This thought hit me yesterday:
Just out of sick curiosity, I hope that in 2008 the Democrats field a candidate who's won the Congressional Medal of Honor. I really want to see all the clever merchandising opportunities that arise at the RNC.
Anticorium, if you want leftish folks to vote for your guy, it would be nice to give them a sop.
I'm sorry, all I have to offer is the promise that a second Bush term would be another four years of having liberalism kicked in the teeth over and over by steel-toe-booted feet.
This is the trauma team stage of American progressivism. It sure would be nice to treat the patient's tennis elbow, lance that nasty-looking boil, and give out some vitamin supplements. But right now, the patient's got a knife in their back, and the ruptured arteries are gushing blood all over the emergency room. Get that fixed first, or there won't be any opportunity to hand out vitamins.
Isn't it worth trying to make the enemy of your enemy into a friend?
Friendship requires trust. Right now, Democrats have about 96,837 reasons to not give that trust.
Olive branches should be extended, yes. But not in a Ralphwards direction.
And while you're addressing your comments to me, dear readers, let me address one of mine to you: Ralph Nader can--
Actually, before I continue, I need to drop PNH a line and find out if I'm allowed to use a phrase that starts with "go", ends "himself sideways with a chainsaw and no lube", and contains exactly ten words.
It's amazing what four short years can do. Nader has managed to betray pretty much every principle I had once thought he held dear, starting in 2000 when he campaigned sufficiently well on the ludicrous premise that there was no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush to throw the election to the Supreme Court. And in 2004 he isn't even running to help elevate a third party into a position where they can effectively challenge the American political duopoly. He's doing it just to prove that anyone can run for president, provided they have enough Republican operatives canvassing for signatures to get them onto the ballot as a spoiler.
None of which is to say that the Democrats are campaigning against Nader rather than Bush, which doesn't pass the giggle test let alone the Google test I posted above. But I wouldn't be too teary-eyed if they did; never has a man worked so hard to deserve it.
But I would like them to do it by fighting Bush rather than Nader.
Results 1 - 10 of about 943 from www.johnkerry.com for bush. (0.15 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 14 from www.johnkerry.com for nader. (0.09 seconds)
Perhaps next you can wish for some sort of global computer network where people can discuss the 2004 presidential election.
33. Filkers know more songs than just "Happy Days Are Here Again" and "Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)".
This seems to imply there'll be no filksinging at the Democratic convention, in which case all I can say is "DNC2004 1, Noreascon 0".
Sorry, but I have better things to do than to call on people to change what they say so that a group of people who they do not speak for will look good.
Cancer won't cure itself, after all. (Actually, I'm curious, what do you have to do that will go undone if you actually say "You're wrong, and you don't speak for me" when someone says that all Christians are schizophrenic fascists?)
But if you want to consider this as some sort of election strategy or police action instead of respect for some of your fellow human beings, fine. The funny thing about not bothering to correct Christian-bashers is that it's a horrible election strategy too! I see a lot of harm done to liberalism when a right-winger says "I can honestly say that when Marc Moron said all Christians are brain-damaged schizophrenics, nobody on the left disagreed. I want you to remember that in November, my fellow parishoners." To my admittedly-amateur eye, it might even help tilt a close election or something.
If the right wing is going to "seize" on "examples", I'd rather not stand aside while people who are putatively my allies hand them shiny, flawless examples on a silver platter, and count on the decency and intellecutal rigor of your average conservative commentator compelling them to preface their remarks with "Now, I can only assume there is a large silent majority of liberals who disagree but anyway."
Your expectation that liberals must fight any and all at all times while conservatives choose their battles (and tar with impunity) is at best dubious.
Given that I've never said that liberals must fight "any and all at all times", I haven't said a word about conservatives "choos[ing] their battles", and I think nobody should be allowed to "tar with impunity", I'm quite interested to find out who this horrible person is you're arguing with. Their body, being made entirely out of straw, poses many fascinating questions in the field of biology.
