Because there are no coincidences

No sooner had I used a homecoming queen's friendly C-cup smile as a political metaphor than the bodaciously curvaceous Samantha of Day-by-Day makes a not-entirely-unrelated point. And at the same time we behold Shelby Steele touching, as it were, the hem of a garment that is not there:

America's primary race problem today is our new "sophistication" around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods ("diversity") and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.
Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. . . .

You should read the whole thing and also visit Day by Day, where Samantha has been known occasionally to appear as naked as the emperor in his new clothes. (Don't hate Samantha. It's not her fault she's as melanin-deficient as Molly Ringwald. Or, uh, Lindsay Lohan.)

Resolved: Barrett Brown is a putz

Having noticed an earlier mention, the spokesman for The Godless Coalition e-mails to deny being an Avatar fan and added an "offer" to debate, to which I replied:

"Offer"? As if you were the soul of generosity, and I in need of your philanthropy. Do your work, do it well, collect your pay and knock it off with the humanitarian posturing. You've never done an unselfish act in your life, and by pretending otherwise, you undermine your own credibility. Better to be honestly selfish than to be falsely charitable.

As to the title of this post: William F. Buckley was once invited to debate British feminist Germaine Greer at the Oxford Union, but after an exhausting series of trans-Atlantic communications, they were unable to agree on the proposition to be debated. Finally, his patience exhausted by the annoyance, Buckley cabled back this offer: "Resolved: Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile."

Barrett Brown and I have nothing to "debate." In October, while I was working on the Sparkman story in Kentucky, he jumped on the LGF bandwagon. He has since promised to include an entire chapter about me in his forthcoming book. This would be a bizarre non sequitur in a volume evidently otherwise devoted to assailing various prominent pro-Israel pundits -- Charles Krauthammer, Marty Peretz, etc. -- which is why I suggested his publisher rename the book, People That Barrett Brown Doesn't Like (Mainly Jews).

My friends are my friends and my job is my job. Which explains why, however harmful the effort of Charles Johnson and others to hang labels on me, there is no flinch reflex on my part. Because I don't flinch at their accusations, as they are accustomed to seeing people do in such circumstances, they become enraged and vengeful, misrepresenting my response (or non-response, whichever the case may be) as some sort of admission.

What this game comes down to, as any disinterested observer discerns, is a question of authority, their status as accuser. Whatever harm they do to me is mere collateral damage in their campaign of ambitious vanity, as they seek to enhance their own reputations at my expense. (Did I mention "vanity"? Yeah: Barrett's obviously got a Google-alert on his name, so he'll read this, too.)

As long as there is work I can do, I'll do it, even if I have to go back to driving a forklift (which was what I was doing before I landed my first newspaper job). Readers who wish to see me continue blogging should hit the tip jar.

The sadism of Patrick Frey

STRONG LANGUAGE WARNING:

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 1:53 AM, Patterico wrote:
But hey, if it will toss his ass off the Internet, maybe I’ll do it. . . .
Maybe I’ll dribble it out over a couple of weeks. . . .
This is going to last a WHILE.
Oh -- and I know a few people too. I’ll be telling them what a fucking psycho he is. He was going to write a book? Good luck.

That was in March, you see, that Frey was planning to drive Jeff Goldstein off the Internet, and endeavoring to prevent Goldstein from publishing a book. All because Goldstein took issue with Frey's criticism of Rush Limbaugh. Now, nearly nine months later, the vendetta against Goldstein continues.

Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean people aren't actually out to get you.

A friendly note to James Wolcott

Jeff Goldstein could kill you with his bare hands. And probably should, but I doubt he will. However, it would be unfortunate if I were to log on one day and see this top headline at Memeorandum:

MANHUNT FOR GOLDSTEIN
Police Seek Blogger in Columnist's
Brutal Dismemberment Slaying

Don't hate the player, hate the game. The viciousness of online discourse has been pondered from many perspectives, but it really comes down to the fact that people think they can say anything they want and never get their asses kicked for it.

Remember the Sparkman case? Sully was wetting his pants over "Southern populist terrorism" and Rick Ungar was screaming "Send the Body to Glenn Beck." In that atmosphere of fear-mongering pundit panic, I decided one Saturday night to try to do some actual reporting and, after a couple of calls, managed to get a law-enforcement official in Kentucky on the phone:

"You'd be surprised what some of these morons write on the Internet . . . that they wouldn't say to somebody's face," the official said in a brief telephone interview.

Exactly. I guarantee that under no circumstances would you, James Wolcott, taunt Jeff to his face. But you have no compunction about sitting there at your computer, on Conde Nast's dime, making fun of a guy you've never met and whom most of your readers never heard of.

Pretty, Popular and Vicious
This "Mean Girls" vibe is an unexpected consequence of online discourse. When I was a kid in school, I used to marvel at the way girls were always doing that evil gossip-clique thing: "You can't be her friend because she said such-and-such to so-and-so and I hate her."

Girl culture is so much more vicious than boy culture because boys are naturally prone to settle matters with their fists. The biggest boy in third grade may be an obnoxious jerk, but his superior potential for violence means that other boys are faced with a choice:

• Stay out of his way;
• Try to be his friend; or
• Form an alliance with other pipsqueaks so that if the big kid gets mad at you, he'll have to fight more than one of you.

Because girls don't routinely risk violence in their conflicts, their viciousness toward each other is unrestrained, and the clique mentality reigns in girl culture -- back-biting gossip, secret rivalries and all the rest.

Girl culture can also be described as the "culture of niceness," because popularity among girls is so largely a function of who is superficially "nice," in terms of appearance and comportment. This is why girls are so keen on fashion and grooming, whereas boys don't care about that crap. If you score the winning touchdown, nobody cares about your hairstyle.

Mean Girls in the Intelligentsia
Now, to bring this back to the blogosphere, you see an extreme example of a problem that is ubiquitous in intellectual life and more generally in "civilized" white-collar environments, where physical violence is considered an impossibility.

When a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation gets upset with a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, the one outcome that can be ruled out in advance is that the Heritage guy will jump in his car, drive over to Cato, storm into the office of his antagonist and invite him out to the parking lot to settle their argument like men.

