Perhaps he is angry at me because he is ashamed at himself, for giving a rather intellectual cover to right wing faux outrage back in March (and no, Steve, you “intellectual giant,” I am not calling you a right winger. But on occasion, you do give them cover).
To quote Matt Yglesias, “I hope that everyone who mau-maued the Department of Homeland Security for expressing concern about this kind of thing feel appropriately ashamed of themselves.”
Steve probably doesn’t feel ashamed. He is probably feeling intellectually superior and smug in his libertarianism. But since he feels I am both an idiot and an asshole, I will lay it out for him why I think he, and every right winger who derailed that DHS report, was and is tragically misguided at best, and an accomplice to murder at worst.
1. A DHS Right Wing Extremism Report is prepared and published, warning that certain right wing extremists may be violent. Specifically mentioned were anti-abortion radicals with their history of killing doctors, nurses, and bombing clinics, and white supremacists / Nazis, whose history of violence and evil hardly needs to be questioned.
2. Steve opposed the preparation and publication of the DHS Right Wing Extremism Report.
3. Richard Poplawski, a right-wing extremist, murders three police officers in Pittsburgh, in part because he feared the non-existent “Obama gun ban.”
4. Scott Roeder, another right-wing terrorist, assassinates Dr. George Tiller in Kansas.
5. A few hours ago, Von Brunn, another right-wing extremist, murders a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
It seems to me that anyone who opposed the DHS report was obviously and horribly wrong. Steve is obviously embarrassed at being proven wrong for the first time in his life, and reacts by establishing an easily beaten strawman scenario where he can easily say that I was wrong and he was right, and that way, all will be right with the world again. No, Steve, I never said that you said there were NO right wing extremists. But, that discussion and debate between us is irrelevant to the issue at hand. The issue is you opposed the DHS report, and you were wrong.
Even Fox News’ Shep Smith recognizes that simple fact: that the DHS report “was a warning to us all, and it appears now they were right.”
I was right, Steve. You weren’t, and yet somehow I am the asshole. You know what to go do with yourself.