. . . he must be trying to deceive people. No alternative explanation works, when
he describes me thus:
Robert Stacy McCain, a supporter of the genocide of Palestinians in Israel, in a blog-post that has to be one of the most single-mindedly bigoted diatribes I have read. And I've read a few.
So says the Trig-Truther impressario of
The Atlantic Monthly, in honoring me with yet another "Malkin Award" nomination, my fourth since February. Earlier today, I paused for a moment to pray and Andrew may therefore be an angel unaware. God bless you, sir, for providing me this opportunity to elaborate on important principles of rhetoric.
Right-click that "genocide" hotlink up there, and choose "open in new window" from the pulldown menu so that you may read Andrew's Feb. 20 post in a new browser window. (Alt+Tab to toggle between the two.) Andrew quoted this:
Swear to God, if [the Israelis] ever want a Gentile prime minister, my first order would be to deploy the IDF in a north-south line, facing east. My second order would be "forward march" and the order to halt would not be given until it was time for the troops to rinse their bayonets in the Jordan. After a brief rest halt, the order "about face" would be given, and the next halt would be at the Mediterranean coast.
To which Andrew replied, "Words fail." No, sir. Perhaps
your understanding fails, but words do not.
"If" is the largest two-letter word in the English language, proposing a contingency or hypothetical.
If Andrew Sullivan were hung like porn star . . .
The more farfetched the hypothetical, the more we should consider what follows "if" to be hyperbole, that is to say, an expression carried to an extreme. Argument by hypothesis always involve the risk that some dullard will fail to grasp the point being expressed and incorrectly suppose that one actually desires the scenario described.
Therefore, it becomes unfortunately necessary to reveal that my campaign to become the first Gentile prime minister of Israel was intended as a jest. Furthermore, my tactical plan for Palestinian "genocide" (actually, Andrew, it would be mere
ethnic cleansing, since they'd have the opportunity to flee the advancing IDF bayonets) was a hyperbole, a sort of verbal clue that the reader had reached the punchline.
There is truth in humor, of course, and anyone who wishes to read the entirety of my Feb. 20 post may attempt to discern what truth I meant to express. The title and first paragraph:
Glenn Greenwald: 'No anti-Semite could
possibly hate me worse than I hate myself'
Well, that's the subconscious meaning of his latest column in his ongoing effort to win the Nobel Prize in literature with his wicked satire of a stereotypical self-hating Jew. . . .
Greenwald is one of these people who has never seen a fight between a Jew and an Arab for which he did not blame the Jew. My Feb. 20 post begins by discussing a category of critics of the U.S.-Israel alliance that includes some of my paleocon/libertarian friends, remarking that one cannot dismiss all such critics as anti-Semites: "The world is more complex than that."
Being
notorious myself, I hesitate to attach the evil stigma of anti-Semitism, an implicit accusation of
mala fides, on those who are attempting to offer serious comment on serious matters of policy. Whether it's James Pinkerton, Pat Buchanan or Taki Theodoracopulos, only conclusive evidence of irrational and irredeemable Jew-hatred will suffice.
Perhaps I am too tolerant in this regard, just as I am too patient in hoping that David Frum will reconsider his "
Unpatriotic Americans" anathema against Robert Novak,
et al. Similarly, I may perhaps be too hopeful that there is still within Andrew Sullivan's soul some shred of conscience that would cause him to retract the accusation that I am an advocate of "genocide."
This essay will be extended over the next several hours. I had other things I meant to do today, but it seems the angels meant otherwise. So if you'll do me a favor, refresh this post in a couple hours. Meanwhile,
the waitress has arrived with your check. (Click the link, buddy. She's a hot redhead.)
UPDATE: My buddy tipped the waitress in a respectable manner, but a certain resident of Connecticut -- maybe Ed's got a thing for redheads -- doubled that tip. My gratitude to both these gentlemen, and to the several others who know how
To Insure Prompt Service. Hope you're all enjoying this latest spectacle, which now continues . . .
Kathy Shaidle is the Only Canadian Who Matters, a woman of such excellent character that I am tempted to forgive the Northern Menace for foisting Neil Young upon us. Lead me not into temptation.
