I Don’t Like Bullies

Some elements of the “progressive” blogosphere like to bully and demean bloggers who refuse to get on the anti-Obama bandwagon. This has been going on for a while, which is one reason I’ve dropped out of socializing with many of them. Now the kewl kids have ganged up on Angry Black Lady

I’ve put off writing this post for days, and I still don’t have the words to express my disgust about the “rape analogy heard ’round the Twitterverse.” In case you’re not up to speed, long story short, I had a Twitter discussion with Marcy Wheeler about the NDAA; a Greenwald supporter quipped that if I saw Obama raping a nun on live TV, I would defend him for it; another supporter quipped that I would fantasize about playing the role of the raped nun; and Greenwald piled on. When asked to account for the clumsy rape metaphor, Greenwald doubled down, claiming that it wasn’t a metaphor, and that he actually believed that I and other Obama supporters would defend Obama if we were to see him raping a nun.

I confess I didn’t read all of the twitter discussion about NDAA, mostly because I think twitter discussions of complex issues are always stupid. It might be that I would decide I agree with Marcy Wheeler’s position on NDAA. Or maybe I wouldn’t. I’ve read differing opinions about how much the detention provisions actually apply to U.S. citizens, and until that’s clarified for me I’m not quite ready to throw up my hands and run around screeching that we’ve all been put until martial law.

But this tendency to stereotype and demonize people who disagree with you reveals a deep lack of character. So I am personally expressing solidarity with ABL on this matter. Do I agree with every sentence she writes? No, but she has an intelligent and well-thought-out perspective that definitely needs to be heard and respected among progressives.

And I think Glenn Greenwald should be ashamed of himself. Awhile back he wrote a book that I admired quite a bit, called A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. The book correctly evaluated the way the Bushies gave themselves permission to wage war and gut civil liberties because they saw themselves as inherently good people battling inherently evil people. And here Greenwald is falling into the same error. In his mind, people who disagree with must be so evil or depraved or brainwashed they would make excuses for raping a nun. He’s dividing the world up into the “good” people who see things as he does versus the “bad” people who don’t.

Time to retire, Glenn. Go clear your head for a couple of years, at least.

If you’re in the mood for being further sickened and disgusted, do read “Occupy’s Iowa options: Ron Paul or Uncommitted” by Lynda Waddington. And don’t spare yourself from reading the comments, which are downright terrifying.

The article explains there are a number of small progressive groups in Iowa trying to shake things up, and they aren’t all doing the same things. But some who align themselves with OWS are trying to get themselves elected delegates to the Democratic National Convention so they can vote for Ron Paul. The point of this is to send a message to the Dem establishment about militarism, and I respect that.

However, the comments reek of Ron Paul worship, and that’s terrifying. Sample:

Original Tea Party & Occupy movements are merging
It is not extremist to ask questions about Building # 7
Learning from & teaching each other
Agree on more issues than disagree

Never under-estimate Liberal/Libertarian common cause.

Of course they should support Ron Paul. Who else shares any of their concerns? Not Obama, that’s for sure.

Here I might gently point out that Ron Paul supports ending all environmental regulation and consumer protection, wants to gut the 14th Amendment, wants to eliminate Medicare and Medicaid and leave us all at the mercy of the “free market” for health care, and wants to end reproductive rights for women. So one might ask the writer which “concerns” he is talking about. Apparently the civil liberties of women and minorities are no longer “liberal” concerns.

And I also want to add that in the event Ron Paul became president, don’t assume he would go around ending wars. Paul obviously is a psychologically unstable man who maintains some cognitive consistency by remaining inside a small ideological bubble, where everything is simple. His opposition to war is less about world peace and nonviolence than about an extreme America-first myopia. As soon as the security advisers brief President Paul about what’s really going on in the world and demand that he start making decisions about real-world things, IMO he’s as likely as not to flip out and want to bomb everything he doesn’t understand. Which is pretty much everything.

