Category Archives: blogging

Freeped

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Those nasty liberal bloggers are at it again … oh, wait …

Last December a freelance writer named Jenny Price wrote an op ed for the Washington Post arguing for a ban on handguns and criticizing the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence for not pursuing a handgun ban.

For the record, I suspect the Brady Campaign is taking a realistic approach. The chance of a ban on all handguns in our lifetime probably is slightly less than the chance lightning bolts will simultaneously strike and write “Bush Sucks” on the White House lawn. I also believe — and I’ve spent some time with arguments pro and con on this point — that such a ban would require a constitutional amendment. But I don’t intend to go into all that today.

I bring up the Jenny Price op ed because today Ms. Price has an op ed in the Los Angeles Times in which she describes reactions to her Washington Post piece. She knew she was going to catch hell; she was not surprised, she says, by the insults and threats she received.

But Ms. Price began her Washington Post op ed by describing how her brother was murdered by his fiance’s mother, with a handgun. And Some People objected.

First, many chat-room members declared that the killing had to have been justified and was most likely an act of self-defense.

One participant, “armymarinedad,” wrote: “I would submit it was a liberal mind-set.” Liberals, many others agreed, are mean to their parents — mean enough to warrant homicide. “One can’t help wondering,” went one response to armymarinedad, “what the mother had done in a previous life to deserve … a Liberal for a daughter.”

The second challenge was that I had made up the story of my brother’s murder. “Law-abiding gun owners simply do not commit crimes,” “Gunslinger” posted — logic hard to refute. But like David’s killer, thousands of law-abiding citizens annually become criminals when they pick up a firearm and shoot other people.

“Chances are very good,” wrote “Plutarch” on freerepublic.com, “that her brother, if she has one, is alive and well.”

Plutarch and his freerepublic fellows Googled my story about David — and were encouraged when they came up empty because they were certain that “this remarkable murder” would have received massive media attention.

“I love to catch them [liberals] lying!” declared “mad_as_he$$.”

Lamentably, a double homicide by a friend or relative of the victims is an unremarkable news event in Los Angeles County, where 17 people, on average, are shot to death every week. The Times’ and Daily News’ stories were brief and buried on inside pages. Because the police took all day to notify our family, David’s name did not appear in them.

No matter. The freerepublic.com gang Googled some more, LexisNexised, scoured The Times’ archives for headlines, dug up Social Security records. They wondered whether David and I had different last names: A “rabid feminist” like me, of course, would never use her husband’s name. But “Ghengis (Alexander was a wuss!)” surmised that David and I had different fathers because that was so “common in California in the ’60s.”

In the midst of my detective work, I received an e-mail from a medical doctor who praised my “terrific opinion piece” and asked for “a link to any newspaper accounts.” But I quickly determined that Plutarch had sent the e-mail using his real name (I can Google too).

Plutarch found a photograph of me on the Internet and posted it on the freerepublic site. He worked so hard on the case that I was rooting for him to be the guy who finally figured it out. But just after he promised his colleagues that he’d call the L.A. County coroner’s office, “DakotaRed” posted a recent newspaper piece about my family that mentioned the murder. The freerepublic discussion stopped abruptly, and the chat rooms on the other pro-gun sites soon moved on as well.

Technorati says the December op ed received remarkably little notice from bloggers — only ten links. I guess when this is posted there will be eleven. The attention paid to Price’s op ed came from gun advocacy chat rooms and Free Republic, not from bloggers, which might Mean Something. Or not. Anyway, here’s a link to one Free Republic thread, although I couldn’t find the comments Price quotes. (Deleted, perhaps?) If you are interested, you can see what the Freep are saying about today’s Los Angeles Times article here. I notice one commenter (#22) doubts the story of Price’s brother’s murder is true. They don’t give up, do they?