This is all for the good except that, absent the possibility of an occasional ass-kicking, denizens of the think-tank world start behaving like girls on the third-grade playground, constantly backstabbing each other and forming snobby little cliques.

Steiner's Law -- "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" -- expresses the essential bogusness of virtual discourse, where a flame-war between rival bloggers passes for a Titanic Struggle for the Soul of America, even though it's merely a collection of words posted online and read by a few thousand people in a nation of 300 million.

People don't like to be insulted and, in a real-world setting, civilized people refrain from insulting others directly -- especially if the person they're insulting is someone who might kick their ass. In the real world, Jeff Goldstein is not accustomed to being insulted and if you, James Wolcott, had ever met Goldstein, you sure as hell wouldn't be taunting him with lyrics from a Village People song.

It's extremely unlikely that Goldstein will show up on your doorstep, brandishing a blood-spattered arm -- torn from the corpse of a California Jew-hater, prior to driving cross-country to confront you -- and bellowing in murderous rage: "Wolcott, you cowardly bastard, come out here and meet your doom, or I'll kick down your door!"

Extremely unlikely, I say. But crazier things have happened.

UPDATE: Moe Lane's Quote of the Day. Moe is an easygoing, mild-mannered guy. Most people don't realize that Moe's day job is ninja warrior.

Meanwhile, one of the glories of the post-racial Obama Age is that it's once again safe for guys named "Schultz" to suggest violence against guys named "Lieberman":

What is the feeling towards Joe Lieberman? I mean how do you, you know, go into a room without punching the guy out after what he’s done to the progressive movement in this country?

Ed Schultz is speaking on behalf of the progressive movement, so he can't be held responsible if somebody actually does a beatdown on the Jew. I'm sure Joe will be deeply moved when he and Hadassah get a Happy Hannukah card from their progressive friends at MSNBC.

UPDATE II: Little Miss Attila is upset that I haven't linked her. Donald Douglas at American Power links with some vintage punk rock, and Jimmie Bise at Sundries Shack also links (but without punk rock).

Dear JSF

Someone pick up a phone and apologize. . . . RS, apologize for misconstruing Patterico's words.
-- JSF, Valley of the Shadow

Smitty already blogged about this, but there is a matter of honorable principle involved which the well-intentioned JSF evidently has not considered. (Ask Jeff Goldstein.)

I was peacefully minding my own business. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was engaged in nothing more controversial than rattling the tip jar for my Pasadena trip, when Patterico started this, for no reason and with no apparent purpose other than to harsh my mellow.

John Patrick Frey is a deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County. He is also -- strange concidence -- an alumnus of the University of Texas Law School.

Hello? He decides to smear me because of a college football rivalry? And I should apologize to him? That's going to one mighty cold day in hell, my friend.

Now hit the tip jar so I can go to Pasadena in style. In all truth, living well is the best revenge.

Roll, Tide, Roll!

Is Baldilocks onto something?

"LGF is gone. Charles Johnson is gone. Face it. He was never ours. How about we let him take his delusions and slanders and paranoias and obsessions and falsehoods with him?"
-- Baldilocks (Juliette Ochieng)

Juliette certainly is not alone in seeing recent blogospheric rumblings as a belated denouement of the LGF meltdown.

The 2001-2005 period, when the Global War On Terror (GWOT) coincided with the rise of the political blogosphere, was also the apogee of what might be called the Karl Rove Center-Right Strategy.

Seeking to maintain maximum support for President Bush and the Republican Party, the Rove strategy involved "triangulation" to neuter Democratic Party arguments on domestic issues. No Child Left Behind, Medicare rescription drug benefits, the 2006-07 push to grant amnesty or guest-worker status to illegal aliens -- these were typical policy initiatives of the Rove strategy.

Especially after the 9/11 attacks, this "center-right" approach was mirrored in the rhetoric of much of the conservative blogosphere. Many GOP-aligned bloggers were understandably eager to elicit the support of liberals, or members of traditional Democratic constituencies, for the administration's foreign policy:

"Oh, look, this person is gay (or black, or feminist, or Joe Lieberman) and yet is strongly in favor of winning the Iraq war."

Which was all fine and good, in terms of the immediate goal of rallying support for the GOP and the Bush administration. Yet by focusing narrowly on a short-term foreign-policy consensus, the Rove center-right approach sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

The Great Unraveling
Once the war became unpopular, and once Democrats were able to shift the political focus to GOP vulnerabilities -- the Mark Foley and Jack Abramoff scandals in 2006, the economy in 2008 -- the Republican electoral coalition that had triumphed in the 2002 and 2004 elections unraveled with astonishing suddenness.

By attempting to unite disparate constituencies without any general agreement on political principles -- except that the U.S. response to terrorism should be forceful and comprehensive -- the Republican Party under Rove's direction had in some sense replicated LBJ's Vietnam-era debacle.

The Democratic hawks who were so key to the Cold War consensus in the U.S. had believed that popular support for fighting communism abroad could be purchased by enactment of liberal domestic policies. And in LBJ's 1964 landslide win over Barry Goldwater, these Democrats believed they had seen the vindication of that strategy.

Yet by 1968, the bloody prolongation of the Vietnam war and the upsurge of domestic chaos -- urban riots and campus protests -- splintered that victorious 1964 coalition so badly that, at one point, polls indicated that Hubert Humphrey might finish third behind Richard Nixon and George Wallace in the 1968 presidential election. (An anti-Wallace campaign led by the AFL-CIO helped prevent that scenario.)

From Values Voters to Obama Nation
For similar reasons, the Republican electoral coalition that seemed so formidable in the wake of the 2004 election -- remember the liberal panic over the "moral values" exit-poll question? -- has proven less durable than advocates of the Rove Center-Right Strategy hoped. Like the Democrats of 1964, the Rove-era Republicans assembled a coalition fraught with unreconciled conflicts.

We should not be surprised that what has transpired in electoral politics has been mirrored in the political blogosphere. Andrew Sullivan was one of the first to leap off the Bush bandwagon, screaming "homophobia" as he went. More recently we've seen Charles Johnson take his leave from the post-Bush Right, screaming "ultranational neofascist theocratic extremism" as he goes.

It is easy to shrug and to dismiss these developments with two words: "Batshit crazy."

