcome, too.

As “The Other McCain” points out, to associate the phenomenon of pinheaded racism with Sarah Palin is a decent example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, in which, upon observing a notable event, a prior event is arbitrarily singled out as a definitive cause. In this case, Gov. Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running mate on August 29 of this year did something to racism; re-established it, created it, “crystalized” it in some way.

As McCain points out,

This accusation of “mean-spirited bigotry” was based on a relative handful of comments, far less dramatic than the huffy HuffPoster’s hyperbolic introduction suggested. The Christian ladies who run Team Sarah — Marjorie Dannenfelser, Jane Abraham and Emily Buchanan of the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List — responded immediately with sanctions against commenters who cross the lines of political decorum. (Of course, decorum is not even an afterthought at Huffington Post, DailyKos or any number of liberal blogs where the comment fields routinely boil with vitriol, but conservatives have long since become accustomed to this sort of double standard.)

I’m not the least bit alarmed that Mr. Dunn can find these comments on a pro-Palin website. That is not to say I approve of the comments; it’s just that there is a hard limit to how forcefully a handful of comments can reflect on a given website. It’s a pretty weak connection. And they certainly don’t reflect negatively on Gov. Palin herself.

Actually, what alarms me far more, here, are the people responding to Mr. Dunn’s article in his comment section. “spiderbucket” did the best job of capturing the prevailing sentiment, I thought:

Look, it’s simply us or them now and we have to stamp them out before they do some wacko McVeigh crap that we all know they are fully capable of.

How many mental illnesses can you spot here? I see two, at least. There’s the “I’m here to promote tolerance and acceptance and I will destroy anyone who gets in my way.”

The other one is even more disturbing than that…it has nothing to do with being a lefty. It concerns me because I know it is an error made by many.

It’s the notion that, if you’re choosey enough about your ideology, you can take up a position on the spectrum that is so clean you can eat off it.

No pinheadedness, no sexism, no racism, no…disagreement?

Do people really believe in this? There’s no shortage of rhetoric being tossed out to this effect — “I voted for Obama, those Republicans are so full of hate.” What is that, exactly? Recruiting propaganda, or do people really believe in it?

I’m not talking about believing in those ugly comments. They exist. The record is out there. It’s what they’re supposed to prove. This is worse than post hoc ergo propter hoc. People who support that guy, over there, have been known to be racists…just like some people who support (name the candidate) have been known to eat their own bodily waste. You can find someone somewhere who believes in just about anything — but nevermind that. I’ll just scootch over to some other spot on the spectrum, like a dog wiping its ass on the carpet, support another candidate…

…and all my friends who support the same candidate, sharing my new spot with me, will be cleeeeeaaaannnnnn.

I don’t think people really believe this. At least the ones who do, are justifying their decisions after-the-fact, acting on feelings — not really “believing” much of anything, intellectually. I’m sure of this. I mean, how often has the following conversation been repeated…

Obama Supporter: I’m voting for Obama. There’s a lot of racist ugliness in that Republican party over there.

McCain Supporter: Yeah, some McCain supporters are registered democrats who were supporting Hillary until Obama won the nomination, then switched. What does that say?

Obama Supporter: Uh…look! Bright shiny object! Hope! Change!

If you know of any discussion beginning like that, and then proceeding into an honest exchange of ideas instead of the uncomfortable and sudden change-of-subject, do let me know in the comment section. So far as I know, wherever that discourse signature has existed, the train-of-thought has been abandoned. Hastily. At the instigation of, and for the benefit of, the Obama supporter.

So there’s this drive to find a spot on the ideological spectrum, either sanitized, or clean by its very nature, filled with wonderful people and completely devoid of any ugly thoughts. It is theatrical in nature. I don’t think anyone really believes in it.

But theatrics can be dangerous. The weak-minded among us have a way of gradually starting to believe the bullshit that comes out of their mouths when they’re trying to recruit others. And the bullshit has to do with being able to conclude things about a person’s character, based on his political affiliation.

There’s a lot more of that on the left than on the right. I don’t think that can be up for serious question or debate, at this point. I will concede this much: Tighty-righties jump to conclusions about the intellectual acumen, or lack thereof…the personal commitment to logic and common sense, or lack thereof, of people who declare their allegiance to left-wing politics. That might seem like the same thing. It isn’t. Lefty-loosies, on the other hand, have been known to come to conclusions, en masse, about right-wing people being bad. Bad beyond any point of redemption. Down to the marrow of their bones. Tatooed head-to-toe to show their devotion to the Dark Side of the Force, like Darth Maul. How can we not be evil? We want to deny medical coverage to doe-eyed one-legged toddlers whose lungs have been replaced with llama bladders, who want to live to their sixth birthdays so they can sell off their favorite presents to fight global warming and find a cure for AIDS.

To oppose all that, we must be terrible.

“Conservatives consider liberals well-intentioned, but misguided. Liberals consider conservatives not only wrong, but really, really bad people.” — Larry Elder

This is bound to be a big problem in 2009. Now that The Chosen One has been elected, those of us who supported the other guy have defined an entirely new level of wrong-ness. An indispensible part of every revolution, after all, is to sweep away the remnants of those who opposed it. Our opinions have been “shown” to be un-American…in a way we were never allowed to call the hard-core left-winger’s beliefs, when they were the loyal opposition. Our vote against Obama is like a beacon. “Here Be Racism.”

What kind of person is open to the idea that if he selects his political beliefs only in satisfaction of a single goal, of choosing the right friends — he is guaranteed to have clean, decent friends?

The kind of person who is inexperienced in the situation where he would have decent friends.

What kind of person says we need more tolerance and understanding, and if you disagree I’ll crush you beneath my boot?

The kind of person who goes through the motions of creating, but lives every moment of his life to destroy things.

What kind of person says Sarah Palin is no friend to special-needs families, even though her family is one? What kind of person says she isn’t a “real” feminist, even though she is, undisputably, a woman?

The kind of person who tells himself a lie, every single day, that he wants us “all” to be “unified,” when in reality such a sense of unity would be the very last thing he wants to see.

Yeah, we’re in the middle of something ugly all right. And we haven’t seen the last of it by any stretch. But it isn’t coming from Sarah Palin’s supporters…not the bulk of it, anyhow.

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Clean FriendsTuesday, December 23rd, 2008

Clean Friends
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008