A guest blogger at Orcinus, Sara Robinson, is posting a series on the authoritarian personality. (Thanks to moonbat for the tip.) Robinson believes authoritarians can be cured — good luck with that. But I mostly want to call attention to the traits of the authoritarian personality, which she lists in Part I. Authoritarian leaders tend to be (not the full list) —

Intimidating and bullying
Faintly hedonistic
Vengeful
Pitiless
Exploitative
Manipulative
Dishonest
Cheat to win
Highly prejudiced (racist, sexist, homophobic)
Mean-spirited
Militant
Nationalistic

And authoritarian followers are usually (not the full list, either)–

Prejudiced (particularly against homosexuals, women, and followers of religions other than their own)
Mean-spirited
Narrow-minded
Intolerant
Bullying
Zealous
Dogmatic
Uncritical toward chosen authority
Hypocritical
Prone to panic easily
Highly self-righteous
Moralistic
Severely punitive
Little self-awareness

Clearly, Ms. Price stumbled into a nest of authoritarians. Ouch. But in her Los Angeles Times op ed she makes a valid point about the Freep that IMO also could apply to blogs —

The discussions left me profoundly sad. “You know,” a friend tried to reassure me, “these are just guys who sit in front of their computers at 3 a.m. in their underwear.”

But when these gun-obsessed guys in their underwear talk to like-minded guys, they build a community that reinforces a level of intolerance that is off the charts. After all, the Internet doesn’t create community. People create community — and how the Internet is used depends on the people who use it.

I’ve sometimes wondered if some Internet forums amount to positive feedback loops for personality disorders. In this case, Free Republic is a medium by which authoritarian personalities get together and feed each other’s authoritarian traits. You can say the same thing for Little Green Footballs and other blog communities. And never forget — anything you feed will grow. Eventually (I postulate), a Freep who was mildly authoritarian when he began freeping will become a flaming, snarling, foaming-at-the-mouth authoritarian; the sort of person compelled to destroy anyone with whom he disagrees, like Jenny Price.

Price also asks, “[D]o you really want these people on these websites … to have guns? … the paranoia and bone-chilling hatred that spew from such sites as packing.org and freerepublic.com make for an equally — and unusually — effective argument for a ban on handguns.” (Have you ever noticed that the people who are most single-mindedly zealous about their right to own firearms usually are the last people on the planet you’d want to own firearms?) But, as Michael Moore argued in the film “Bowling for Columbine,” Americans aren’t just violent with handguns. We are violent, period. We murder each other with all manner of objects — knives, clubs, whatever — at much higher rates than other first-world nations. Might this homicidal tendency be a by-product of authoritarian culture? A stretch, maybe, but think about it.

Henry Porter writes on the Guardian web site that right-wingers on the web are successfully silencing speech they don’t like. Porter cites a Chicago university that banned students asking questions about Israel and Palestine in class. The subject was verboten, Porter says. When a professor named Douglas Giles permitted a student to ask a question about Palestinian rights in his World Religions class, he was fired. (I found the same story at Chicago IndyMedia. Is it true? Is there something that Giles is not telling us? I don’t know. If anyone learns more about this, please post.) According to Porter (emphasis added) —

Giles’s sacking … is part of the movement to suppress criticism of Israel on the grounds that it is anti-semitic. A mild man, Giles seems astonished to find the battle for free speech in his own lecture theatre.

‘It may be sexy to get on a bus and go to DC and march against war,’ he said to me last week. ‘It is much less sexy to fight in your own university for the right of free speech. But that is where it begins. That is because they are taking away what you can talk about.’ He feels there is a pattern of intolerance in his sacking that has been encouraged by websites such as FrontPageMag.com and Campus Watch.

Joel Beinin of Stanford University is regularly attacked by both. Beinin is a Jew who speaks both Hebrew and Arabic. He worked in Israel and on an assembly line in the US, where he helped Arab workers understand their rights. Now, he holds seminars at Stanford in which all views are expressed. For this reason, no doubt, his photograph recently appeared on the front of a booklet entitled ‘Campus Support for Terrorism’.

It was published by David Horovitz, the founder of FrontPageMag.com who has both composed a bill of rights for universities, designed to take politics (for which read liberal influence and plurality) out of the curriculum and a list of the 100 most dangerous academics in America, which includes Noam Chomsky and many other distinguished thinkers and teachers.

The demented, bullying tone of the websites is another symptom of the descent of public discourse in America and, frankly, one can easily see the attractions of self-censorship on the question of Middle East and Israel. Read David Horovitz for longer than five minutes and you begin to hear Senator Joseph McCarthy accusing someone of un-American activities.