However, the batshit craziness is not without cause, and that cause is the failure of Republican leaders -- and prominent conservative communicators -- to articulate consistently the Reaganesque message of freedom.

Last summer, when arguments over the Wall Street bailout were coming to full boil, I used "Libertarian Populism" as the title of an American Spectator column. Nobody's offered me a book contract to elaborate on that "Libertarian Populism" concept, but that idea is exactly what you've seen at work in the past year in the Tea Party movement.

Those Tea Party crowds are responding to a pro-freedom message expressed in populist language, viewing Big Government and Big Business (think: Tim Geithner, AIG, the GM takeover) as corrupt partners in an insider-elite agreement to defraud taxpayers and disempower citizens.

Another 'Time for Choosing'
It was hardly a coincidence that Charles Johnson reacted so harshly to the Tea Party phenomenon. Johnson and his LGF cult have never been libertarian and were "populist" only insofar as that term meant mocking John Kerry and Muslims.

When the political alignment of 2001-04 -- forged by what I've called the Rove Center-Right Strategy -- collapsed in 2006-08, it was inevitable that some supporters of the former Republican coalition would not be part of whatever new coalition emerged to take its place.

Just as the rise of the Reagan coalition resulted in the obsolescence of the liberal Republicans who had been an important part of the Eisenhower coalition, the emerging Tea Party coalition will render obsolete many of those who were part of the G.W. Bush coalition.

As Reagan famously said in 1964, we are at a crossroads, a "Time for Choosing" and I trust that it is with sadness Juliette bids farewell to former friends.

Let's parse that sentence again, Dan

Sometimes the help of friends is not as helpful as they might wish, and Dan Collins is only trying to help:

TimB recently visited comments to once again chide me for linking up Stacy McCain. He and others probably also induced Patterico, whom I respect, to question whether Stacy is a racist based on a statement that people naturally feel revolted by miscegenation.

Which is not actually what I said in 1996, and which (mis)interpretation has been the nub of an enormous, if understandable, misunderstanding.

Go back to yesterday's post, "Your Secret Racist Buddy," in which I made reference to a young woman's discussion of interracial relationships that I had summarized in that 1996 debate -- which, I must again emphasize, was an argument with a white separatist named Dennis Wheeler. That George Kalas, Gary Waltrip, Dana Greenblatt and I were arguing for inclusiveness ought to be your first clue that my remarks weren't aimed at justifying racism.

The young woman referenced in that discussion is a black friend of mine who in 1996 had recently returned to Georgia after living in New York. Asked about the state of race relations, North and South, she said it was about the same in both places, except that there was less acceptance of interracial relationships in the South. And she meant this chiefly in regard to the black community. (Her own father is white, and she had dated many white men.)

Notice that my friend's comment is juxtaposed with a passage from Kent Steffgen's book Bondage of the Free, a right-wing critique of the civil-rights movement published in 1966. In that passage, Steffgen talked about the high degree of residential segregation in New York City -- then as now, dominated by liberal politics -- as evidence that what was being attempted under LBJ's "Great Society" was unlikely to produce real improvements in racial harmony.

My friend had been to New York, so I asked her how things were up there, and her remark about interracial relationships struck me as curious:

Why should attitudes toward dating/marriage between the races be considered a litmus test of racial harmony?

As I explained in a comment at Little Miss Attila's blog, my object in that 1996 e-mail debate was to isolate the white separatist Wheeler (and any of his ideological soulmates) on very narrow grounds. Fully comprehending the subtext of his argument, I didn't want Wheeler to win sympathizers on the basis of such a "litmus test."

In other words, just because someone had personal issues about interracial relationships, there was no need for them to endorse a white separatist political agenda. "The personal is the political" is an identity-politics slogan popularized by feminists, and we see how it not only leads to feminist nonsense, but to racialist nonsense and gay-rights nonsense. Here I was, in 1996, confronted with Dennis Wheeler's argument that all whites must adopt a Politics of Whiteness -- an evident fulfillment of Steffgen's 1966 prophecy:

Americans will be told, in effect, that they must make a choice between their own heritage and prejudice toward Negroes. That is the way the Communists have it rigged. Ten thousand interracial themes will not beat a path to brotherhood but into the moral sewers which, in turn, will open up a market for the advocation of pure race doctrines from coast to coast and border to border for the first time in U.S. history. (Emphasis added.)

Steffgen's reference to "Communists" as instigating agents of such a development strikes us as bizarre in 2009, but that was written in 1966. Steffgen's perceived the likelihood of a Newtonian pendulum-swing reaction in racial politics, with militant advocacy of integration provoking a militant opposition. And who can say that Steffgen was not prophetic in this passage?

A Negro will appear in every advertisement and televised audience scene. The cast of characters in major Hollywood productions will conform to the 'racial balance' requirement of the Federal government.

Anyone who pays attention to the content of media has noticed how the quest for "diversity" leads to a sort of tokenism, so that every detective show and hospital melodrama on TV -- and the commercials, too -- reflects the kind of "racial balance" considerations Steffgen described. The Associated Press, Feb. 15, 2005:

Somewhere there's an America that's full of neighborhoods where black and white kids play softball together, where biracial families e-mail photos online and where Asians and blacks dance in the same nightclub.
That America is on your television.
In the idyllic world of TV commercials, Americans increasingly are living together side by side, regardless of race. The diverse images reflect a trend that has been quietly growing in the advertising industry for years: Racially mixed scenarios -- families, friendships, neighborhoods and party scenes -- are often used as a hip backdrop to sell products. . . .
But critics say such ads gloss over persistent and complicated racial realities. Though the proportion of ethnic minorities in America is growing, experts say, more than superficial interaction between groups is still relatively unusual. Most Americans overwhelmingly live and mingle with people from their own racial background.
Advertising, meanwhile, is creating a "carefully manufactured racial utopia, a narrative of colorblindness" says Charles Gallagher, a sociologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
Only about 7 percent of all marriages are interracial, according to Census data. About 80 percent of whites live in neighborhoods in which more than 95 percent of their neighbors also are white, and data show that most Americans have few close friends of another race, Gallagher said.
"The lens through which people learn about other races is absolutely through TV, not through human interaction and contact," he said. "Here, we're getting a lens of racial interaction that is far afield from reality." Ads make it seem that race doesn't matter, when real life would tell you something different, he added.