It was she, the diminuitive Canadian, who
seized upon the "Ransom Note Method" as the key to understanding a certain species of
ad hominem by which the Left cuts-and-pastes various remarks and assembles them into a dossier of distortion, like a kidnapper gluing together a ransom note.
The primary purpose of such an attack is to depict the target -- among others,
Ann Coulter and
Michelle Malkin have both received this treatment -- as a person of such despicable sentiments, guilty of such vile hatreds, that no respectable person can view them as anything but a bogeyman, a demon, an agent of evil.
For decades, the "Ransom Note Method" has been employed against the Left's enemies, living and dead, and has repeatedly achieved not only its primary purpose, but also its secondary purpose: To intimidate and confuse the Right, to cause them to ostracize those conservatives who are most dangerous to the Left, and to discourage other conservatives from engaging in direct confrontation with the ideological foe.
Kathy don't scare easy. To quote our hero
J. Coddington Van Voorhees VII ("Coddy," to his friends), I like the cut of her jib. And now that a few people have begun to discern the methods and objectives of the Ransom Not Method, the method's effectiveness has been permanently impaired. It will soon be destroyed entirely and the Left will be deprived of one of its most reliable weapons.
You assholes picked a fight with the wrong Canadian. Kathy was called a "racist" for her full-throated criticism of Canada's Orwellian political correctness, so that the book she co-authored cannot even be purchased via Amazon. But she has friends, among them
Mark Steyn, and with friends like that, she can handle as many enemies as may come against her.
Welcome to the Camp of the Saints.
Hit the tip jar, and come back in an hour or two, because I aim to make sure you get your money's worth, folks:
"My God, Scarlett O'Hara!" said Tony peevishly. "When I start out to cut somebody up, you don't think I'll be satisfied with scratching him with the blunt side of my knife, do you? No, by God, I cut him to ribbons."
-- Gone With The Wind
UPDATE 4:05 p.m.: James Joyner is an extraordinarily insightful writer, and when he calls me "
perhaps the most skilled attention whore in all the blogosphere," my instinctive reaction is, "
Perhaps?"
Dr. Joyner
began blogging in January 2003, when the 'sphere was as tiny and helpless as little Trig Palin, and his
excellent Outside the Beltway blog has grown along with it. The Good Doctor therefore may not appreciate the difficulties confronting a writer who got 6,000 visitors in March 2008 -- his first month of full-time blogging -- and who did not aim to fail at this new endeavor.
"Attention whore"?
Heh. This implies that I would compose a quite risky 1,500-word analysis of anti-Palinism merely to gain attention. (Check the
gazongas on that redhead!) Yet it is a fact, one which too many journalists fail to appreciate, that there is no point writing something if no one is reading it.
Dr. Joyner comes from an academic background where entire careers are devoted to that sort of writing. If my prose style is . . .
engaging, this is surely no sin in the realm of commercial writing. But I did not come here to argue with my dear friend James, rather to eviscerate Andrew Sullivan. (Just a figure of speech, a metaphor, a bit of engaging
imagery to whet the appetite of the reader who is encouraged to suspect that Sully's intestines will be displayed in the next update, in about an hour.)
UPDATE 4:52 p.m.: Before that interruption, I was discussing principles of rhetoric, namely, if you're going to attack a man,
destroy him.
Don't shilly-shally around. Don't snipe or gossip or kibbitz or damn him with faint praise. Be a man about it, and take him head-on, determined that when you finish, there shall be nothing left of his reputation except a smoldering crater and the hushed awe of the spectators.
To do otherwise is to advertise yourself as a soft target. That this principle could be applied to Israeli's response to rocket attacks from Gaza might make Andrew Sullivan pause, if he were a thoughtful man. Or hung like a porn star.
Ken Layne's attack on Sarah Palin, involving her son Trig, was astonishingly sadistic.
I saw it at Professor William Jacobson's blog -- the Professor quotes it in full, so that you don't have to click over to Wonkette to see it -- and immediately forgot whatever it was I had planned to do before I saw it.
What could motivate Layne's wanton viciousness? What did Sarah Palin ever do to him to deserve that? Rather, what could
anyone ever do to provoke such cruelty? Nothing. Layne's attack was a raw specimen of undiluted evil.
It reminded me of
similar specimens of evil, also involving the governor and her infant son. Motherhood is among the many institution our society once revered, but which are now widely mocked and derided. As I pondered what sort of response Layne might deserve, I thought about that: Why is it Sarah Palin's
maternal qualities that Layne and others like him choose to attack?
