Posted by
Bill Crawford on Tuesday, June 16, 2009 9:59:40 PM
After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Bill Clinton did a wonderful job using the right wing origin of the plot to engender a recovery from the Republican takeover of Congress and "the age of big government is over".
He made a terse statement about the right wing being responsible for the bombing, and then immediately back tracked to the more specific target of right wing "short wave operators". But the original meaning went out there, and re-energized his base for his upcoming re-election campaign.
Now we have a nut job who killed an abortion doctor- who hopefully will fry for his act. And a neo-Nazi who went gonzo in a Holocaust Museum in D.C., who thankfully got the death penalty applied by a couple of security guards on site.
I've listened for twenty years about things like Reagan's Alzheimers being ten years too late, hoping Clarence Thomas eats enough cholesterol to die soon, how Cheney should take his hunting skills into the Oval Office with Bush and on and on. Anybody who wades into MoveOn, DailyKos or the Huffington Post should be prepared for yards of this stuff.
So now, Fox News is responsible for the death of Dr. Tiller, because Bill O'Reilly has the temerity to pose the anti- abortion argument premises without disguise. That is because it's viewers, unlike the editorial writers at the NY Times, are just too darned stupid to make any moral difference between "abortion is murder" and "killing an abortion doctor is murder".
This cheesy culture war tactic is not designed to proselytize. There is no sense in winning over converts to an argument by impuging the intelligence of those who disagree with you. This is the by product of people posing themselves as moral absolutists. They are not posing the premises of an argument for your contemplation- they are posing the argument as already over and those who disagree with them as unhinged- in this case, using a few people who ARE unhinged and making the ipso facto connection to everyone else.
I propose to these people that they join the movement on the coasts of this great land to block out Fox News from their cable menu (like it is some sort of pornography that their children shouldn't suffer) and spare themselves the torture of exposure to people like me.
You know, people who continue to pose argument as competing premises, and refuse to swim in the great swamp of intolerance that you will find in cities like New York and San Francisco.
So, if people like me refuse to drop issues like whether or not Obama is a natural citizen, it may be because he has not addressed the issue, and not that the question has been answered and I am, by definition, a nut job. The answers that have been given are circumstantial and not definitive. I don't think it is worth doing anything about at this point, save continuing to wait for a better explanation.
I refuse to accept the terms of argument handed to me. I will not cow to the moral pressure of the likes of Anthony Herbert and Frank Rich, no matter how absolutely they hand it to me. Why would dissent be "patriotic" under Bush and somehow so much more unseemly now?