So there is a signfiicant gap between the media portrayal of race and people's actual lives. And now let's look at that 1996 quote for which I've been relentlessly hounded:

As Steffgen predicted, the media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion.

The key here is this: To what stimuli do these "perfectly rational people react"? To the media images!

It is the media's depiction of a "carefully manufactured racial utopia," in Professor Gallagher's phrase, which produces the "revulsion" I described -- repeat, "described," not "advocated" or "endorsed." And from there, I proceeded to describe a hypothetical scenario attempting to draw a line between "racism" (i.e., racial hatred or discrimination) and a mere personal preference:

The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.

A heckuva sentence to be compelled to defend, especially when it has been repeatedly plucked out of its context, having originated in a very lengthy argument with a white separatist. Given everything you now know, however, you likely perceive that sentence in a much different light.

What I was telling the readers of that e-mail list-server with the all-caps "THIS IS NOT RACISM" was to reject the guilt-trip that is constantly being laid on them by the agents of political correctness. Believe it or not, even in 2009, America is still a free country and you still have the right to your own opinion -- even unpopular opinions, and even opinions with which I may disagree. (Being opinionated by nature, I have learned to resist the temptation to turn every conversation into an argument.)

The white separatist Dennis Wheeler classifed me as one of those who "adopt a Libertarian view on race," which is fair enough, even though he obviously meant it as a pejorative.

The point is that I am weary -- and was obviously already weary in 1996 -- of the totalitiarian tendencies of political correctness, where ordinary Americans are made fearful of expressing their opinions because Big Brother Is Watching.

It strikes me as ironic that the Internet, which has been hailed as a liberating force of First Amendment freedom, has been hijacked by some people for the purposes of conducting a Star Court inquisition, so that I have been compelled to spend so much time explaining myself.

Now let my accusers explain themselves.

ADDENDUM: Let me add something that should be obvious to those who've followed these arguments going back to Charles Johnson's Sept. 12 attack on me -- I am a diligent student of history, popular culture, and political philosophy.

In 1996, a few months before this debate with Wheeler, I was awarded the George Washington Medal from the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge for a series of columns about the National Standards for U.S. History. Research for that series led me into a study of Marxism, and I sometimes boast that I've read more Marx than have most Marxists.

"How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
-- Ronald Reagan

Before I studied communist philosophy, my conception of Marxism was superficial. To me, a Marxist was some old Russian guy in a general's uniform on the reviewing stand during a May Day parade in Red Square, or a bearded crackpot with a megaphone ranting about the bourgeosie, or a Third World guerrila in combat fatigues with an AK-47.

Once I understood the philosophical basis of communism -- dialectical materialism, history as a series of Hegelian conflicts, etc. -- it affected my perception of politics and culture.

There are people who are, we might say, unconscious Marxists. They have been schooled in a particular worldview, taught to view the world through a prism of oppression, exploitation and alienation.

Baptized by immersion in such beliefs (which are nowadays widely promulgated in our educational institutions) these people are incapable of thinking outside the schematic system of categories that has been instilled in their minds. Confronted with a phenomenon that does not fit their schema -- e.g., a poor person who opposes socialism, a lesbian who rejects the dogma of the gay-rights movement -- these people must either ignore the obtrusive phenomenon, rationalize it, or attack and destroy it.

These unconscious Marxists are everywhere, including in the comment fields of conservative blogs. Wise men should not allow such ignorant trolls to go unrebuked.

A woman has the right to change her mind

"I’ve changed my mind. I’ve decided that you can prove a negative, and that Stacy must now prove he is free of racism. Can’t they do that with an MRI these days?"
-- Little Miss Attila

What a zany cut-up, that one. More madcap misadventures in miscegenation!

True fact: One day in the newroom of the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune, I was making fun of something -- I forget what -- and with an expression of mock horror used the word "miscegenation."

One of our reporters, Marla Edwards (who subsequently went to work at CNN's Web site) looked at me and said, "Wow, I've never heard anybody say that word out loud before."

The word has an interesting etymology, evidently having been coined (from Latin roots) in 1864 as the title of a pamphlet distributed by New York Democrats, who accused the Republican Party of promoting miscegenation. True fact.

And here's another true fact: "Racism" is of 20th-century French origin. (Unlike "collaboration," which the French did not invent, but merely perfected.)

One of the basic assumptions made when somebody goes to accuse a Southerner of racism is that the accused is an ignoramus, to whom the accuser is so intellectually superior that the ensuing argument is going to be a slam-dunk victory for the accuser.

Like I ain't been around this track a time or two, y'see? If anyone ever wants to schedule a panel discussion about stereotypes, just give me a holler. I've been stereotyped from birth.

Since we're dabbling in a bit of linguistics, semantics and other elements of forensic rhetoric here, y'all go take a gander at what Jeff Goldstein has to say in this matter.

(And don't let Attila fool you, boys. You know who she'd rather have beers with.)

Jeff Goldstein gets to the nub of it

Those Jooooozz, they're like that, you know:

The question is, why? Is it to "out" "racists" who may damage conservatism at large by dint of their being attached to the movement publicly? . . .
Finally, are there other motivations at play here? — a wish, for instance, to preen unsullied amid the harsh spotlight of political correctness at the expense of forever closing down legitimate areas of inquiry and the free exchange of ideas.

You can read the rest. Like I said a few posts ago, I sided with Goldstein in his debate with Patterico about Rush Limbaugh's "I hope he fails" comment, and fear that Patterico's engagement with me might be the result of smoldering embers of a long-held grudge. That is (we hope) irrelevant to the present discourse, but it does show how what Hollywood calls the "back story" can come into play in such discussions.

What sometimes occurs is a basic problem of organizational dynamics, where personal ambition and personal grievances are externalized as arguments about something else -- anything else. People don't want to admit to being envious or insecure, or to talk about their own fears and doubts, so instead they find someone to scapegoat.