(I, on the other hand, would be quite pleased if liberals started "dialing down their tolerance", as PNH puts it, for Christian-bashing; think that mending fences with the evangelical left would help greatly in taking the initiative away from the right; and feel that you can go ahead and tar all you want, as long as you're repairing some of the sad, sad highways into the city I used to live in. Skip the impunity, though -- bad road repairs are almost worse than none at all.)
Well Anticorium I will flip the question back to you. What do you think we should do about what other people (I contend a small minority of people) think?
Speak out. If they're a minority, prove it with words and actions. Make it clear that the anti-religious left won't get away with anti-Christian statements, because that's not what liberals really believe. There's a saying about evil's victory conditions, and I'm sure it doesn't go "Evil always fails in a comical slapstick manner because it's so self-evidently wrong that good men need never waste their time fighting it."
The best way is to spend an inordinate amount of time defending ourselves against every invented idea of the left that the right can come up with.
And yet it's not a right wing "invention" that I'm talking about here. I'm talking about what people actually said on Kevin's comment page. (Maybe they're all actually right-wing trolls sent off by Instapundit to poison the well, but I'll risk that I'd have some tough crow to eat if that truth comes out.)
If there's some sort of litmus test you'd like me to take so that I can show my True Liberal Bona Fides, some sort of cerification test I can write to demonstrate that I'm not Glenn Reynolds, please point me at it.
And in ken's post...
If you can name five--or even three--visible conservative commentators [...] who took Anne Coulter to task[...]
Wait, what? I simply can't agree with that. It's not okay to wallow in the mud like a pig! I don't care what the other pigs are doing, or how many "heh"s and "indeed"s and "objectively pro-Saddam"s they oink out. I'd like to be better than that not just because people respond to virtue (he said, perhaps naively) but because it's the right thing to do. Be honest, be compassionate, be just, and then kick some ass.
So your answer, Brent, to the question "What do you think good-hearted liberals should do when people (ostensibly liberal people, even) do propose that Christians deserve no respect and even less consideration?" is ...
... is ...
... hm. I didn't actually see an answer there.
On the other side, you have a couple of disc jockeys and some simple minded blog posters who want to make fun of religous belief because they think its humorous.
No, I think that on the other side there's an undercurrent of rationalism so rough and sharp that it risks becoming, or already is, hatred of Christianity and its adherents. And, given that hatred is a bad thing, I'd rather like to know what you think should be done when otherwise decent people start talking like that. If, hypothetically, someone were to say I think that a better analogy is that most religious belief is an illness, like schizophrenia, and should be treated as such or The only difference between belief based religions (as opposed to practice based) and other odd mental states, is the veneer of respectability that 2000 years brings*, would you think it was just a big ol' joke?
I'd like to think that there's a better answer than "yeah but Georgie and Johnny hit me first and it got me so darn mad I had to hit Suzie." Please prove me right.
Do we, on the left, really want to lend credence to that idea?
I'd say the best way to lend credence to an idea is to let evidence of it go unchallenged.
* I am of course completely fabricating these quotes, which were never once uttered anywhere on washingtonmonthly.com. Honest.
I'd like to believe you, Phill and Brent, but the very first comment on Kevin's post talks about "religious nutbags" and it only goes downhill from there. This comment is a particularly fine example. Little Green Footballs would be proud of some of the rhetoric that's being slung over at Political Animal.
That's not a compliment.
What do you think good-hearted liberals should do when people (ostensibly liberal people, even) do propose that Christians deserve no respect and even less consideration? I'd really like to know, because after getting all the way through Kevin's comment page my liberal spirit is feeling very weak indeed.
(PS: I used to use the handle "MD" while commenting here and on Making Light, but today I noticed that a commenter here is already MD^2. Since they were around longer and I'm a lot less than their square root, I'm changing my name. I apologise to MD^2 and to everyone else for causing confusion.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 1 |
| 2004 | 11 |
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