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Thursday, January 13, 2005
Attack Of The Microbes
Courage is a necessary component of heroism. Courage in espousing an important but controversial political position is becoming rarer by the day.
In his column of today, Thomas Sowell gives us a partial explanation of why serious political argument is dwindling in quantity in our national discourse. In place of polite argument over historical data and conceptions of sociopolitical processes, we have a rising tide of personal condemnation and general ugliness. Since few of us have a taste for such abuse, we tend ever more to converse solely with persons who already agree with us. True dialogue between opponents who are both serious and intellectually honest is vanishing under this tide.
Michelle Malkin, one of the true ornaments to American political commentary, has come under assault via E-mail for her views. Her assailants are most enraged by her support for the Bush Administration's Middle Eastern campaigns and its wider war on terror, and for her arguments for sharply straitened border control and restrictions on immigration.
Her assailants are also persons who cannot or will not argue for their positions. A man with a point to make will make it. He'll state it clearly and buttress it as best he can with facts and logic. He won't descend to ad hominems or irrelevant invective.
He who knows himself to be unequipped for a contest of rationality, in which evidence and logic are the sole permissible tools, has an obvious interest in avoiding such contests. But he might also have an interest in preventing others from airing their views. In this connection, invective and slander have proved potent weapons, particularly to the political Left, which has disavowed all standards of graciousness or decency.
Miss Malkin has courageously chosen to stand her ground. This is highly praiseworthy. But your Curmudgeon worries for her. She's a public person who's concealed virtually nothing about herself. Among the microbes who've belabored her via the Internet, there might be some who won't stop with mere words.
Comments
The substitution of name-calling for argument by the left is an old story. We are used to hearing leftists rebut an argument with an epithet: reactionary, fascist, racist, sexist, homophobe, etc.
What the cases of Sowell and Malkin illustrate is something newer, at least to me: a resurgence on the left of the kind of crude, casual racism I thought we had all long outgrown. We see it in the resurgent antisemitism of Europe and slurs againt the Zionist neo-con “cabal” at home, in Harry Reid’s attack on Clarence Thomas, political cartoons about Colon Powell and Condi Rice, and so forth.
I am struck by the fact that even while opposing him in court in the 1950s, Thurgood Marshall was able to retain <a href=http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/001/32.68.html>respect, admiration and civility</a> toward segregationist John W. Davis, whereas today’s progressives do nothing but spit vitriol at those of us who are on the same side of this issue but disagree on far smaller points, such as compulsory racial preferences.
I am astonished to learn that the most self-righteous enforcers of political correctness, diversity, multiculturalism and “sensitivity” speak among with a kind of <a href=http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/affalert309.shtml>racist contempt</a> I have never encountered (and would never tolerate) among their counterparts on the right.
Something strange is happening here. I’m not sure I completely understand it, but I think it may have something to do with the left sensing that it is losing its stranglehold on minorities. The eruption of racism from that quarter suggests that the racial compassion and solidarity touted by the left was nothing more than a political ploy. Now that it is losing its effectiveness, the mask is dropping.
The Democrats were once the party of slavery, Jim Crow and the KKK. In their hearts, did they ever really change?
Posted by Mark LaRochelle on 01/13/2005 at 11:49 AMI was appalled at the email she received. It was a very dark and revealing journey into the tiwsted mind of the writer of such ungodly evil, which essentially left me breathless.
This is not anything new from the left, I noted the hypocrisy years ago, and made my decision then that the Democrats were not a party I could align myself with.
All I can say is it takes a very sick mind to come up with stuff like that.
God bless Michelle Malkin and give her strength. I don’t care how tough she is, I think it would be impossible not to be hurt by such cruelty.
Posted by Heather on 01/13/2005 at 04:36 PM
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