Anyway, the commenters say over and over that Ron Paul is the only one talking about the “real issues” that are of concern to progressives. These real issues are the war on drugs and ending the war in Afghanistan. All other issues are things we progressives can put on the back burner, because they aren’t that important. And, anyway, a President cannot overturn Roe v. Wade. (No, but he can appoint right-wing whackjob Supreme Court justices who can, and will.)

So, basically, we liberals are supposed to sacrifice everything we gained in the entire 20th century to end the war in Afghanistan and the war on drugs. I think not.

20 thoughts on “I Don’t Like Bullies

  1. A million years ago I read The Nation regularly, and I enjoyed reading both Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens — but then Cockburn became a holier-than-thou crank who praised libertarians and damned Bernie Sanders as inadequately left-wing, while going off on tangents like declaring cave paintings to be frauds. Hitchens, of course, became effectively a neocon, and more and more of a bully and a boor.

    Greenwald is becoming a horrible combination of both, with some PUMA thrown in. He’s a menace.

    And oy, the kids and their love of libertarianism — don’t get me started. It’s too disheartening.

  2. Paul an old loon.
    And a hazard.
    Period.

    And just because he’s sane on drug legalization and war, folks, doesn’t make his other positions any less crazy. See the ‘stopped clock’ analogy.

    Like I said before – years ago, I used to read Glenn and Jane Hamsher regularly. I stopped because I thought they went from being smart analysts on some subjects, to being ANAL-ists about their personal favorite ones.

    Sh*t happens.
    Even to people you once liked.

    Ralph Nader once wrote a great book called, “Unsafe At Any Speed,” about badly designed and built cars, one of which that blows up when rear-ended. He convinced people to stop buying Corvairs, which caused the company to eventually stop making them.
    Decades later he ran a campaign trying to convince people that there was no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. And helped Bush blow-up the country, after he confused just enough people to throw the election Little Boots’ way.

    So, sometimes people like Paul, who seem to be your “Knight in Shining Armor” on your pet subjects, is really a crazy person in an aluminum-wrapped suit, ranting about having to keep the government out of using your teeth as loudspeakers to brainwash everyone. “What do you mean? You can’t HEAR that?”

    I really like ABL (Angry Black Lady), even though I sometimes don’t agree with her.
    And it’s not like she’s trying to hide anything – the word “angry” is right there – part of her moniker.

  3. I used to think that only the Right suffered from an extreme case of puerile-ism. Now it seems that it also affects the Left. (I like the synonyms – childish, silly, foolish, callow, sophomoric.)

    We can know next to nothing of what faced Obama when he walked into the Oval Office. I’ve long suspected that the problems this country faces – nationally and internationally – are far greater and far more serious than we’re given to know. Nor did Obama know them when he ran for office.

    (We’re like children/teenagers who can’t begin to understand what’s good for them, what’s bad for them yet think they know it all.)

  4. Greenwald doubled down, claiming that it wasn’t a metaphor, and that he actually believed that I and other Obama supporters would defend Obama if we were to see him raping a nun.

    OK, I’m learning that second-hand, but still. I suppose anyone who believes Ron Paul would be more “progressive” than Obama actually might be crazy enough to write foul crap like that. Is that where Greenwald is going? Or is he just taking up Hitchens’ mantle of Cranky Old Man?

    (Also, I would’ve thought Ron Paul’s blame-the-victim writings on sexual harassment would make him far more likely than Obama to rape nuns.)

  5. Well said, everyone. When I hear GG or Jane Hamsher going off on tangents, I begin to wonder about their sanity as well as mine. Thank you for reminding me that I am not crazy! I am especially frustrated at people who seem to think Ron Paul is some sort of messiah. Ron Paul might know a lot about medicine, but his expertise in that area does not translate into knowledge of government or economics. Paul’s problem is that he is a tenther, a goldbug and wants to govern a 21st century country with late 18th or early 19th century methods that won’t work. Barbara, your observation about Paul is that he’s a “libertarian” of a sort that came about after Brown v. Board of Education is precisely on point.

  6. “And oy, the kids and their love of libertarianism — don’t get me started. It’s too disheartening.”

