Selective outrage never is becoming, but it becomes more obnoxious still when it becomes selective selective outrage. An unsigned commentary from New Orleans’ Gambit magazine illustrates the point precisely.
The Gambit folks apparently became perturbed when, locally, in the wake of Republican Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao’s vote to pass a ruinously bad House health care measure received some rude remarks from people disappointed in that, and, nationally, that at a rally attended by 10,000 or so to protest the bill in Washington D.C. headlined by leading Republicans, a sign appeared equating a photo of a concentration camp with the bill. To them, it seemed to signify a recent growing incivility in political discourse.
But, in reality, the piece tells us more about the fallaciousness and insecurities of its writers. The entire diatribe focused on this presumed speech coming from alleged supporters of the Republican Party and by implication from the right of the ideological spectrum. And to bolster its attempt to define this speech into its being uncivil, the writers mention that two groups called upon Republican leaders to condemn it as such. Recognize this tactic serves a broader political agenda to accomplish the proverbial passing of a camel through the eye of a needle, to try to delegitimize principled conservatism by a shotgun marriage of it with these other sentiments by the drawing of condemnation of groups allegedly representing the objects of these slurs.
This attempt unravels when first investigating the groups. One, the Anti-Defamation League, famously preaches from the left and long has a history of selective outrage: speech from the right it finds offensive draws immediate ire; but unquestionably hateful speech from places with which left sympathizes draws mild rebukes if any at all. The other, the Asian Pacific Americans for Progress, describes itself as an organization for “progressive” (read: very liberal) people and swears absolutely fealty to the health care reform wreck supported by Democrats. That they are the ones condemning remarks isn’t so much any validation that these remarks are objectionable as it is revelation of their own partisan political biases. Naturally, the editorial mentions none of this.
Note also that the writers are building a thesis by selectively taking unrepresentative evidence and attempting to impute it to the whole. Maybe, out of the thousand or more signs at the rally, were there a couple others of the same ilk that got the writers into a huff. And the submitted comments about Cao that so vexed these crusaders are unlikely to represent more than a similar proportion of the entire universe of those objecting to Cao’s vote. Yet they try to pass off these as some larger indicator of widespread “hatred” that has created this “ugly season.”
This cavalier reading makes one wonder where these nimrods have been for the past decade. If you want to see real vituperative hate in political discourse, you need look no further than dozens of wacko leftist blogger and forum sites where the venom has been flowing freely ever since former Pres. Bill Clinton got caught with his fly unzipped. This should not be surprising, as liberalism as a whole lacks intellectual and empirical verification as a political ideology, so it must rely on willful ignorance of history and fact with these replaced by emotive anti-intellectual appeal. Yet this seems to escape the slumbering authors, perhaps because they revel in the same self-deception and/or inability to think for themselves.
Being an ideology bereft any intellectual coherence and substance, liberalism’s proponents long ago took and made mainstream arguments into directions featuring ad hominem, straw man, and dissembling qualities. Not unlike what Gambit’s editorialists try to do when they imply negative qualities to the right when it has been the left’s province for so long. Liberals have for so long have created the conditions and lived in an “ugly season” that when seeing a flicker of it on the right they cannot break from the playbook which results in the usual incorrect, self-serving interpretation.
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