Tuesday, June 22, 2004
MS. SPARTACUS:
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king, but a pariah condemned for his fraudulent claims of imaginary "visions". Statistically unusual eyesight is not the only quality provoking such jealous denial from the less gifted. Anything which calls into question their petty prejudices can lead to vicious personal attacks.
Consider the snarking by liberals at a colleague of mine who happens to share the same initials. When her writing disproved their foolish idea that women are more gentle and kind than men, the estrogen-challenged on the left mounted a Last Stand At Gender Gap, with cleverly Photoshopped allegations, and some notorious Boondocks cartoons, claiming that she had an Adam's apple. The implication was escalated further by Tbogg, writing of a man she had been seen dating, "Jonathan? Sweetie? Have you ever seen The Crying Game? ....Why? Oh, no reason...." It is not surprising that the guardians of feminist political correctness have displayed their usual double standard by not condemning the "sexism" of these cruel ad feminems.
Yet that helplessly beset conservative muse is in fact quite moderate. She was decried for intolerance after 9-11, when all she advocated was killing enemy leaders and forced conversion of their people. I have repeated often that her proposal, though well-intentioned, is not an adequate response. I continue to lobby for massive retaliation with thermonuclear weapons to destroy the entire Islamic world. Lately, as casualties mount in Iraq, I have been delighted to see more bloggers edging toward this idea. As this shift gathers momentum, perhaps it was inevitable that the appeasers would turn their nictitating membranes in my direction. Naturally, their first reaction was to use the same tactic against me which they tried on her.
Cleverly, they got a "moderate" to fire the first shot in this meme war. A moderate blogger is someone who has a permalink to Instapundit, but not to Little Green Footballs. In this case their designated fire-starter was Dean Esmay. On Monday he posted on his blog a damnation with faint praise of my own. Part of his thrust was to dismiss all my serious suggestions for destruction of the domestic Democratic demons as mere "satire". This reminded me of a lament by Lily Tomlin, about going to great effort to put an important statement about life onto a freeway overpass for the world to see -- and then having some fool with a spray can come along and change it to read "Buick". No, Dean, "satire" was the last dying word of Citizen Gaines. My own métier is uncomfortable truth; Diogenes of Sinope hung up his lantern when he met me.
Esmay's real agenda was in these words:
Last year someone threatened to sue the anonymous leftist blogger Atrios for libel, and to demand his real identity in legal discovery. Insty and even Misha belittled this as unwise and the litigious one relented, but not before a campaign was begun by Billmon of the Whiskey Bar against this abuse of the tort process:
Let's stand this liberal technique on its head. So leftist plotters manipulated Esmay into claiming that two or more people on the blogroll, probably male, are actually me? I suggest that everyone reading this PUBLICLY DENY THAT YOU ARE ME. Say that you're not me here in the comments, say it in the comments at Esmay's own site, and say it in a post on your own site to help spread the word. Let's overwhelm him with denials and kill this vile liberal scheme before it builds up any steam.
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king, but a pariah condemned for his fraudulent claims of imaginary "visions". Statistically unusual eyesight is not the only quality provoking such jealous denial from the less gifted. Anything which calls into question their petty prejudices can lead to vicious personal attacks.
Consider the snarking by liberals at a colleague of mine who happens to share the same initials. When her writing disproved their foolish idea that women are more gentle and kind than men, the estrogen-challenged on the left mounted a Last Stand At Gender Gap, with cleverly Photoshopped allegations, and some notorious Boondocks cartoons, claiming that she had an Adam's apple. The implication was escalated further by Tbogg, writing of a man she had been seen dating, "Jonathan? Sweetie? Have you ever seen The Crying Game? ....Why? Oh, no reason...." It is not surprising that the guardians of feminist political correctness have displayed their usual double standard by not condemning the "sexism" of these cruel ad feminems.
Yet that helplessly beset conservative muse is in fact quite moderate. She was decried for intolerance after 9-11, when all she advocated was killing enemy leaders and forced conversion of their people. I have repeated often that her proposal, though well-intentioned, is not an adequate response. I continue to lobby for massive retaliation with thermonuclear weapons to destroy the entire Islamic world. Lately, as casualties mount in Iraq, I have been delighted to see more bloggers edging toward this idea. As this shift gathers momentum, perhaps it was inevitable that the appeasers would turn their nictitating membranes in my direction. Naturally, their first reaction was to use the same tactic against me which they tried on her.
Cleverly, they got a "moderate" to fire the first shot in this meme war. A moderate blogger is someone who has a permalink to Instapundit, but not to Little Green Footballs. In this case their designated fire-starter was Dean Esmay. On Monday he posted on his blog a damnation with faint praise of my own. Part of his thrust was to dismiss all my serious suggestions for destruction of the domestic Democratic demons as mere "satire". This reminded me of a lament by Lily Tomlin, about going to great effort to put an important statement about life onto a freeway overpass for the world to see -- and then having some fool with a spray can come along and change it to read "Buick". No, Dean, "satire" was the last dying word of Citizen Gaines. My own métier is uncomfortable truth; Diogenes of Sinope hung up his lantern when he met me.
Esmay's real agenda was in these words:
"She" is probably a man or, more likely, two or more people. Just look to her blogroll, it'll probably be one or more of those fellows. ...the guys doing Ms. Clouter (or, really, shouldn't it be "Miss?" I'm sure "she" must be an old maid who dislikes the term "Ms.") ....So Dean claims not only that I am "one of those plural personalities", as the valet said in a classic Fred Astaire movie, but apparently have visited Denmark for surgical transformation as well. That's if we take his comments seriously, instead of as just an attempted libel by a writer jealous over missing one arm of an "X" on the 23rd chromosome. Jung would find it most fitting that it was on the 23rd day of June in 1956 that Walt Kelly depicted my reaction to this in Pogo:
Beaver: "You know who Miss Ma'm'selle Hepzibah really is? She's the lost Dauphin of France!"I shall not fall into the trap described by the late Lyndon Johnson, who said one of the best things you can do in politics is to start the rumor that your opponent copulates with swine (LBJ used cruder language, of course). He went on that you don't expect anyone to believe the story; you just want your enemy to stand up and publicly deny it. Instead, I propose to take a leaf from one of those commie activists who were only briefly silenced by the Hollywood censorship supported by Saint Ronald.
Owl: "Don't that surprise you?"
Fox: "Somehow it don't surprise me half as much as it's gonna surprise Ma'm'selle Hepzibah."
Last year someone threatened to sue the anonymous leftist blogger Atrios for libel, and to demand his real identity in legal discovery. Insty and even Misha belittled this as unwise and the litigious one relented, but not before a campaign was begun by Billmon of the Whiskey Bar against this abuse of the tort process:
So fuck you, Stalker Luskin, AND the lawyer you rode in on. Or, to paraphrase one of my favorite gladiator movies: I'm Atrios!The reference is to a film with Kirk Douglas, based on a novel by old blacklistee Howard Fast, about the slave revolt in ancient Rome. In one classic scene someone demands to know which of the slaves is Spartacus, and soon dozens of them are all claiming to be him. Likewise, dozens of bloggers were soon claiming that they were the real Atrios.
Let's stand this liberal technique on its head. So leftist plotters manipulated Esmay into claiming that two or more people on the blogroll, probably male, are actually me? I suggest that everyone reading this PUBLICLY DENY THAT YOU ARE ME. Say that you're not me here in the comments, say it in the comments at Esmay's own site, and say it in a post on your own site to help spread the word. Let's overwhelm him with denials and kill this vile liberal scheme before it builds up any steam.
