Patterico's Pontifications

3/6/2007

Noted Greenwald Target Reads Patterico on the Air

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 11:49 pm



This is kind of humorous: Mark Levin reading my examples of leftist hate speech.

Go here to listen. It starts at 48:42.

(H/t Claire.)

I always sort of enjoyed watching Levin scream at liberals on Hannity & Colmes, but when he’s shouting about “libs” by himself on the radio, Levin is a little over the top for my taste.

But he seems to get under Glenn Greenwald’s skin, so he can’t be all bad.

A Not Entirely Fictional Conversation Between a Leftist and a Conservative

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:20 pm



Leftist: You conservatives do it, but we leftists don’t.

Conservative: Nonsense. You leftists do it too. Here’s proof.

Leftist: Ah, the “tu quoque” fallacy. Why must you conservatives always play the “you do it too” game?

Introduction to Hypocrisy 101

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 6:18 pm



I’m still not done with Glenn Greenwald’s recent dishonest post. Let’s look more at the issue of hypocrisy, shall we?

The reason I ignore most attacks from right-wing bloggers is not because I don’t believe in the virtues of responding — I do — but because most of the attacks are at this level and it is honestly difficult to generate the motivation to reply (as but one helpful hint, if you want to accuse someone of “hypocrisy,” you must (a) excerpt a standard the person has advocated and then (b) show how they have violated that standard; failure to follow steps (a) or (b) means that you have not made out a case for what is called “hypocrisy”).

OK, then.

Here’s the (a) and the (b):

(a) Greenwald decries innuendo on the right

  • Here, Greenwald criticizes right-wing bloggers, who, he claims, “traffic in the most reckless innuendo, gossip, and rank, error-plagued speculation that exists.”
  • Here, Greenwald blasts “an ever-growing network of scandal-mongers and filth-peddling purveyors of baseless, petty innuendo churned out by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, various right-wing operatives and, more recently, the right-wing press led by Fox News.”
  • Here, Greenwald excoriates right-wing bloggers for “publicizing innuendo about private sexual behavior and exploiting sexual morality for political gain.”

(b) Greenwald engages in rank innuendo

  • Here, Greenwald trafficks in reckless, baseless, petty innuendo about private sexual behavior, in order to exploit sexual morality for political gain:

    If the term “moral degenerate” has any validity and can be fairly applied to anyone, there are few people who merit that term more than Rush Limbaugh. He is the living and breathing embodiment of moral degeneracy, with his countless overlapping sexual affairs, his series of shattered, dissolved marriages, his hedonistic and illegal drug abuse, his jaunts, with fistfulls of Viagra (but no wife), to an impoverished Latin American island renowned for its easy access to underage female prostitutes.

    Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink.

I previously discussed this issue here, in a post in which I applied Greenwald’s tactics to him. (Did you know that Brazil is renowned for prostitution and sex tourism? Did you know that Glenn Greenwald spends a lot of time in Brazil? And he does seem to be obsessed with both topics!)

Innuendo: it’s fun! As nobody knows better than Greenwald himself.

P.S. On a serious note, I don’t see how any fair person could sanction this sort of nasty rumor-mongering. I’d like to think that he lost a lot of fans with that post about Limbaugh. But, given the unquestioning sycophancy of so much of his readership, I’m sure that post only enhanced his stature among lefties.

Libby Guilty

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 5:44 pm



Scooter Libby has been found guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to the FBI.

I didn’t follow the trial closely, but from what I’ve read, I have no particular reason to doubt the jury’s verdict.

Defying Jason Leopold, Fitzgerald says the investigation is done. In retrospect, it was quite a to-do over an “outing” that the prosecutor could never prove violated the law. But no matter how silly the investigation might be, you gotta tell the truth. Bill Clinton learned that — though he was never prosecuted — and now Scooter Libby has learned it too.

Reading Comprehension Problems

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 8:20 am



I despair for some of our lefty friends, many of whom have severe reading impairments.

Yesterday I catalogued just a few examples of leftist hate speech by prominent figures, and I said: “The point of this list is not to argue that leftists are more hateful than conservatives.” And got a flood of leftists saying, you haven’t proved leftists are more hateful than conservatives!

I said:

It should be obvious that this post is not a “they do it too” defense of Coulter or her ilk. To the contrary, my repeated condemnation of her is a matter of record.

And I got a flood of leftists saying: why are you defending Ann Coulter?

I said:

If leftists defend any of the above quotes on the grounds that they’re “jokes,” they cannot consistently criticize the likes of Ann Coulter for making the same kinds of “jokes.” But they’ll try. Just watch.

And they did, blind to the counterargument I had already made.

And finally, I got the most reading-impaired lefty of them all, Rick Ellensburg himself, saying that, according to my post, he had argued “that no liberal of any kind has ever said anything offensive or wrong in the entire history of the world.”

Well, no, sir, you didn’t say that. I’ll grant you that. What did say was precisely what I quoted and debunked:

[I]t is undeniably true that there are people of every ideological stripe who express profane and reprehensible sentiments. The difference is that right-wing authors, talk radio hosts and bloggers — read and listened to by millions of people — traffic in such sentiments regularly . . . . But to find such sentiments outside of right-wing circles, one must go where right-wing bloggers went today — digging into anonymous blog comments (or e-mails allegedly received). That difference is so obvious — and so meaningful — that it all ought to go without saying.

The bolded part — which was bolded in my original post, for the benefit of reading-impaired sock-puppeting lawyer/bloggers — was debunked quite neatly by my post.

And you, Glenn Greenwald, are too proud to admit that.

But it’s obvious to any sentient being not blinded by ideology.

If any liberal tried to make such a list of alleged conservative hate speech, I could easily cherry-pick and nitpick it until the cows come home, using the same lame arguments leftists used yesterday. This quote is old. This person is not a politician. Your source on this is a leftist web site and not the original recording. Blah blah blah. You think the same stupid arguments all you people made can’t be flipped around? Go ahead, try it.

Even this “Lean Left” post, cited by Greenwald as excellent evidence of righty hate speech, merely cites 13 things Ann Coulter said that boil down to: lefties don’t care about the good of the country. For example: “[Environmentalists] never intended for us to survive,” and “Liberals want mass starvation and human devastation.” Oh, that’s what you mean by hate speech, Glenn?? Because if it is, I can give you examples of the left saying things like that all day long. I was trying to play fair and stick to actual hate speech, like threats of death and violence, and naked racism. But if calling Republicans Nazi counts, you have opened the floodgates, my friends.

Commmenters, start giving us examples of Republicans being called evil. It’s all Glenn Greenwald-approved “hate speech” now.

By the way, Greenwald claims that one of my examples was a quote from Conan O’Brien. It wasn’t. It was a reference to Alec Baldwin’s appearance on Conan O’Brien. But Greenwald says I quoted “such towering political leaders on the left as Conan O’Brien, Chris Rock, Alec Baldwin, Alexander Cockburn, Dan Savage, and Louis Farrakhan.” (Well, and DNC Chairman Howard Dean, Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, top Democrat strategist James Carville, and former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson.)

But not Conan, Glenn. Not Conan.

Why is this mistake interesting? Because the Conan O’Brien mistake was made by the “Lean Left” blogger cited above, whom Greenwald had relied on to provide a defense. You see, Greenwald did what he has always done in the past when I have whacked him across the head. He relies on his army of sycophants to come up with any argument against my broadside, no matter how misleading — and he relies on those arguments without checking their accuracy.

This is who he is. And this is what he does.


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