A horror and hatred of . . . the
"birth canal"?
UPDATE 5:44 p.m.: Hate to repeat myself, but . . .
Heh. No point knocking yourself out, eliciting accusations of being a "single-minded bigot," if nobody's going to read it.
"Attention whore" or not, as I contemplated Layne's attack on Palin, the exposed flank was clear. Like others, he seemed
offended by motherhood.
Q. What manner of person would do this?
A. A vicious cocksucker.
Now, I have occasionally remarked on the forms of misogyny characteristic of gay-male culture. Others have made similar observations. There is a type of woman that gay men typically venerate -- The Diva,
e.g., Cher, Bette Midler, Liza, Madonna -- and there are types of women that gay men typically despise, perhaps none more than that unglamorous stereotype, the frumpy housewife. If you add the descriptor "Christian" to "housewife," it's like chumming the waters near the Great Barrier Reef.
Why is this so? In Principles of Logic thirty years ago, our professor warned against any statement containing "all" or "always," "none" or "never" (a danger that is best illustrated by Venn diagram). Nevertheless, one might describe the general attitude toward women in gay-male culture, without fear that this description could be fairly characterized as applicable to every gay man. Therefore . . .
Gay men have mother issues -- and all that proceeded from there. And having written that and put it on the Internet, now I see that Andrew Sullivan finds fit to accuse me of advocating Palestinian "genoicide." As Dana Carvey's Church Lady might say, "How convenient."
Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful . . .
This essay can be extended and, if you refresh this page in about an hour, I think it will be. Do you really think I'm merely an "attention whore"? Or do you suppose that there is some
reason I wanted your attention? Let the wise consider, and
please hit the tip jar.
UPDATE 6:42: Referencing my discussion of gay culture's influence in the fashion industry, a conservative blogger left
a link to this:
Ladies, a question. Why did you allow gay men to become the arbiters of feminine beauty? Seriously, I want to know. Letting Penis Hilton judge a beauty pageant is like me asking Rosie O'Doughnuts for advice on how to be a real hunk . . .
Ladies, before I hear any more whining about society's horrendous standards of beauty, consider who sets them, and consider who lets the deciders decide. . . .
Indeed, the artificial standards of the fashion industry are . . .
unmerciful, you might say. Look at the ads in
Cosmo. How many hetero guys consider anorexic 6-foot-tall heroin addicts to be ideal? Show of hands. Anyone?
Perhaps no skill is more important to survival than the ability to distinguish between a friend and an enemy. An honest enemy is less to be feared than a false friend. Military aircraft carry a signal device known as IFF ("Identify Friend or Foe") the purpose of which is to prevent friendly-fire incidents, and to enable pilots to know that the enemy in their sights is indeed an enemy.
Women who turn to
Cosmo seeking friendly advice are fools, as
I explained years ago. And one of the basic problems in politics is quite similar. Republicans are forever listening to "friendly" advice from people who aren't really their friends.
Ask Sarah Palin about that. She joined Crazy Cousin John's campaign last year and found herself surrounded by arrogant know-it-all "advisers" whose advice struck her as wrongheaded, and now
those same advisers appear as anonymous "campaign insiders" in vicious hit-pieces aimed at destroying her future viability as a candidate.
If Andrew Sullivan wants to be my enemy, this is his choice. I pity him too much to hate him, and his animosity harms me not at all. I wish he wouldn't accuse me of genocide, but this ludicrous accusation hurts his credibility, not mine.
There were other things I might have added here, and perhaps I'll add more later. But I've got to read this
Vanity Fair article and see if I can deduce the identity of the sources. Then a nap, maybe, before preparing for my trip to Alabama.
Please tip your waitress. (Look at those
gazongas!)
UPDATE 7:05 p.m.: If you
criticize Somali immigrants for harassing a gay man, is your hatred of homophobia perhaps a form of xenophobia? Or is it just regular racism?
Whatever happened to
multiculturalism, for crying out loud?
How dare you try to
impose your values on those Somalis?! This is
eliminationist rhetoric!
Posts
My advice to you, Tiger? Plead insanity. Because you'd have to be crazy to cheat on her.