This kind of scapegoating attack is dishonest, because it's not about what the attacker says it's about. Andrew Sullivan's wild obstetric speculations about Trig Palin are an example of this. Any rational observer -- and Sarah Palin's Uterus is admirably reasonable -- can see that Sully is actually suffering from borderline personality disorder, and all his demands for an investigation of the evidence are merely the externalization of his own underlying psychopathology.

Goldstein and Patterico might each accuse the other of scapegoating, each claiming that his opponent's arguments about Rush Limbaugh weren't actually about Rush Limbaugh. I am here to mediate their unfortunate dispute, because it is my heartfelt desire that all men should live in the harmony of universal brotherhood and . . .

What the hell? No, scratch that universal brotherhood crap. Patterico sucks, Goldstein is inarguably Da Man, and you can cue the soundtrack from the rumble scene in West Side Story, baby.

When you're a Jet,
You're a Jet all the way,
From your first cigarette
'Til your last dyin' day.

That's how I roll. If Patterico wants a rumble, we'll give him a rumble, even if it's just me and Goldstein against the whole damned blogosphere.

BTW, I'm not making any accusations or anything, but the first sign that Charles Johnson was going nuts was when he went after Pamela Geller. Patterico's March attack on Jeff Goldstein . . . just a coincidence, I'm sure.

'Your secret racist buddy'

Ace is not him:

If you have a racial axe to grind, if you are kind of pissed off about minorities, stop posting on the subject. You are embarrassing yourselves, you are embarrassing me, you are embarrassing everyone else here.
If you think that I am secretly winking at you telling you I just hit the Racism Button and it's okay to start with the racial jibes, you are wrong.
If you think I am your secret racist buddy, who speaks in "code" but you "get" what I'm really saying, you are wrong. I hate you. I despise you. . . .

Ah, yes. The nudge-nudge, wink-wink. The experience of Michael Douglas's Falling Down character in that military surplus store, where the neo-Nazi says, "You're one of us!" and Douglas says, "No, I'm not!" (And kills the guy.)

Last year I went to New York to cover Bob Barr's appearance on The Colbert Report. Afterwards, there was some kind of debate at the Lolita Bar. I didn't cover the debate, but filed my American Spectator report from the bar, which has free Wi-Fi.

There was this young guy who seemed fascinated that I was actually a real honest-to-God journalist, and he started talking to me, asking questions, which is annoying when I'm on deadline. Anyway, I tried to be polite, but there was a kind of stalker thing going on, which I couldn't figure out.

So finally, the debate ended, I hit my deadline and filed my story. Then we all got taxis and went to a cigar bar in Greenwich Village, where Barr and the Libertarian Party brain trust could relax and socialize.

The younger stalker guy was at the cigar bar, too, and started talking to me again. He engaged in the kind of nudge-nudge, wink-wink sort of talk that such people do -- trying to draw me out on some subject alien to my knowledge or interest -- until finally he satisfied my curiosity: He was a Jew-hater.

So I made a quick and diplomatic disengagement, and avoided the guy thereafter. You can't reason with people like that and there's no point talking to them. Because they are often mentally unstable, however, you have to be careful how you deal with them or they could flip out and make your life hell.

Kooks in the Office Lobby
This wasn't my first such encounter, BTW. Why do these anti-Semites tend to react this way when they are introduced to a real honest-to-God journalist? They're like the people who periodically show up in the lobbies of newspaper offices with axes to grind -- usually against their ex-wives -- claiming to be the victims of foul miscarriages of justice that they expect you, the newspaper staffer, to rectify by doing some of that "investigative journalism" stuff they've seen on TV.

For the past 16 hours, I've been effectively offline because of a computer glitch, so I haven't had time to figure out exactly what is happening in the blogosphere regarding the Patterico situation. Dafydd ab Hugh has written a couple of guest posts there, evidently engaged in my defense, and some of what he says in this post is worth considering.

Mike LaRoche at South Texian is also on the case, as are others whom I don't have time to link right now, since I'm on a borrowed computer and have other work to do. Let me quote a passage from my 1996 debate with white separatist Dennis Wheeler that I think is being overlooked or underemphasized:

To say that one wishes better racial relations in a real sense is not to endorse the prevailing view of "diversity through homogenization." I recently saw a young black woman that I had once knew when I was a smalltown sportswriter and she was a high school track star. She is originally from New York and had just gotten out of the Air Force a few months earlier and returned to Georgia. After some friendly banter, I asked her if she thought race relations were better or worse in the South than elsewhere in the country. About the same, she said, but then she immediately began a discussion of interracial relationships and how these are less accepted in the South.
This struck me as odd: Why should attitudes toward dating/marriage between the races be considered a litmus test of racial harmony? After all, as she later made clear, many blacks are extremely disapproving of such relationships. And yet an acceptance of "Jungle Fever" (Spike Lee movie about blackwhite dating, for those who've missed their multicultural sensitivity training sessions) is held out to us as the ultimate test of whether or not we're "racists."

So you see that, rather than engaging in some hypothetical third-bong-hit-in-the-dorm-room discussion of an idealized utopia, I was citing a particular real-world example -- an actual conversation with a personal friend, whom I could name -- that seemed relative to the debate. And my young friend was talking in particular about black people in the South being less approving of interracial relationships.

That ought not be overlooked. I'm not trying to pull the "some of my best friends" defense, merely pointing out that I was trying to explain reality, rather than to express my own personal ideal.

In his own introduction to the debate, Wheeler notes that "several people adopt a Libertarian view on race," and in response to the same long post I've just excerpted, Wheeler says:

Reduced to its essence, this was another manifestation of the Libertarian argument of "get the government out of the issue."

What Wheeler says, intending "Libertarian" as a pejorative, certainly ought to serve as a stout defense to any accusation that I am a "white supremacist." The two accusations are fundamentally incompatible.

Harshing a Utopian's Mellow
What Wheeler couldn't get past, really, was the problem that racial reality -- life as it is actually lived -- does not conform to his own theoretical ideal. Only by extremely coercive government measures could Wheeler's racialist utopia be obtained; even if one endorsed such coercion, there is nothing like a political consensus to pursue such a policy; and if there ever were an effective majority in favor of a racial-separatist policy, this would lead us straight to the conundrum of minority rights in a democratic society.

