That our present politics is even more toxic than our television is news to nobody. Indeed, in more ways than one, television battening on ignorance, enhances the toxicity while the Internet amplifies it.
Case in point. While tracking today's "Who Knows?" news -- "Al-Qaeda Chief in Iraq Killed?" I had to move around various blogs on all sides of this story. In doing so, I noticed what I could have predicted happening to a more alarming degree than I could have estimated.
Among those American blogs that you know are skewed to the Right I found that many commenters were, from the first hint of the news, praying for it to turn out to be correct. After all, if somebody tells you that a man associated with an organization that has killed thousands of your fellow countrymen and even more innocent civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, his death would be "good news" by any rational definition. Nothing abnormal here.
No so the American blogs you know are skewed to the Left. In the comments sections of these blogs you find a lot of people that are actually 'praying' for the news to be wrong. Not only are they doing so but they are constructing fanciful conspiracy theories involving Veto Day and "Mission Accomplished" day at the same time. Included in these comments is an overall tone of smug satisfaction with the accomplishments of a killer who leads other killers to slaughter thousands of people without any qualms whatsoever. It is almost as if these commentators are "living their dream" of killing through the actions of an Al-Qaeda capo; they would hate to have him taken away. It would lessen their pleasure at a distance.
I'm no fan of the blathering rants of Michael Savage. He's wrong in so many ways and clearly a man with more personality disorders than Rosie. Like her he's found a way to capitalize on them and like her I seek to switch him off almost every time I hear him. At the same time, after wading through the ooze and mire of the comments sections at the Huffington Post and Think Progress and the always dependable Daily Kos, I am slowly coming to agree with him that "Liberalism is a mental disorder." [Ed.-- Now that's nuts. Hey, I didn't say I'd read the book. Even a broken crock is right every so often.]
Here's an exchange within the comments at HuffPo:
Comment trying to be reasonable: "It's not even about politics anymore. It's about, "Well, 3,000 people really wasn't so bad. It was a one-time thing, it was over quickly, and we've all moved on. We can deal with that. But we can't deal with war, day after day, even though we're not the ones fighting it." That is a selfish state of mind, and it presupposes that these future attacks will not infringe upon the liberal lifestyle. That is what is truly frightening."Response: What is truly frightening is existence of people with your state of mind! Knowing that there must be occassional terrorist attack DOES NOT give you or anyone else the permission to go and destroy everything and everyone in ME or else where. I am against terrorism, but what US has been done in Iraq for past 5 years is even worse than trorrism action!
I previously thought that it was that the Left that was delusional while contemporary Liberalism was merely a passionate political stance enhanced by the extreme partisanship of this era. No longer. That's too kind a definition of people who pray for a monster to live just to get their pallid political rocks off. I'm going over to the Chris Rock position: "Whatever happened to crazy?"
Posted by Vanderleun at May 1, 2007 6:00 PM
I came to the realization that the Liberal camp was crazy, nuts, deranged, etc. when I jumped out of their camp in the years following 9/11. I used to be a classic Democrat of the JFK variety - Irish Catholic Democrat. When I did the homework and the research about why it all happened - found this blog and many other Libertarian or Conservative sites - and found out about modern Islam, my transition was complete. The Transnational Progressive (read Communist/Socialist with a 'Red') Democrats in power now are not the ones I grew up with. And seriously, I grew up with Leftists - Dad was a lifelong member of the Party (yup, that one, US Communist) and Mom was a liberation theology Catholic. I know the party lines by heart.
This present bunch are just power hungry and deranged. They will do anything to regain the power they feel is their right including selling the US down the drain.
The Hobo
Bush hatred has made them insane. They want to kill him but if they can't literally kill the man and everybody associated with him, they're gonna try to smear him and them so badly that they'll wish they were dead.
Yes, they're insane. Insane like rabid dogs, they can't seem to help themselves. They spread their madness to everyone around them that they can. They can't tolerate diversity of opinions so they make it a hate crime to express views that they disagree with.
Posted by: Delsie Clanton at May 3, 2007 5:11 PMI don't suppose it would help to point out that post 9/11 we did not indiscriminately kill large numbers of people or destroy the Mid-East. Easy as that would have been, the U.S. took the hard road, and we are still spending the lives of our young people to try to build a stable government in Iraq.
I don't think it will work, not long term anyway, and it is clear that the press and the Left have no interest in a long term solution to Islamic fundamentalism. So our young will die, our military will wear out it's equipment, and the bigger war will loom ever closer.
The "response" you posted gets to one of the questions I've been mulling over for some time. If the terrorists and their friends are as media/web savvy as is claimed, how many of these posts are by "provocateurs"? That commenter is almost certainly not a native English speaker based on certain errors that are very common to those whose mother tongue is not English. Illiterate English speakers make different sorts of errors.
Just an observation from somebody that has lived in a number of non-English speaking countries.
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