Yglesias: The Critical Democratic BS Shortage

WE'VE ALL HEARD THE EXPRESSION, "He's trying to cram 20 pounds of BS into a 10 pound bag." It implies that the source of our annoyance is so full of BS that he hasn't got room for it all. Given the incessant repetition of the Democrats and their fellow media travelers working overtime to demoralize their own country, you might think that this is a classic example of the cramming behavior referenced above.

You might think that but you would be wrong. Just the reverse is true. What we are seeing is a shortage of BS sloshing about in a very large bag. This is why all these memes hang around and pollute our shared spiritual commons these days. For when you are short on actual examples to buttress your argument, what you have to do is repeat them in as endless a variety as you can imagine. This is to create the impression that there is a vast body of weighty evidence propping up your argument when it is, in reality, as thin as the gruel once doled out to orphans in Victorian work houses. Feed them the same slop over and over, they might think they're full.

If you want to show just how evil your country is and all you've got is a dozen or so twisted individuals running a prison in Iraq, just repeat the statement 10,000 times and show the same pictures from different angles. Voila, you've got 120,000 impressions of evil. You've smeared your own country with thousands of brush strokes and you've gotten to feel good about yourself while you're doing it.

If your lie is that "Bush Lied," repeat it like some magic incantation one million times and print up a lot of posters for it. You've learned from tyrants and dictators how to inflate your lie into the Big Lie. If a lot of you, because of the way you were raised, have your hands on the media, you can repeat the reports about the lie and through sheer dint of amplification make the Big Lie bigger.

Then, when your examples and your 'proof,' gets lighter and lighter until it barely fills the bottom of your BS bag and starts to smell, shall we say, less than fresh -- you can always root around in all that sludge down there and pluck out the dripping and foulest morsel you carry with you in case of extreme emergencies -- The Nazis. You will be breaking Godwin's Law, but you'll hope nobody'll notice you're overdrawn at the Bank of BS. If you can't prove it, tell everyone your opponents are Nazis. It won't work, but you'll continue to get invitations to dinner parties and afternoons in the Hamptons and paychecks, so what the hell. What's a little BS among friends that desperately need some more BS to fill up the empty sacks of their souls?

Matthew Yglesias has obviously come up with his own critical BS shortage in The Return of the 'Stab In the Back' at the woefully named redoubt for those whose BS just isn't playing like it used to, - Center for American Progress. Matt tells us:

The groundwork is being laid for a new version of the "stab in the back" myth that helped destroy Weimar Germany. No matter how far south things go in Iraq, the blame will be laid not at the feet of the president who initiated and conducted the war, but rather on those who had the temerity to note that it wasn't working. Rather than the critics having been proven right, or so the story goes, the critics are to blame for the failure of the very policy they were criticizing. It's an ugly tactic, and as you go down the journalistic food chain, it grows uglier still.

Connoisseurs of fine BS have to stop to savor that one. It is a brilliant example of prime, well-aged and finely marbled BS.

Let's look at how much high-density BS is in that one:
1) It predicts a Naziesque crackdown that is just around the corner, much like the manner in which people's rights have been ruthlessly repressed since the advent of the Patriot Act.
2) It whips up a brief period of mourning for the tragedy of Weimar Germany -- that all too brief spring of free absinthe and cocaine l'entre deux guerres, that one fragile thing that could have stood against Hitler -- a warns America that it too could be a Weimar Republic.
3) It then gives to the critics ( the few, the select, the brave enough to run a typewriter four thousand miles from a war zone and tell us what's wrong with it) the virtue of having "temerity" as if bravery in this world was found by just shooting your mouth off in the center of a vast circle of like-minded friends.
4) It then warns of the looming disaster that awaits truth, justice and the American Way, just by noting that there's a lot of people working the media who would be really pleased to see their own country lose no matter what the cost.
5) It wraps the whole thing up by referencing the "journalistic food chain" and warning how ugly it is down there, as opposed to the finer, brighter, whiter realms that Yglesias and his band of snobs inhabit.

Fine, fine, fine BS. It may even fill up the Democratic BS bag a bit so that the sloshing sounds from within don't echo so much and make the bag seem so hollow.

But hollow it is. We can tell that is the truth from the blunt fact that Yglesias has evoked, in his desperation for just a little more BS to fill his bag, Godwin's Law

Godwin's Law     prov.     [Usenet] "As a USENET discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.

Thus, for all that we are afflicted by the endless replays of Yellowcake, the Plame Game, the Bush Lied Lie, the Clarke Testimony, the Woodward Access, the Abu Ghraib Gambit, the WMD Goalpost Moves, we can hope to see an end to it at some point. We know, from this masterful effort at scraping up some refuse and shaping it into a new cake of BS that, in fact, the Democratic BS is getting in short supply.

So little BS remains in the Left's Strategic BS Reserve that there may not be enough on hand for John Kerry to mount a serious BS attack on the President. This may account for his grudging agreements dressed up like differences of the last few days. Yes, the BS shortage is real and critical for the Left. They've used too much ammunition too soon and may well have to "save the last BS for themselves."

Witness to this is found in Yglesias' own article when, in searching for "fresh evidence" of his enemies willingness to trash the press he can only come up with the 'transgression' of

Glenn Reynolds,... campaign to incite the defacement of New York Times distribution boxes .

This is mind-boggling BS that refers to a couple of photos of NYT boxes that some benighted souls had scribbled on. It is wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling BS. But it is of something so slight that , even if it were true, would still leave Yglesias in the position of have only one ounce of fresh BS for his twenty pound sack. The sloshing would still be audible from a thousand yards.

I don't know what they're thinking other than "We just hate that stupid, stupid President...," but they'd better get some fresh BS in massive quantities, because at this rate they don't have enough BS to win a national election, no matter how many times they put their two horse apples on national television.

Posted by Vanderleun at May 28, 2004 3:57 PM