    Libertarianism, at its heart, is the essence of adolescence. While most of us make our break from authoritarianism sometime in our teens (many of us with the aid of the “authoritarians” themselves), some never get the chance at that tender age, for a variety of reasons, and instead come to the realization that authority is not always right later in life.

    As with most ideological converts, they go overboard, emphasizing the good, and minimizing the bad parts.

    The concept of minimal government and focus on ‘harm done’ is not, in itself, incorrect. The messy part is drawing the lines and defining “harm.” Libertarians tend to believe that only huge, obvious harms should be considered, ignoring the much more numerous, smaller harms that interfere with civilization. They also prefer that these harms be left undefined, leaving it up to the court system to sort out the resultant mess. Both beliefs are quite immature, IMNSHO.

    “Me, my, mine” is the rallying cry of libertarianism.

  7. If I may play devil’s advocate… It’s true that Paul won’t call out his racist ally Lew Rockwell; but it’s also true that he’s the only candidate publicly against this country’s A#1 racist institution; the War on Some Drugs. He’s deeply unreliable about restraining corporate power, but again he’s the only candidate publicly against this country’s A#1 corporate takeover tactic; the endless wars.

    Basically I see him as the flip side of the mainstream-politics coin. D’s and R’s both promise continuation of the welfare-warfare state, though of course more of the latter than the former; Paul promises to end both the welfare and the warfare – though of course the former before the latter!

    • paradoctor — Paul is a sick, twisted fool who would un-do every gain racial minorities made in the 20th century. He’s not the “flip side” of anything except sanity.

  8. Yesterday I said Glenn had his head up his ass to his shoulders. I was wrong. He has overcome that obstacle, and has his head up his ass all the way to his hips. And is in danger of disappearing entirely. The feat will set a new standard for being ‘self-absorbed’.

    Sarcasm aside, Glenn ought to know the one feature which unites all democrats is that we don’t agree. The most pointless, stupid, self-destructive thing any democrat can do is DEMAND conformity. After all, that’s the feature which unites republicans. The ‘one thing’ Glenn seems to be demanding is that we will all reject President Obama. Not for someone with more progressive credentials.

    President Obama is a moderate – which makes him the most progressive candidate with any chance of being elected. This isn’t good enough for Glenn – he finds Obama personally offensive probably because the President has ignored Glenn’s columns. Grow up, Glenn. Once you were a respectable legal authority with a following. You have lost much of that – and the only hope you have of not loosing it all starts with an apology as public as the insult.

  9. Ok, let me start again as the site just went kerblooey on me. My wife was upset with the president over the NDAA and felt scared that we were heading towards a dictatorship etc. I let her vent it out and then explained that this whole thing was a poison pill put into the defense authorization bill as a trap for Obama. Did she really think he was going to veto,or not sign a bill that provided 100’s of thousands of jobs and provided funds to help the wounded etc? Could you imagine the firestorm if he did? I went on to further point out that it was the House radicals who put this turd into the bill and that in order to correct it, if the courts do not, was to make sure the Democrats regained the majority in the House and kept it in the Senate. I think Greenwald is way off base, and has been a lot recently when it comes to Obama. He, and others, just refuse to get the idea straight that a president is the president of all Americans, left and right, liberal and conservative, and that just because the idea of this has been so completely warped and scrambled, does not make it any less true. To me, presidents have always had too much power and there have been many instances in our history when the y abused it.ie: Palmer raids, Lincoln’s suspension of Habeus Corpus, Nixon, FDR trying to pack the court…this is how we roll in this country.
    The coming election is a watershed moment in this nation’s history. Are we going to continue to be progressive and move forward or will we stumble back towards a neo-feudalistic style of society. This, more than the NDAA, should scare the shit out of you. The language in the NDAA can be, and should be, corrected. But if we put in leaders who wish to continue to destroy the middle class, we are going to be in a world of hurt. IMHO

    • Actually, maha’s been the simple-minded participant in this discussion. Put another way, she’s constructed a Greenwald strawman argument to rail against.

      You aren’t ready to acknowledge the truth, are you?

  10. Daphne,
    How do you figure that?

    You can’t just dump a word-turd like that here, and then run off.

    Explain how and why you think that.