More evidence that authoritarians rule America — we are about the last industrialized democracy with the death penalty; in 2004, 97 per cent of all known executions took place in China, Iran, Viet Nam (authoritarian regimes, notice) and the USA. And is not the Neocon world view — love us, or we’ll invade you — essentially authoritarianism writ large?

The compulsion to eliminate whatever one doesn’t like takes milder forms. A few days ago a rightie blogger realized, correctly, that a Reuters photograph showing bomb damage in Lebanon had been Photoshopped. Ever since then a number of rightie blogs, including some of the big ones like LGF and Hot Air, have been eagerly searching for more evidence of media malfeasance. And it may be they’ll find such evidence, since many such images are coming from stringers who earn a living by selling their work to news and stock photo agencies. But now every image that amounts to bad PR for Israel is being scrutinized with single-minded obsessiveness. And if the scrutinizers don’t see signs of Photoshopping, they’ll find clues the image was staged. As Glenn Greenwald wrote last week, reaction from the VRWC to the Reuters photos has been a little, um, over the top.

I’m sayin’ there’s something going on here that ought to be listed in the DSM-IV-TR somewhere.

Sara Robinson points out that authoritarians are hostile to the “cultural and political openness” that a functional democracy requires. “Everything in their souls drives them to dismantle the democratic impulse,” she says, “and bring people under the heel of hierarchical authority — which is why history has also shown us that the nation’s worst moments, past and future, are created by people with a strong right-wing authoritarian orientation.”

I’m not sure how history shows us what our worst moments are going to be in the future, but never mind — authoritarians are in control of our government more so than ever before — even more so than during the McCarthy era, IMO. And the Internet may be a factor, because (I postulate) it is exacerbating authoritarian tendencies in right-wingers who participate in online discussion.

This bears, um, watching.

Only in the Blogosphere

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The Talking Dog interviews Erik Saar, who was an Arabic linguist at Guantanamo Bay. You want to read this.

Dave Neiwert comments on those nasty liberal bloggers. Steve G. reminds us to remember Vince Foster.

More: Via Ezra, the Rude Pundit on those nasty liberal bloggers:

Why is it that whenever right-wingers wanna criticize the “viciousness” of the left, more often than not, they use e-mails and blog comments instead of, say, the words of writers (bloggy and non-bloggy) and leaders? Like Lanny Davis in the Wall Street Journal‘s OpinionJournal, making some big and brave statement about “McCarthyism” on the left towards Shoeless Joe Lieberman as indicated by the well-considered and crafted comments on blogs and e-mail responses. The Lieberman-lovin’ Davis writes, “The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony. Here are just a few examples (there are many, many more anyone with a search engine can find) of the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman” and then quotes the mean meanies of the left, like at Daily Kos. But not, you know, Kos, or Hunter, or McJoan, or DarkSyde, or any of the other posters. Nope, it’s commenter “tomjones.” …

… When the Rude Pundit wants to go trawling for right-wing hate, he doesn’t need to look to his hate e-mails, with their occasional threats of violence. He doesn’t need to point to the comments on right-wing blogs. He can just point to the blogs themselves, or turn on the goddamn radio or the fuckin’ Fox “News,” or open the newspaper to read the vomitous rantings of every other conservative columnist talking about liberals despising and destroying America. They can only pick nits; we have to swat hissing cockroaches.

Exactly.

More more:

Billmon’s Da Man:

This is really quite revealing of the neocon mind set — and the increasingly large gulf between that mind set and what American power and influence can support:

    “The position that we’re taking in the UN is just nuts,” a former White House official close to the US decision-making process said during the negotiations. “The US wants to put international forces on the ground in the middle of the conflict, before there’s a ceasefire. The reasoning at the White House is that the international force could weigh on the side of the Israelis — could enforce Hezbollah’s disarmament” . . .

