That Didn’t Take Long

To play the tired PC card. Which, we are already clear, is basically the default position of retreat for those who can’t find rational or civilized arguments for their daily fear and loathing and paranoia.

There is simply no attempt to delegitimize political speech from this site.  We absolutely welcome it.  We do work pretty hard though, at treating illegitimate political speech as, well, illegitimate.  And the illegitimate consists of the Talking Points — the effort to get conservatives everywhere to be on the same message every day.  The effort to slant the news coverage to the conservative position simply because this message is coming from so many places.  The effort to recast the world in terms where conservatives area always being abused by liberals.  Those talking points are traditionally lies – or, optimistically, a selective choosing of facts – designed to get the rest of the world to participate in their daily fear and loathing and paranoia.

Even David A’s post can’t quite manage an intellectually honest or coherent critique of leftist speech without making it all up pretty much wholesale:

• There’s no evidence whatsoever that the debates in the US over whether the Iraq war was legitimate or well prosecuted somehow put our troops in danger.  Here is the made up bit: “Our enemies used quotes from the Daily Kos and Keith Olbermann types to justify their attacks on Americans and our allies.”  There is no proof of this, of course, but is more of the bad leftovers of the period of time when conservatives were delighted to try to bully critics of the war into silence.  Let’s remember that this was a worldwide debate and one that the conservatives pretty much lost. And you can’t just claim a thing for it to be true.
• And Jon Voight?  No one is pushing back against him because of Evan Thomas’ really awful bit of hyperbole.  People are pushing back on him because he too resorted to stupid name calling – calling Obama a false prophet when the vast majority of people who keep characterizing Obama as either the messiah or as a prophet are Republican Christians.
• Then we get some really confused BS about Jews.  It’s hard to make any sense out of this, but David creates the point that “President Obama’s supporters who blast Israel” (an attempt to make all of us anti-semitic and no where near true for the majority of his supporters) pretty much out of thin air.  Rev. Wright has changed his anti-Semitic locution of the day from “Jews” to the absolutely no better “Zionists”.  Wright deserves his long walk in the wilderness.  But David wants to use this somehow to pretend that this shooter is not a right wing extremist.  Even though “right-wing extremist” would be pretty much the definition of Nazis (among others) in this century.  And this delusion would be the hallmark of someone working overtime to never have to think about the complicity of some of the people he makes common cause with in egging on the apocalyptic rhetoric of fear and loathing and paranoia.
• “If you criticize Sotomayor, then you are a racist opposed to women and Latinos. If you called Alberto Gonzales a killer and a criminal, then you are a patriot”  Another lie.  If you criticize Judge Sotomayor in racialist terms, you are a racist.  And that has been the terms of the debate from much of the right.  If you are criticizing her opinions, then you are engaged in exactly what the process is for.  Gingrich calling her a racist and other wingnuts trying to find signs of racial privileges in her past are racist.  Period.  The atavistically racialist critiques of Judge Sotomayor has no bearing on her judicial performance and it is the racialist stuff that has gotten not just all the criticism, but all of the press.  Now to be joined by the slow walking and obstructionist efforts.  If you don’t want people to think that you are a racist, then get the people speaking about Judge Sotomayor for your party to dial the racialist stuff back.

I could keep going, but you do get the point.  David – as is required by longstanding wingnut rules of engagement – makes up the stories that will support the worldview needed to be able to listn to his radio handlers and beleive every word they say.   A worldview that casts Dems – or at least these Dems — as the meanies while conservatives are just doing the absolutely right thing by indulging in their irrational fears and paranoias and prejudices.

What is apparently not PC about this is that we call him on this.  We don’t let him get away with this made up way of the world.  We don’t let him get away with not looking at the abundant bigotry in denying one class of people the rights that all of the rest enjoy.  He would prefer to be completely unchallenged, so that he can go back to his blog and his buddies with smug tales of teaching liberals something today.

Forget that.  As long as you start from a dishonest place, you get called on every bit of it – the lies, the not-facts, the selective-facts, the stupid math, the cherry-picked polls, the revisionist history – all of it.  As long as your politics starts with what you are scared of, you bet we’ll have something to say about that.  As long as your only comfort in how your ideas are treated here is to retreat to delusions of victimization, we’ll remind you that you are your own worst victimizer.

You are perfectly free to believe and say what you like.  But Political Correctness is not defined in terms of your own personal victimology or in not being in any position to adequately defend yourself.  But being in a better position to defend yourself requires much more work than listening to your radio handlers every day.