Ace:
ou know when I say “Read the Whole Thing?” Here’s my suggestion:Don’t read the whole thing.
It’s not that there isn’t some minor interest to parts of it; there is. But overall, it’s long-winded, self-justifying, and self-indulgent.
You can read a bit of at Hot Air, but here’s the part I focus on:
In the New Media culture, anything good you do is tossed in a pit, and you are measured by who you are on your worst day. What’s the Boy Scout code? Trustworthy. Loyal. Helpful. Friendly. Courteous. Kind. Obedient. Cheerful. Thrifty. Brave. Clean. Reverent. I might be all of those things, at certain moments. But people suspect that whatever good you do, you are faking. You’re that guy. You’re that guy that says this. There is a core of outlets that are pushing these stories out. Breitbart clutters the blogosphere with “Alec Baldwin, he’s the Devil, he’s Fidel Baldwin.”Broadway has changed, by my lights. The TV networks, too. New York has changed. Even the U.S., which is so preposterously judgmental now. The heart, the arteries of the country are now clogged with hate. The fuel of American political life is hatred. Who would ever dream that Obama would deserve to be treated the way he has been? The birth-certificate bullshit, which is just Obama’s version of Swiftboating. And all for the electoral nullification that seems like a cancer on the American system. But this is Roger Ailes. And Fox. And Breitbart. And this is all about hate. It’s Hate Incorporated. But the liberals have taken the bait and run in the same direction—and it’s just as corrosive. MSNBC, in its own way, is as full of shit, as redundant and as superfluous, as Fox.
Wait, we started this, and the left then imitated us?
Of course this is nonsense on stilts. I have decried this Scalp-Hunting culture myself, frequently, as infects both the left and the right.
But here’s why I sometimes am conflicted about it:
The right is engaging in this defensively, as an Alinsky-style attempt to “Make them live by their own rulebooks.”
The right has been savaged by these tactics for decades. It is frustration over that that I believe is responsible for so many people being unwilling to acknowledge that Ted Nugent’s remarks were way over-the-line: Because they know this game is played by the left relentlessly, but the left is never (or very rarely) called to account for its own PC Speech Transgressions.
No one on the right — or very, very few on the right — wish this odious, toxic, censorious regime to continue.
But many on the right worry about unilateral disarmament. We know that if the left is permitted to engage in this game, without the sick rules of this game ever being turned against them, they will do so zealously and in perpetuity.
They will have no reason whatsoever to re-assess their strategy of Scalp-Hunting based on accusations of Speechcraft. (That is, witchcraft — only the “magic words” here are not Satanic, but contrary to the PC code. And you can’t be burned at the stake for Speechcraft accusations, but you can and will probably lose your job.)
