Hello All -
Longtime lurker and very infrequent poster, htat33, here at your service. The Daily Kos is such a fine bit of internet grassroots activism that I have rarely felt the need to pipe up, but reading today's Slate Magazine online article just made feel the need to vent.
Read the article:
http://www.slate.com/id/2108714/
What's great about the article is that Slate allowed staff other than writing contributors to speak their minds. And the staff is overwhelmingly pro-Kerry. Those comments demonstrate the array of contempt for the failed Bush policies as well as admiration (some glowing, some grudging, some barely) for Kerry the man and Kerry the politician.
But one of the few pro-Bush comments jumped out at me, and boy is it a doozy:
"Steven Landsburg, Economic Writer: Bush
If George Bush had chosen the racist David Duke as a running mate, I'd have voted against him, almost without regard to any other issue. Instead, John Kerry chose the xenophobe John Edwards as a running mate. I will therefore vote against John Kerry.
Duke thinks it's imperative to protect white jobs from black competition. Edwards thinks it's imperative to protect American jobs from foreign competition. There's not a dime's worth of moral difference there. While Duke would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of skin color, Edwards would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of birthplace. Either way, bigotry is bigotry, and appeals to base instincts should always be repudiated.
Bush's reckless spending and disregard for the truth had me almost ready to vote for Kerry--until Kerry picked his running mate. When the real David Duke ran against a corrupt felon for governor of Lousiana, the bumper stickers read, "Vote for the crook. It's important." Well, I'm voting for the reckless spendthrift. It's important again."
Obviously, this comment is beyond the pale. But this comment is more than that. It is almost a quintessential piece of GOP-think. Many of us have observed the shocking new phenomena of Bush operatives blatantly lying to a huge crowd or to a reporters face (this includes the 2 candidates as well). And they do this willfully, completely aware they are lying, fully aware of the fact that the audience itself knows they are lying.
This "Steven Landsburg" is lying to you. He does not give a whit about Edward's views on outsourcing. He doesn't for a moment equate Edwards' views with the clear racism of the former Klansman David Duke. This "Steven Landsburg" doesn't for a moment believe a god damned word he just wrote. What he is doing is engaging in the ancient wing nut rhetorical trick of "bait the liberal" or "hoist the liberal by his own petard."
The trick goes something like this: go to a free for all message board like Yahoo. Engage in a debate with a winger. Eventually you will be faced with a sort of "gotcha" moment that is intended to discredit all of liberalism by breaking out the "hypocrite" charge. Say you're debating some policy and race and racism is a related topic to this bit of policy. Now let's say you parry and thrust on this message board with some Martin Luther King Jr. quotes etc. A well schooled winger will counter with something like:
"Well, MLK was a communist but you wouldn't care about that. However, you might be interested to know that MLK was an adulterer. A man of God as an adulterer. And he plagiarised a paragraph in the 40s when he was in divinity school. So - he's no man of God. He's no "scholar" of the highest order. He is irrelevant. His views don't count because he is a hypocrite - and by associating with his views YOU are a hypocrite. And since you are a liberal therefore ALL liberals are hypocrites. Your entire political beliefs are predicated on a lie."
Now, no winger would ever write like that. But that's the basic premise: find some tortured association to pounce upon and deride as hypocritcal and then tar everyone associated with the "hypocrite" as fellow "hypocrites" therefore shredding the entire political movement just like that, QED. That's the idea anyway.
So what was our "Steven Landsburg" attempting to do in his little demonstration of seriously flawed if not mentally deranged logic? Well, he obviously knew his fellow Slaters were liberal and would support Kerry. He knew if he mentioned any of the belaboured Bush talking points he would just be a lone loopy voice howling in the wind of common sense. So he went for the "you're candidate is a hypocrite so you're a hypocrite too" approach.
Landsburg does this by simply appropriating the issue of racism, espousing a very liberal attitude about racism and then doing the "gotcha": Edwards is a racist, therefore you supposed liberals are voting for someone who goes against everything you believe in.
This post isn't about outsourcing. I will say, however, that to equate the racism of David Duke, he of the KKK, they of the decades of lynchings and church bombings, with a candidate's concerns about outsourcing is a ludicrous, ugly, slanderous, illogical, galling and childish bit of "logic."
This is what we are up against people. Common sense versus a seething mass of liars, willing to distort EVERYTHING to fit their precious ideology. I for one look forward to the inner debate the GOP will surely face when JK wins on November 2nd.
Good luck Kossacks - you're an AMAZING bunch.