    A former US Central Intelligence Agency officer confirmed this view: “I am under the impression that George Bush and Condoleezza Rice were surprised when the Europeans disagreed with the US position — they were running around saying, ‘But how can you disagree, don’t you understand? Hezbollah is a terrorist organization.'” (emphasis added)

And a tough and dangerous one to boot. This is supposed to encourage the French to plunk their people down in the middle of a hot LZ?

Ever since 9/11, there’s been this attitude among the Bushies that the most important thing is to convince the world that America’s enemies (who are now identical with Israel’s enemies) represent the ultimate in evil — the Wal-Mart of evil, the Pittsburgh Steelers of evil, the Dr. Evil of evil. Once that goal has been accomplished, why then of course the “free world” will line up and enlist in Uncle Sam’s army. Or so the thinking seems to be.

In other words, the PR strategy is also the diplomatic strategy — and, as we’ve seen in Iraq, the military strategy as well. Mike Gerson (Bush’s chief speechwriter, crafter of all those fine phrases about freedom and democracy) really is running the war. And when you let your speechwriters run your war, you have no right to complain when you lose.

About That Graphic, II

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There’s something obscene about arguing over a graphic as we totter on the edge of World War III, but as I’ve been accused of being insensitive by people I respect I’m going to (reluctantly) open another thread for discussion of the infamous Lieberman blackface graphic. (If you are new here, please read my first post on the subject before commenting, and note that any comments that deliberately misrepresent what I wrote, or what other commenters write, will be deleted.)

Some warmup: I have a habit left over from my Zen student days of stepping outside my emotions and analyzing them. This is a means to develop equanimity and purge oneself of ego attachment. I don’t claim to have succeeded, mind you, but I still make the effort. There’s more about the practice of examining one’s own anger here and an advanced dharma talk here, for the adventurous. This may be new to you, but please give it a try. Although certainly there is righteous anger that arises on behalf of others, most of the time anger is like a guard dog defending our egos. I request that everyone chain up the guard dog, at least temporarily.

There are a number of issues here, which I’ll present randomly–

As I said elsewhere, symbols have no intrinsic meaning or power; they have only the meaning and power we assign to them. And that’s a subjective, individual thing. The same symbol — let’s say, a Christian cross — might represent love and salvation to one person and hate and oppression to another. Racist symbols push a lot of buttons in our society, certainly, and evoke a lot of pain. Using racist symbols to make any point is perilous, for that reason. And, yes, one could argue it’s dumb and inconsiderate, as well. But not necessarily malicious.

Starting with the dumb part: There is a lot of material on the left side of the blogosphere that offends me. I am very squeamish about sexually explicit language and graphics, for example. I attribute this squeamishness to my advanced age and 1950s-era midwestern small-town upbringing, however, and usually don’t make an issue of it except when it carries over into public demonstrations. But if we bloggers are in fact going to become major players whose utterances become hot button issues that could sway elections, perhaps it’s time to tone down the raunch on the blogs as well. As Mary Mary said here, “If bloggers want to play with the big kids they’d better start acting like it.”

But then (she said, taking the other side) the strength of blogs is that bloggers can be gut-level honest in ways that writers for commercial media cannot be. Is there a line that can be drawn between “toning down the raunch” and self-censorship? I could argue that line might be found somewhere between clear and honest expression of opinion and pandering to one’s audience. I think the Lieberman blackface image falls into the “pandering” category. But then firedoglake gets about six times the traffic The Mahablog gets, so what do I know? Maybe I should do more pandering.

Although I defended it, I wouldn’t have published the Lieberman blackface image on The Mahablog, controversy or no controversy, because although it had a point it was not an illuminating point. In other words, if you have to read the text to clarify what the illustration means, then the illustration isn’t being illustrative. Further, blackface is ugly and disgusting, and I don’t generally publish ugly and disgusting graphics here. Snarky is as far as I go.

Dave Neiwert and I are on the same page, I believe —

Now, longtime readers of this blog know that cursing and profanity aren’t really my style, though I do use them when the occasion warrants. And I have argued that obscene hate mail and vicious sexism have no place in the left’s repertoire.

However,

But there is a place for profanity. Even if it’s not my style, I well understand that the outrageous behavior of the right inspires real and righteous outrage; people are being killed on behalf of their agenda, after all. After awhile, it’s only natural to respond to constant abuse — the threats, the charges of treason, the constant personal attacks, the outrageous abuse of power — with a straight shot to the face: “Aw, fuck you, asshole.”

