Today's Daily Howler does both the unthinkable and provides a marvelous service (for this reader, at any rate) all at the same time. In writing about the error- and hyperventilation-prone way some liberals are writing and talking about the tea-baggers and, specifically, recent incidents on Capitol Hill, Somerby actually dredges up the horrid way Newt Gingrich attempted to exploit the horrific murders committed by Susan Smith in 1994 (she drowned her two children, first insisting they had been kidnapped by "blacks", then confessing she had done it herself so her boyfriend would like her more) for partisan purposes. This is the unthinkable; the service for this reader is just this: he clarified for me the ways in which some liberals and some liberal and left-wing sites get a little out of control - and expose their own ignorance - when talking about some issues, including race and religion.
Crooks & Liars is one site that, for the most part, practices almost daily shark-jumping when it comes to right-wing nuttiness. It is one thing to point out something silly or ridiculous said by someone on the right. It is quite another to make out of these, even accumulated, bits of nonsense a dangerous trend that threatens the general leftward drift of the vast majority of the American people. I tire of it, to be honest, because even as they keep talking about all these nonexistent threats to our ways of life, they also bemoan the lack of substantive discourse on the internet.
Duh, anybody?
Virtual Tin Cup
