{"id":4556,"date":"2009-04-14T07:54:45","date_gmt":"2009-04-14T12:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4556"},"modified":"2009-08-23T17:40:32","modified_gmt":"2009-08-23T22:40:32","slug":"the-phantom-menace-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4556","title":{"rendered":"The Phantom Menace, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Iowahawk did a hilarious send-up of JournoList<\/a>, the hush-hush list-serve for liberal “deep thinkers”:<\/p>\n

JOSH MARSHALL: How about we do something about how wingnut bloggers live in an echo chamber<\/p>\n

JESSE SINGAL: sweeet!!!! gmta<\/p>\n

MICHAEL COHEN: ya its like those f*****z are in a echo chamber or something<\/p>\n

CHRIS HAYES: gmta<\/p>\n

JONATHAN CHAIT: ya total echo chamber<\/p>\n

BRAD DELONG: echo-o-o-o-o-o-o cha-a-a-a-mber-er-er-er<\/p>\n

ISAAC CHOTINER: lols<\/p>\n

EZRA KLEIN: ok,,, we agree. Yglesias its your turn to write it<\/p>\n

MATTHEW YGLESIAS: cant, I have h\/w assignment due for rahm emanuel<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, that’s a spoof – but I have a hunch I know what one of the recent topics must have been. There’s been such a wide-spread synchronicity of – for lack of a better word – “thought” among so many regional and national leftybloggers, I can’t help but think it’s not only no coincidence, but in fact a symptom of the most caustic initiative on the part of the American left.
\n———-<\/p>\n

Before we get to the story, let’s talk aphorisms.\u00a0 Aphorisms can be taken way too far – but they can be useful memes for categorizing things like human behavior.
\nOne of my favorites I get from watching the odd episode of House<\/em>.\u00a0 In and among all the glib causticness, House<\/em> trips upon the odd ingenious bit of human nature.<\/p>\n

Many of those bits tie back to his main rule – his Prime Directive, if you will – for human nature; everybody lies<\/em>.\u00a0 It’s true, really; at some point or another, everyone finds it in their self-interest or sense of emotional self-preservation to bend the truth.<\/p>\n

I’m positing that this rule as a corollary when it comes to the left-leaning “alternative” media.\u00a0 Indeed, let’s call this “Berg’s Second Law of Leftyblogging”:\u00a0 whenever liberals toss out defamatory generalizations about conservatives, they are projecting<\/em>. (Classic example comes about 1:04 into this video<\/a>).<\/p>\n

You can pretty much name your slur; the party that yaps about “fatcats” is the party that owes its soul to plutocrats.\u00a0 The party that whinged about Bush’s record on civil liberties has always been the party that actually did <\/em>crush civil liberties (see the ’94 Crime Bill, the ’96 Counterterrorism Act, and the various Dem plans on the “Fairness” Doctrine, bank takeovers and the ). The party that complains about violence, corruption, wastrelcy and incompetence is <\/em>violent, corrupt, spendthrift and incompetent.<\/p>\n

It’s a theory, but I’ll stand by it. Indeed, you’ll see why as this piece continues.<\/p>\n

There’s one more aphorism.\u00a0 It’s George Orwell’s note that dictators always need enemies to keep the people occupied.<\/p>\n

They don’t even need to be dictators!<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

It’s a running joke among conservatives; if you order a pizza, and a lefty hears about it, it’s an example of extremism.\u00a0 Pushing to liberalize charter-school laws and vacant-housing ordinances? Activism for the Second or Tenth Amendments?\u00a0 Extremism.\u00a0 To paraphrase the old drill sergeant aphorism, “everything you do can get you labelled an extremist, and everything you don’t do can get you labelled an extremist”.<\/p>\n

I started seeing little trickles and dribbles around the regional Sorosphere a couple of weeks ago: references to “right-wing extremism<\/a>” (this in reference to a quip by Michele Bachmann that uses some kind of guerrilla warfare reference to refer to conservatives in Minnesota), usually with more-than-muted warnings about “militancy” and “violence”.<\/p>\n

It’s tempting (and in the case of the link above, accurate) to write it all off as examples of intellectual laziness, of the febrile thrashings of inferior minds.\u00a0 Indeed, both of these play into the larger point.<\/p>\n

But there is <\/em>a larger point. The leftybloggers involved in these casual, petty, paranoid defamations are unwitting tools in a long-running campaign to control the English language, if necessary by devaluing it to uselessness.<\/p>\n

More tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, Iowahawk did a hilarious send-up of JournoList, the hush-hush list-serve for liberal “deep thinkers”: JOSH MARSHALL: How about we do something about how wingnut bloggers live in an echo chamber JESSE SINGAL: sweeet!!!! gmta MICHAEL COHEN: ya its like those f*****z are in a echo chamber or something CHRIS HAYES: gmta JONATHAN CHAIT: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,63,51,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-lefty-alt-media","category-liberal-tyranny","category-slander-files"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}