"Read what he wrote, and reach your own conclusions."
That is only too easy to say, Dr. Bones, even when the sayer does not actually live far out in Foxcuckooland. But it can be not easy at all to follow through.
I mean, to read what the G. O. Party neocomrade wrote, -- the conclusions part is no trickier than usual. Indeed, sometimes I get the feeling that my own conclusions about the militant extremist GOP come first, and that I do not go about to examine each new bill of goods from Hooverville and Wingnut City and Rio Limbaigh with Arctic or Martian dispassion.
Nevertheless, it was a whole new experience (for the present keyboard) to be referred to a tendentious URL by a cultivated despiser thereof, and discover that its proprietor/perpetrator has neither left his original-intent contemptibility alone, nor silently and undetectably patched it up, but rather ...
... but ....
Well, there IS a strong temptation to say 'Go look for yourself!' at this juncture. And it would do nobody any harm if she did.
Still, one ought to be able to describe such things, and not be reduced to wordless wonder each time Kennebunkport-Crawford Dynasty gentry, or one of their hired-hand or volunteer dubyapologists, discover a new twist.
So then: Neocomrade M. Ambinder has gone hog-wild with that STRIKEOUT gizmo from HTML in his second paragraph. One might, perhaps, call neo-Ambinderism the ‘journalistic’ equivalent of an octopus retreatin’ behind a cloud of her own ‘ink’.
I'm not even very interested, it turns out, in drawing my own conclusions about this ploy. It is a lot more fun to wonder what impression this specimen can have been hopin’ to cause folks to draw about its off-beat behaviour. There may not even be a definite conclusion yet, I won't know for sure until I work through the stage of patting my political pocket to make sure the wallet is still there. So to speak.
Though the ploy be off-beat, the plight of the ployster is not. Neocomrade M. Ambinder has merely discovered that somethin’ he originally dismissed as rubbish because it was advanced by a sentimentally or ‘ideologically’ displeasin’ source. [1]
This might have happened to anybody. In fact, it does happen to somebody often enough to get included in Prof. Fisher’s Historians’ Fallacies several decades ago. Fisher has, as I recall, a crazed Polish chauvinist caught claiming, out of sheer Bircher-worthy dottiness, that Germany invaded his holy Homeland, 1 September 1939. In spite of which, that DOES happen to be what actually happened.
Or at least there was a firm consensus that that is what had happened back when Dr. Fisher wrote the book. Now that on has encountered the Invisible Empire of Karl Rove -- "'That is not the way the world really works anymore. WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- WE will act again, creating other new realities..." &c. &c. -- one would rather like to ask Dr. Fisher if he has reconsidered the supposed fallacy.
It occurs to me as I scribble that Neocomrade M. Ambinder might conceivably be buildin' deliberately on foundations laid for himself and for the Party of Big Management by Neocomrade Karl, Lord Rove. That is to say, the aspirin’ neoteric leaves a few fragments and ruins of her ‘journalism’ in its bad --its pre-invisible and subimperial-- manner around to set off the main attraction. Like the Kaiserwilhelmkirche in Berlin, don't you know?
Perhaps Coventry Cathedral would be a better analogue, though, since we get the Revised Standard Version set down right next to the picturesque rubble, as follows:
| [Addition. That's a hasty generalization. Many of the loudest voices were reflexively anti-Bush, but I can't accurately describe the motivations of everyone, much less a majority, of those who were skeptical. There were plenty of non-liberals who believed that the terror threats were exaggerated.] |
Unless I am mistaken, Dr. Bones, we do not have complete repentance of sin and amendment of neo-life here, because the neocomrade ‘journalist’ still manages to give the impression that he can "accurately describe the motivations" of most folks. It's only maybe thirty-eight per ten thousand cases in which Dr. Ambinder gets his diagnoses wrong.
More importantly, it appears that charter members of the neocomradely community do not look at this matter the way Prof. Krugman and Dr. Fisher and you and I do. For decent political grown-ups, the chief point would be that Germany really did invade Poland. For the like of M. Ambinder, however, it is rather that M. Ambinder still cannot detect the secret- or private-sector motives of the heart with perfect reliability. At least, not when it comes to spottin’ rabid Polak patriotism.
We humble want to hear about ‘facts’ or "objective reality" or the like. Something of that sort, despite all the critical and philosophical problems. Whereas Neocomrade Dr. M. Ambinder much prefers talkin’ about the current state of Neocomrade Dr. M. Ambinder’s diagnostic methodology.
It really does look as if subtle degenerative influences from the Rovan Empire may be at work here, does it not?
Yet perhaps not, after all, for this nifty neoism of Ambinder’s may be at bottom no more than that same old tune that Shakespeare set words to in his day: Richard loves Richard. That is, I am I.
Mais que sçay-je?
Happy days.
______
[1] That's my own cultivated-despiser type formulation, obviously. The exact words that get the Striveover Therapy (Pat. Pend.) treatment were "those folks based on gut hatred for [President Bush]" -- intelligibility requires that the name of George XLIII be crossed out too, but possibly the neocomrade aimed at intensifyin’ his rhetorical shtyk by leavin' the ostensibly corrected sentence ungrammatical?
As I have moaned already, Dr. Bones, it is not given to me to grasp exactly what Neocomrade M. Ambinder is aimin’ at ‘journalistically’ when he behaves like this.
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