Wheeler's programme -- and Daffyd ab Hugh notices I used the British spelling, as I'd been immersed in reading Winston Churchill in 1996 -- was a non-starter, and whatever anyone thinks of Wheeler's racial opinions, his argument amounted to an attempt to persuade people to follow him in a lemming march off the cliff into the abyss of an irrelevant fringe.

Labels like "libertarian" and "pragmatic" are used as epithets by some conservatives, who insist that a particular ideal (and always their own ideal, of course) must be the object of conservative thought and that no practical considerations should prevent the pursuit of that object. Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Cons" nonsense was one form of this idealistic conservatism, a philosophy that tended toward a disengagement with real-world politics, even as it made foolish concessions to liberalism. (See Jonah Goldberg's lengthy response to Dreher's book or my own brief review.)

If by "pragmatic," you mean that we are seeking to deal with actual problems with realistic measures, who would argue against pragmatism? It does not mean we are unprincipled, only that we aren't engaged in mere academic speculation about rainbow-and-unicorn utopias. And if you say we are "libertarian," does this mean that we have no ideals beyond the limitation of government? Of course not.

So you've seen how I dealt with Wheeler's white separatism, and his accusation that my "Libertarian view on race" was an apostasy. Now, more than a dozen years later, I find myself dealing with an entirely opposite accusation, that I am some kind of hateful bigot -- based in large measure on the arguments I made against Wheeler!

Damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Ace isn't "your secret racist buddy." There seem to be some people who want you think I am. My cosmic point, however, is that it doesn't matter whether you're "racist" or not, or whether you think I'm "racist" or not. Your opinions are your own, and even a fool has a right to his folly. (There's that libertarian thing again, see?)

The Road to Johnsonism
Patterico's liberal troll TimB said I should "be separated from the mainstream dialogue" -- that is to say, TimB has appointed himself Mainstream Dialogue Czar.

What part of "fuck you" is so hard to understand, Tim?

A commitment to free debate doesn't require Ace to let his comment field fill up with noxious stuff. He has one of the most wide-open comment fields on the Internet, and whatever caused him to brandish the banhammer, it must have been pretty bad.

The comments here are moderated. I don't ban people. There are just some comments I don't approve. And maybe I approve some that I shouldn't. Pixels are free, but I am proprietor of this particular slice of bandwidth, and trolls -- who try to hijack discussions for their own purposes, including efforts to disparage the very purpose of the blog -- are not welcome.

TimB can log into Blogger and have his own blog (call it "TimB's Dishonest Liberal Troll Blog") in a matter of minutes. Alas, Charles Johnson has already cornered the market on that.

Patterico, as blog aficionados are aware, is an assistant D.A. in California, and he seems to display a prosecutorial zeal toward me. Hell, the only time I ever set foot in his jurisdiction was when I changed planes at LAX. What's his beef?

My readers are hitting the tip jar to send me to Pasadena, so if the D.A.'s got a warrant, maybe he'll send some detectives to get tough with me next month on my way to the BCS championship. Which is why I'm thinking of bringing my Samoan attorney along for the ride . . .

THE DISCUSSION CONTINUES . . .

Blog Commissars

Last week, John Hawkins at Right Wing News compared Charles Johnson's methods to the way the ChiComs treated U.S. prisoners of war in Korea. I recently had an e-mail exchange with Kathy Shaidle about this stuff, and she told me about Ezra Levant's experience with the Canadian "human rights" tribunals.

What's bizarre is how some bloggers have decided that the best use of the medium is as an online Court of Inquisition, as I recently commented:

You seem to be making the same mistake other people have made, supposing that what you think I said is the same thing as what I said. You further seem to suppose that your accusatory method -- "This, That and The Other," as I've sometimes described this type of attack -- can result in a perfect distillation of my beliefs. Liberals have composed similar laundry-list indictments of Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh, for similar purposes. Lather, rinse, repeat.
By this method, you attempt to make yourself the arbiter of what is or is not to be admitted as evidence and then -- j'accuse! -- you declare that I be judged only on that evidence. And if I refuse to allow you to set the rules, you accuse me of not playing fair, despite the fact that I was minding my own business when you decided to arraign me in this manner, as if I were accused of some crime.
You see that you are arrogating to yourself a most frightening authority. I am not a candidate for public office, and it is profoundly strange to find myself the target of this sort of opposition research project.
Consider that I've been attacked like this since 2000, and was forbidden to respond while I was at the Washington Times. I quit the Times in January 2008, and nobody said anything about this until Charles Johnson targeted me on Sept. 12. So if it is to be demanded that I make a comprehensive declaration at this late date, there's a lot of catch-up for me to do, at a time when I've got no shortage of more useful work to do.
All things considered, some of this confusion is understandable. Your purpose in belaboring it is less understandable.

When I was at The Washington Times, I understood that the attacks by SPLC on me were actually aimed at my employer, and by extension at the conservative movement, the Republican Party, etc. And those attacks did not begin, as I've explained, until I published a May 2000 interview with Laird Wilcox, a critic of the SPLC.

Exactly why Patterico has recently taken an interest in me, however, I haven't the foggiest idea. (You might think he'd be busy enough with Roman Polanksi and Michelle "kittykat" Sullivan.) Maybe this is a lingering grudge from March, when I sided with Jeff Goldstein against Patterico:

As the incompetence and corruption of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid regime become increasingly evident, the Ordinary American seeks an alternative. The task of conservatives in this time of peril is to raise a banner around which the good and true will rally. We need a fighting creed, and courageous hearts with strong voices to shout it: WOLVERINES!

The Goldstein-Patterico debate was about Rush Limbaugh. The American people admire a fighter and as Wally Onakoya said of Limbaugh, "He is a man, you know."

Looking back over the past nine months, "Wolverines" conservatism -- especially the Tea Party movement -- has triumphed over Brooksian wussyism.

If we heed the voices of defeatism and despair, if we allow ourselves to be distracted by carping criticisms from The Dogs Who Bark While the Caravan Moves On, if we start endlessly second-guessing our gut instincts because we're afraid of offending the sensibilities of the editors at Newsweek -- well, that way lies disaster.

Disaster has been averted so far, but the barking continues. As Donald Douglas at American Power notes, I am in effect accused of wishing him out of existence. Instead, he's got over a million hits, and his traffic has roughly quadrupled in the past year. Gee, I wonder how that happened?

