Ah, Purges.
By Myopist Posted in User Blogs — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
David Corn is just the slightest bit perturbed: he's apparently been a mole for the Bush Administration all along, and now people are catching on.
By 'mole' I mean 'Bush critic who can't stand the hardcore Stalinist protestors' and by people I mean 'various conspiracy theorists'.It all started... well, depends, really. The triggering event was apparently this article, which took the not unsurprising stance that Bush's latest SotU speech was actually pretty good, at least on a rhetorical/emotional level. This is at least unsurprising to anybody willing to pay attention, which I freely admit eliminates about a third of the Democratic activist base and roughly 95% of the antiwar movement base (statistics pulled out of the air and served with a smile) - but let us not blame Mr. Corn for that. He is rather more liberal than I am, to be sure: but he hates the Angry Left's more baroque conspiracy theories, which is a fairly large plus in my book.
But apparently not to Mark Crispin Miller (yet another iteration of the Independent and Iconoclastic Bush Critic, Variant Let's Make Fun of His Speech Patterns!*), who took this event as some sort of validation of this article (the aforementioned moledom). David Corn took umbrage, hijinks ensued and now me, Glenn Reynolds and the folks over at Reason Hit And Run are sitting back and snarfing up the popcorn. The Reason link, btw, has links to a couple of real Angry Left screeds; check it out.
Schradenfreude aside, this sort of thing goes a long way to explain the problem that the antiwar movement has today: an absolute unwillingness to accept deviations from dogma. David Corn should not have to swallow umpteen different paranoid political fantasies in order to belong to the 'peace' movement. Indeed, he shouldn't have to swallow one. But because he isn't willing to uncritically accept lurid tales of CIA plots and stolen elections - to say nothing of accusations that the government knew about 9/11 in advance - there's apparently no place for him at their table. Or anybody else equally sensible of actual reality, apparently.
Which is fine, as far as it goes, but I'd rather that it didn't spread. Political violence isn't pretty, and we're not as far away from it as we'd like to think.
-M
*Is it just me, or are all these folks pretty interchangeable?
. . .I'd hate to see what they think of as a critique. This was not exactly an article which spoke well of the President. The compliment towards the President was a backhanded one, calling the speech a success for the President personally but not for the country. In fact the second paragraph is just dripping with cyncism, so much so that I even wrote about it on my own blog.
It is fun to see lefties attack one another, much as we all were amused by the feeding frenzy in the week of the Peter Beinart article a couple of months back. But it's not as though we on the right have been without our own internal vicious struggles as well.
The last few months have witnessed almost as much intra-ideological fighting as cross-party warfare. I often wonder how much longer the two-party system can continue when it seems evident that it is getting harder and harder to maintain intra-party discipline and civility.
I simply cannot entertain a rational, civil political discussion. They may be right-wingers, but they are so radical in their opposition to Bush that they have aligned themselves with the rabid left. Their fervor is altogether religious and dogmatic, and while I cannot imagine them ever engaging in violence, they would certainly wink at it if it were perpetrated by the "right" people and for the "right" causes. After all, when Bush is creating a Fascist state in which the Bill of Rights has been repealed, anything is justified by way of opposition.