I think bloggers like Atrios, Digby, Tbogg and Jane — and scores of others — do a good job of giving voice to that outrage, and it’s needed. Reason and facts often are next to worthless when confronting these jerks, and though I do my best to provide them, I also applaud those who fight back — especially when they do so with as much wit as you often find in left Blogtopia [yes, skippy invented that term].

And I’m relieved I’m not the only one who thinks intention matters —

As with all such cases, it all boils down to intent. If this had been posted to derogatorily suggest that Lieberman was secretly a “black man” at heart (the kind of thing that is known to occur at certain far-right sites) then it would be a clear-cut case of race-baiting. If the intent, on the other hand, is to portray Lieberman as a pretend black sympathizer in the mold of a minstrel showman (as the artist responsible later made clear in the post’s comments) then it’s fairly harmless. Dumb, and not particularly effective, but harmless.

I really hate it when people take offense where (it seems obvious) none was intended. A wise person once told me if you don’t take offense, no one can offend you. I admit that takes discipline, but it’s the truth. And as explained above I don’t expect the whole world to tiptoe around and cater to my personal sensibilities, but I’d like the same consideration.

I defended Jane Hamsher not because I thought the graphic was brilliant, but because it was obvious to me she was not making a racist statement. Instead, she was making a statement about racism — more specifically, about a white politician’s racial hypocrisies. Slams of Hamsher did not make this distinction. But if we assume that any use of a racist symbol is racist per se, then by the same logic the World War II poster at left is anti-Semitic because it incorporates a swastika.

This rightie dug up other stuff out of firedoglake so he could rant about how awful it is. The first thing you probably notice on the page is the raunchy boys-in-leather image, which firedoglake didn’t publish but only linked to. Like this. This image leaves me cold, but I guess other people find it amusing. The image is closely parallel to the blackface image, except that instead of pretending to be black Lieberman is pictured as pretending to be gay. I suppose one could argue that the image is homophobic, because it depicts gay men in a stereotypical way. I don’t know that anyone complained about it, though. The rightie bloggers calls it an example of “sexually perverted imagery” — isn’t that homophobic?

I believe I could argue that this image of John Kerry in drag, while a lot less explicit, is misogynistic because it depicts being female as demeaning.

The rightie goes on to catalog examples of sexually explicit language at firedoglake. As I say I don’t care for raunchy language myself, but on the Left I seem to be an anomaly in that regard. But then the rightie finds it equally shocking that Ned Lamont agrees with Jack Murtha on Iraq — like any deviation from Dear Leader is just wrong — and objects to calling the “Religious” Right the “American Taliban,” which seems to me spot on (hey, if the shoe fits …). Lots of us lefties have used the same phrase many times before. Strong opinions are always going to be offensive to somebody. That’s why freedom of speech has to be protected.

Let’s wade in a little deeper. Mahablog commenter Kevin objected strongly to my defense of Hamsher, here, here, and here. And although Kevin is very articulate it still isn’t clear to me where the offense lies if (as he says) he doesn’t believe Hamsher is a racist. I also agree with Ian that the Malcolm X quote e.g., “the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political ‘football game'”) was uncalled for. It seems to me Kevin is assuming I am racist, and insincere about it. I admit I am frequently oblivious to many things, and I cannot speak to anyone’s inner motivations but my own, but I sincerely hate racism and do not want to use anyone as a pawn or tool. Being one of the more marginalized creatures on the planet myself, I’m hardly in a position to have pawns of my own, anyway.

Certainly you can argue that the Democrats have fallen short of keeping their promises to African Americans. But, hell, in the past several years the Democrats have fallen short of keeping their promises to all of us. Welcome to Progressive World. The whole point of the Lamont challenge is to send a message to the Dems they need to start listening to their base instead of the lobbyists and interest groups.