Coincidentally, it was a lawyer who asked the famous question, "And who is my neighbor?" Like the bloggers say, read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Speaking of Kathy Shaidle, never try the "cultural pride" defense with a Canadian. Thanks to "human rights," it is now illegal to have culture in Canada and, honestly, what do Canadians have to be proud of? Gordon Lightfoot? Neil Young?

For months now, I've been doing my best to get Kathy deported from Canada, the desolate arctic non-nation I call Un-America. She's a "known associate" of mine. That's got to be a serious human rights violation in Un-America.

THE DISCUSSION CONTINUES . . .

An Interesting Question

Who is "TimB"?

How freakin’ naive are you? You need exposure to racism to know if it’s wrong? Go watch Mississippi Burning and leave the adults to talk. . . .
Wow, Dustin, you could really grow by meandering over to Stormfront. . . .
Dude, I have been trying to cause this conversation on this McCain douchebag for months! People like him need to be separated from the mainstream dialogue

This was TimB's response to Dustin -- whom I mentioned in a previous post -- and aroused the curiosity of "this McCain douchebag."

Especially curious is the reference to Mississippi Burning, a film I saw in theaters when it came out in 1988. It's not a documentary, nor is Deliverance, and when we consider TimB's references to "[p]eople like him" and "Stormfront," it appears that TimB wants to have an argument with a Hollywood stereotype of an ignorant hillbilly bigot, rather to say anything useful.

"People like him"? Why would it be so important to TimB that I "be separated from the mainstream dialogue"?

You see that this devolves to a question of his motives vs. my motives. TimB claims to know that my involvement with "the mainstream dialogue" is motivated by racial malevolence, yet supposes no one will question his motives for desiring to have me "separated" from that dialogue.

He has appointed himself Mainstream Dialogue Czar, and attacks anyone who disputes his authority -- a familiar sort of fool.

The Discussion Continues . . .

I'd Rather Be in Pasadena

There are lots of things I'd rather be doing today than responding to someone's insistence that we have a big discussion about race. Nevertheless, as Mary Katharine Ham might say, it's on like Donkey Kong. The Dread Pundit Bluto commented on a previous thread:

I read the quote as referring to the inborn ("natural") survival trait that provokes an aversion to mutation and hybridization.

OK, this is one way to parse the word, although not necessarily what I had in mind, as I explained:

There's no need to go into anything "scientific" here, Bluto, since I certainly wasn't trying to get into a conversation with Wheeler (or anyone else) about genetics or heredity. I have already begun to extend this discussion, and haven't yet gotten to this part of it. Here, however, I can briefly say that I understand man to be a tribal creature by nature, prone to appeals of group interest.
While we today may identify ourselves by such labels as Republican or Democrat, Catholic or Protestant, Redskins fans or Cowboy fans, the underlying impulse is tribalism, and it is rooted in a basic sense of affinity that Edmund Burke addressed in his famous discourse about "little platoons." We ought to be able to discuss such things without risking the accusation of endorsing or advocating some particular opinion. But the gap between the "is" and the "ought" is as real as the gap between the reality and the perception. I am certainly no more racist than Charles Johnson, and perhaps a good deal less. Yet CJ evidently decided to advertise his moral superiority by making himself the Caped Crusader Against Racism, beginning with Pamela Geller, and you see what a fool he's made of himself in the process.
Thank God for foolish enemies and wise friends.

Which is basically what it comes down to, you see. Some people have tried to play the role of tribal chieftain among conservatives, and to decide who is or is not eligible for membership in the tribe. Charles Johnson's attack on Pamela Geller was his opening gambit in an intended purge, and his attack told us less about Geller than it told us about Johnson:

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has apparently decided that the problem with the conservative movement is that it needs more purges, and Pam Geller at Atlas Shrugs seems to be his designated scapegoat. . . .
Pam is a good person and I would suggest that this guilt-by-association "urge to purge" is antithetical to the best interests of conservatism. You can't build a movement by the process of subtraction.

Let my friends go read "Fear and Loathing at Patterico," and see if they understand how my experience with Dennis Wheeler helped me spot CJ's gambit for what it was. As Benjamin Franklin said, experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other. Having learned a few lessons in that "dear school," I was ready to administer a lesson.

Well, I'd rather be in Pasadena, with a month of relaxation before the Jan. 7 meeting between Alabama and Texas in the BCS championship game, and I am thankful for friends who contribute to the Pasadena tip jar.

Mrs. Other McCain came into my basement this afternoon and told me that after our budget discussion yesterday, she felt better, knowing that I was in charge. Ah, but who is really in charge? I woke up this morning to discover a commenter asking me to respond to Patterico, an entirely unexpected development. "Angels unwares," anyone?

The Discussion Continues . . .

Fear and Loathing at Patterico

Although I can't vouch for the accuracy of everything collected in Dennis Wheeler's "The Great Southern League Race Debate," it is an important document that explains what Stogie and others have been trying to explain about this "white supremacist" accusation against me, namely that it is false.

Whatever Patterico's intent in blogging about it, the main effect is that I've been provided ample materials for a discussion of how this smear got started. I didn't plan to spend any more time dealing with it, but one of my commenters asked me to address it, and so I will. The provenance was explained this morning:

Wheeler was -- and, so far as I know, still is -- a white separatist or white nationalist, call it what you will. In the 1996 e-mail list-server messages he collected, you will see that I argue against Wheeler's insistence that the Southern League (which subsequently became the League of the South) should adopt his own racial views. Others on my side in that debate included George Kalas and Gary Waltrip.
Wheeler's arguments did not prevail; he left the list-server and subsequently posted lengthy excerpts of the colloquy on his own site, without permission of the participants. Wheeler obviously believes himself correct, and considers the 1996 debate a vindication of his own views. It's a free country, and I can't tell him what to think.

Rather than starting with the how and why of my participation in that list-server, I'll begin by pointing out the when: It was 1996, and the occasion of the Atlanta Olympics had led to a lot of controversy over the Confederate symbol on the Georgia state flag and a lot of ill-informed MSM punditry about the "legacy of slavery," etc. Being a native Atlantan, I was outraged by the attempt of reporters for the New York Times and other major media outlets to smear my hometown, a thriving metropolis that had long boasted of being "The City Too Busy to Hate."