    And sorry, but it’s Glenn is the one who’s irrational on this one – in the sense that he seems to have given up any of the ability to use ration that made him a good blogger in the first place, and think that Paul, a man who’d bring us back to the pre-Civil War days, will be a stronger advocate of people’s civil and privacy rights and freedoms.

    You might as well choose a hungry fox to guard your hen-house.

    I really don’t understand what Glenn is thinking when he says that, or how any “rational” Liberal or Progressive can defend him. It’s “NUCKING FUT’S” to think that Ron Paul will be a greater advocate for anything we care about, than President Obama. I have my issues with him. But I’m not blinded by some “Purity Police” concern about my pet issue(s), so wtf do I know? Nothing. And that’s still more than some of the people who support Glenn’s position know.
    This is NUCKING FUTS!!!

  11. maha: Ron Paul may indeed be a fool, but who but a fool would run for president nowadays? As for twisted, I’d say he’s fairly straightforward. As for sick, he’s sane on several issues that all the others are provably insane about.

    I disagree with him about the safety net, but he’s said he’ll leave Social Security alone, for conservative (small-c) reasons. I agree with you that this is small comfort.

    Actually I suspect that there would be very little that a President Paul could do about the welfare-warfare state. The ship of state has much inertia. Fortunately. Maybe Paul would try to undo the New Deal; but the others would try to undo the Enlightenment.

    Speaking of which… how postconstitutional can Obama be and still get your vote?

    • Ron Paul may indeed be a fool, but who but a fool would run for president nowadays? As for twisted, I’d say he’s fairly straightforward. As for sick, he’s sane on several issues that all the others are provably insane about.

      Yes, he’s quite straightforward. But again, you have to sink deeper into his world to understand where he is coming from. His is a very simplistic ideology that he projects onto everything, and the foundation of it is the old white supremacist “states’ rights” argument as it was honed during the desegregation struggle. Everything else flows from that. His understanding of the Constitution is hyper-literal and would choke off any means for people to actually use it to govern themselves. His ideas basically negate every progressive development of the 20th century and reverse every bit of progress made in the areas of racial equality, gender equality, separation of church and state, and every court decision based on inclusion of the 14th amendment to restrict states restriction of citizens’ rights. These policies would result in much less personal liberty for most of us. His economic ideas are a throwback to the 19th century and are unworkable in a 21st century first-world economy. I am not exaggerating. This is precisely what he thinks, based on his own pubic statements.

      Speaking of which: How anti-progressive can Paul be and still get your vote?

      You’re another one who needs to read Ta-Nahisi Coates’s blog post on this. Making this into an argument about Barack Obama versus Ron Paul is a massive misdirection. By all means, criticize Barack Obama. But when you hold up Ron Paul as a contrasting paragon of anything but stupidity you make your own argument ridiculous.

  12. Don’t worry, I’m not voting for Paul. I just wish a good candidate were to steal some of his better issues; but that would require a good candidate.

    I’ve read TNC. I like his way of thinking. How do you tell the messenger from the message?

  13. Apologies for unclarity. I meant: flawed messenger, with a message partly worthy, partly unworthy. So how do you separate the good parts of the message from the bad? What’s interesting about Paul is that his mix of good vs bad policy is different from the usual.

    Paul reminds me of both the Grateful Dead and Jon Stewart, in this way; once the Dead put on a benefit concert for the rain-forest, and Jerry Garcia ruefully admitted that it’s kind of pathetic that something that important should need the help of them of all people. Jon Stewart expressed similar regrets about people getting their news from him. In both cases they were admittedly unworthy; but others, supposedly worthier, were not active at all; and that was their critique.

    So isn’t it kind of pathetic that _only_ Ron Paul, of all people, is speaking out against empire and drug war? This isn’t meant at praise of Paul, but as harsh critique of all the others.

    • So how do you separate the good parts of the message from the bad?

      It’s all bad, coming from Paul, because his “good” ideas most of the time are based on the same reasoning as his “bad” ideas. For that reason, if you care about the “message,” you create considerable distance from Paul and find another messenger.

Comments are closed.