I was also stunned that Liza Sabater, who is a friend and a good-hearted person, slammed Jane Hamsher for being a “white woman of privilege” who presumed to speak for the black people of Connecticut. I never did see the text that went with the graphic, so maybe I’m missing something. And I sorta thought all us progressives were in the fight together. Certainly if, say, a black man presumes to speak for white-but-not-privileged me he’s welcome to go ahead and do so; I’ll take all the help I can get.

I learned a long time ago never to tell others they shouldn’t be angry. Through the years I’ve met people who have endured outrageous violations of their being, from many sources. Nobody gets through life without some wounds, but some people do seem to get wounded a lot more than others. However people deal with their anger is a personal matter. I’m not going to deliver any lectures on that today, except to remind readers that anger tends to be a defense mechanism (remember the guard dog?). It’s up to us as individuals to come to terms with whatever the dog is defending.

But although I regret whatever anger my position provoked, and although I acknowledge that anger may be understandable, at the moment I do not see cause to change my opinion in this matter. If there’s something I’m not seeing, please enlighten me.

Tin Foil Time

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Monday I wrote, “I have no doubt the audiences of Faux Nooz and rightie talk radio are being told, over and over, ad nauseum, that the atrocity at Qana was staged, and that the Fable of the Staged Atrocity at Qana is already firmly established in rightie mythos.” I didn’t even have to look.

Via Digby, even Jefferson Morley of the Washington Post called the “Qana was staged” rumor the “right-wing equivalent of the Sept. 11 conspiracy theories.” Glenn Greenwald noticed that the righties are even making all-too-familiar arguments about how buildings collapse.

As Morley says, the Qana conspiracy theories fall apart when you ask about details, such as “How did Hezbollah truck in bodies to the Qana site without the pervasive Israeli aerial surveillance catching it on film?” or “How did any a demolition crew prep the World Trade Center towers for implosion without anyone noticing?” Oh, wait, wrong conspiracy. Sorry.

It won’t matter what evidence comes along that refutes “Qana was staged”/”WTC controlled detonation” theories. These notions are firmly embedded in the heads of the susceptible.

And the moral is, beware of believing what you want to believe.

So Much for the Cedar Revolution

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As documented in the last post, one of the casualties of the current war could be the government of Lebanon. You remember the “Cedar Revolution“? Just last year our State Department was congratulating Lebanon for its democratic elections, the first elections held after the withdrawal of Syrian troops — “This is an important first step in fulfilling the aspirations of the Lebanese people for a sovereign and democratic government.” Last year the righties gleefully gave credit for the liberation of Lebanon to George W. Bush because, you know, Bush makes the sun rise and the rain fall and all that.

I just heard a Time magazine reporter speak on television. He said most Lebanese are pro-American, but now they think America has abandoned them. And I have to say I’m surprised at how quickly the righties have abandoned Lebanon. In 2005 they couldn’t say enough about the wonderfulness of freedom-loving Lebanese. Now it seems they’ve completely disconnected the “good” Lebanon of 2005 from the “bad” Lebanon of 2006.

Among the several possible negative side-effects of the current strife is that the fledgling democracy in Lebanon could fail completely and be replaced by civil war and chaos and a lot more terrorism. This would be extremely unfortunate.

At the far end of the loony scale is Debbie Schlussel, who is ranting that Americans caught in Lebanon this week are Hezbollah Supporters, and they shouldn’t expect American taxpayer’s money to rescue them. Yes, I know, we all figured out a long time ago that Schlussel needs to be heavily medicated and probably muzzled. But to the news that American citizens in Lebanon are expected to reimburse the government for their rescue, which I think is outrageous, Schlussel says,

One thing is lost in all the press coverage of the whining Americans who went to Lebanon of their own accord and now want us to pick up the tab to get them out.

THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS IN LEBANON ARE HEZBOLLAH SUPPORTERS.

Most of them are Shi’ite Muslims, many of whom hold dual U.S. and Lebanese citizenship. Many are anchor babies born here to Muslims in the U.S. illegally. Some are illegal aliens who became citizens through rubber-stamping Citizenship and Immigration Services (and its INS predecessor) coupled with political pressure by spineless politicians.

Schlussel is a little vague about how she knows this is true, except to argue that many American citizens in Lebanon are from Dearborn, Michigan. Well, that clinches it.