Ride With the Angels
As a reporter, editor and columnist for the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune, I approached this ugly mess in the Gonzo way, stomping straight into the middle of the fight and becoming directly engaged with the fight and the fighters.

Arbiters of journalism ethics are free to criticize this method, but it gets results. If you're going to write about the Hell's Angels, ride with the Hell's Angels. Whatever is lost in terms of Objectivity is more than compensated by the elimination of misinformed bullsh*t, which is the real problem in American journalism.

From the standpoint of the news consumer, it doesn't matter whether Katrina Vanden Heuvel is a Marxist or whether Sean Hannity is a member of Opus Dei. What matters is whether they get the facts right or whether they are engaged in the dissemination of misleading distortions. What makes the MSM an object of criticism is that they strike a pose of Objectivity while disseminating such distortions.

Hunter S. Thompson was always a man of the Left, yet despised mainstream journalism on the same grounds as do most conservative bloggers today: The media get the facts wrong, or omit facts more important than what they report. Most often, to borrow the terminology of liberal analyst George Lakoff, the MSM "frame the narrative" in such a way as to prejudice the reader's perception of personalities (e.g., Howard Dean or Sarah Palin), events (e.g., the Iraq War or the NY23 special election) and social phenomena (e.g., homosexuality or crime).

If you allow your perception of the world to be controlled by the MSM -- permitting them to be the primary lens through which you view events -- you will be misinformed and disinformed. Just as Hunter S. Thompson saw the bogus "'terror on two wheels" hype about the Hell's Angels as an opportunity to seek out the Angels and discover the unreported reality, I have often found myself in the position of trying to discover similar realities, e.g., the absurd "Send the Body to Glenn Beck" claims about the death of Bill Sparkman.

Trolls and Hidden Agendas
All of this is by way of outlining a distinction that is very important. As a professional journalist, I was paid to cover the controversies of the mid-1990s. As a citizen, however, I felt a duty to become involved in those controversies, which is how I found myself on the list-server in July 1996, praising George Kalas for his efforts to prevent the League of the South from being marginalized as a racist organization:

I have never understood those black or white who say that the South should necessarily be riven by racial antagonisms.
-- Robert Stacy McCain, July 17, 1996

It was my praise of Kalas, you see, that elicited Wheeler's subsequent response and the debate that then unraveled. And as anyone who reads the whole thing will see, I got an early introduction to a phenomenon that bloggers now know as the "concern troll."

Wheeler didn't start out by declaring himself a white separatist, a provocateur attempting to hijack the organization whose e-mail listserver was, at that time, a public forum open to all. Instead, he began with a subtle attempt to undermine the authority of Kalas to speak for the League.

Thus began a long train of events which now, more than a dozen years later, results in me being accused of racism -- when my entire purpose was to argue against what I am now accused of advocating. I note this comment on the Patterico post:

I think DaveC is right that this can basically be put in enough context to be forgivable, if RSM wants. . . .
-- Dustin

Well, I've never met Dustin and perhaps never will. While I appreciate his message of support, the "forgiveable" part bothers me. Whom have I wronged, that I should seek their forgiveness? Granting that people have been offended, this was when they were led to believe (by the framing of the narrative) that I was expressing some personal doctrine of my own, rather than discussing the attitudes of others.

That this discussion has been fairly criticized, I cannot deny, but I wasn't writing for publication, I was trying to prevent Wheeler's attempt to hijack the League as a vehicle for his own purposes. That this preventive engagement was successful ought to be counted to my credit, rather than being cherry-picked in an effort to discredit me.

Yet it would be dishonorable to say that the end justified the means, so if my readers feel more explanation is due, I will try to satisfy that demand. Over and over, I've said that this is a long story, and a story of such value that I did not intend to tell it for free, merely to defend myself against an accusation that my friends know to be false. I am not a "white supremacist" or a "segregationist" or whatever other perjorative label my enemies wish to attach to my name.

Nevertheless, since I am in the middle of a fundraising drive to collect $2,000 for a trip to Pasadena -- Roll, Tide, Roll! -- I'll put aside whatever else I might have done today, and try to explain the basics, so long as the readers keep hitting my Pasadena tip jar.

The Discussion Continues . . .

Tea Party more popular than Republicans?

From Rasmussen Reports:

Running under the Tea Party brand may be better in congressional races than being a Republican.
In a three-way Generic Ballot test, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds Democrats attracting 36% of the vote. The Tea Party candidate picks up 23%, and Republicans finish third at 18%. Another 22% are undecided. . . .

Read the rest. I think what we're seeing here is a good measure of the "brand damage" problem for the GOP, a legacy of the Bush era. This does not mean that an actual third-party movement would be a viable option for disaffected conservatives. It merely points out how important it is that the Republican Party take seriously the limited-government sensibilities of the Tea Party movement.

On an unrelated note, a friend has asked me to address his concerns raised by Dennis Wheeler's collection, "The Great Southern League Race Debate."

Wheeler was -- and, so far as I know, still is -- a white separatist or white nationalist, call it what you will. In the 1996 e-mail list-server messages he collected, you will see that I argue against Wheeler's insistence that the Southern League (which subsequently became the League of the South) should adopt his own racial views. Others on my side in that debate included George Kalas and Gary Waltrip.

Wheeler's arguments did not prevail; he left the list-server and subsequently posted lengthy excerpts of the colloquy on his own site, without permission of the participants. Wheeler obviously believes himself correct, and considers the 1996 debate a vindication of his own views. It's a free country, and I can't tell him what to think.

However, by republishing the debate, Wheeler has furnished materials for me to be once again acccused of being a "white supremacist" -- and materials to disprove the accusation. Later today, I will publish a more thorough discussion of this, which will take time to write. I felt it incumbent to append this brief note, just to let my friends know that I am now aware of Patterico's post yesterday, having been informed this morning by a commenter.

P.S.: Remember to hit the tip jar to fund my trip next month to Pasadena to cover Alabama vs. Texas in the BCS championship game.

UPDATE: Fear and Loathing at Patterico.