A few people in the comments — one of whom says she is a Christian and American citizen in Lebanon — argue that Schlussel is wrong about the majority of American citizens in Lebanon — but Schlussel (in ALL CAPS) argues back that THIS IS MY AREA OF EXPERTISE. (She knows Dearborn, Michigan, very well.)

But then some Debbie fans weighed in —

“One thing is lost in all the press coverage of the whining Americans who went to Lebanon of their own accord and now want us to pick up the tab to get them out.”

Here Here….To me that says it all, I just love all these “Americans” that call themselves Americans who live elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East.

When you leave the security blanket of this great country, you are subject to the laws and lay of the land you travel to, simple as that.

Another:

If there were no war, they would anyway pay for their return ticket at some point, right? So why should the US foot their bills?

Well, maybe because American citizens and American taxpayers often are the same people, and their taxes pay to maintain the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, among other things.

In response to the American in Lebanon —

Your story and self-proclaimed patriotism isn’t all that convincing. What were you doing there if you love the US so much? Did someone hold a gun at your head and force you to stay in Lebanon? You went there out of your own will, so you pay for the ticket back home, if you really consider the US your ‘home’. Thats the least you can do.

Got that? If you’re a real patriot, don’t leave home.

The U.S. State Department posted a warning about travel to Lebanon on July 13, 2006, which updated another warning of May 2, so I suppose the State Department can say, “I told you so.” However, the warning also says that the American embassy in Lebanon is there to help American citizens.

If you’re going to Iran, on the other hand, the State Department lets you know you’re on your own — “The U.S. government does not currently have diplomatic or consular relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran and therefore cannot provide protection or routine consular services to American citizens in Iran.”

Lebanon is celebrated as a choice tourist destination in the Middle East, and American tourists continue to go to the Middle East wars or no wars. If you are going to do the Grand Tour of the Holy Land, Lebanon certainly should be included on the tour. Well, maybe not right now. But it seems a bit harsh to tell Americans who traveled to Beirut before the fighting started that they shouldn’t expect rescue.

The Crickets, They Chirp

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Glenn Greenwald tells us the nice doggie has issued another threat to lynch U.S. Supreme Court justices. You can read the threat on Glenn’s site; I’m not linking to The Imperial Rabid One. In case you missed it, here’s a screen capture of an earlier lynch threat.

To paraphrase the Confederate Yankee:

When a rightie blogger threatens to assassinate five Supreme Court justices, what response do we get from prominent rightie blogs?

*crickets*

Not one post.

Nothing from Jeff Goldstein or Michelle Malkin; silence from Patterico, the Ace, Rick Moran, and Instapundit. Typical.

Update: The excuses so far:

Riehl World View, on the nice doggie:

I’m not going to condemn that from Misha because I don’t see it as anything other than hyperbole and it’s Misha’s blog and a matter of free individual speech.

Riehl World View, on Debbie Frisch:

No public servant, military man or woman, public school teacher, or even corporate employee would be able to make such remarks without some serious consequences.

I see the quibble about public servants. Do we know what the nice doggie does for a living? He might be a corporate employee, for all we know.

Sister Toljah, on the nice doggie:

Apparently Mr. Greenwald thinks the monolith right (we all speak with one voice, you know) should spend their time scouring the rightie blogosphere and punditocracy for offensive comments and in turn post the obligatory condemnation,

Sister Toljah, on Debbie Frisch:

I wish I could say I was amazed at the lack of significant liberal condemnation (with a couple of exceptions) from the higher ups on the left hand side of the blogosphere over Frisch’s harassment of Goldstein but, sadly, I’m not.

Toljah makes reference to Goldstein’s denial-of-service blackout that coincided with the Frisch flap. She seems to think the DOS “attack” is part of some kind of plot and not the result of (I suspect) Goldstein’s failure to secure adequate server space and bandwidth to accommodate traffic spikes. I’m certainly not aware of any leftie conspiracy to shut down Goldstein’s site. He’s not worth that much effort, frankly.

Update update: See Skippy.

Frisch Follow Up

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Please note the following chart:

This chart shows traffic patterns on Debbie Frisch’s blog over the past 30 days. Here it is for the past week.

Now, what do these charts tell us? They tell us that Debbie Frisch got next to no traffic before the recent little dust-up with Jeff Goldstein. As of right now her sitemeter says she gets 5,781 average daily visits. Before this weekend she was getting, um, way less. Possibly fewer than 100 visits a day. I took a look at her site meter yesterday afternoon after the controversy was already spreading around the blogs, and her average at the time was under 500.

Skippy figured out that Frisch has been blogging less than a year, and in that time she had been honored with a total of 12 links to her site before the Goldstein flap.

I bring this up because this fellow wrote,

Well checking her site meter it looks like Ms. Frisch is averaging 5,700 hits a day with today well over 10k hits already. I am sure her average has spiked due to this controversy. Still looking at Maha’s meter her blog is averaging only 1,800 hits per day. Maha has been around a lot longer but Ms. Frisch’s blog is definitely not some unknown lil voice out in the internet wilderness.

Yes, it is.

Update: Preemptive Karma offers an apology. But not for Frisch.

Update: I see from Memeorandum that the righties are still nipping at Frisch, who is warped enough to still be responding to them. Look, I don’t know what Frisch’s problem is. I don’t know if she’s just immature or if she’s bipolar or is being deliberately provocative to drive up her traffic — which is working brilliantly — but it’s way past time to leave it alone. I learned a long time ago on the Internets that when it becomes clear the person you are “debating” is a few clowns short of a circus, it’s time to walk away. Let ’em have the last word, and just walk away, and ignore or twit filter the loon in the future.

Comments Improvements in Progress

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I’ve spent a big chunk of this afternoon trying to install preview and quicktag functions for comments. As of now the quicktags work but the preview doesn’t. It “previews” a blank post by “anonymous,” but then if you go ahead and post the comment you wrote does post.

I’ll leave the plug-in activated for now, so you can at least use the quicktags. If I can’t find out what I did wrong, maybe I can find another plug-in that does work.

Hypocrisies

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This blogger had the bad judgment to get nasty with Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom, and apparently she drew upon herself the wrath of the Right Blogosphere, and now she’s sorry. See Kathy Kattenburg at Liberty Street for more background.

Maybe the first rule of blogging should be, Don’t dish out what you aren’t ready to get back tenfold.

Anyway, the blogger in question, Deb Frisch, has been identified by the Right as a “liberal,” and Confederate Yankee asks,

When a liberal blogger threaten child sex abuse and murder, what response do we get from prominent liberal blogs?

*crickets*

Not one post.

Nothing from Kos, or Atrios, silence from Raw Story, AMERICAblog, and MyDD.

Nothing from me, either, as I never heard of Deb Frisch. If she said what is claimed she said, then she’s really awful and should be ashamed of herself. But I refuse to be collectively lumped together with or held accountable for people I’ve never heard of.

Perhaps the Yankee expects liberal bloggers to apologize for the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.

I’d like to establish a “blogroll” rule. If someone on my blogroll writes something inexcusably nasty, then you can lump me together with or expect me to apologize for what that blogger wrote. Otherwise — go to hell. [Update: Please pass this on to Right Wing Nut House, OK?]

See also Jeralyn at TalkLeft and Retardo at Sadly, No.

Update: Tbogg.

Update update: Although we lefties are being slammed for not apologizing for remarks made by someone we never heard of on a blog few of us ever read, Michelle Malkin refuses to express even a flicker of regret for Denice Denton’s suicide. Of course, as she says, Malkin didn’t kill Denice Denton. We don’t know how much of a factor, if any, Malkin’s targeting of Denton was in Denton’s decision to kill herself. However, we don’t know is not the same as no responsibility whatsoever. It’s we don’t know. Meaning, it may have been a factor.

Even if Malkin sincerely believes she had no part in the suicide, a decent person would have written something along the lines of “This individual I blogged about a couple of months ago has killed herself, and even though I disagreed with what this woman was doing I extend my condolences to her friends and family.” That’s, like, the minimum amout of regret a civilized and mature person would express under the circumstances. It’s the least Malkin ought to have done. And, of course, she doesn’t do that. She just flies into a big snit because people are mean to her.