The Increasing Thuggery of the Fringe Left
A portion of Aaron’s post below about Sarah Palin deserves emphasis. Aaron adroitly shows how Erik Wemple of the Washington Post seems bizarrely preoccupied with the race of someone Sarah Palin allegedly slept with, but that’s not the part I want to emphasize. This is the part of Wemple’s piece I want to emphasize:
[P]eople should stop lobbying for abstinence -only education. It’s a bad idea on many levels. One of those levels is the media: It gives reporters every reason to investigate the most intimate moments of abstinence-only advocates.
Increasingly, this is how the fringe left in this country operates. If they don’t like your views, they will mischaracterize your position and use that as an excuse to attack you personally.
I don’t want to suggest this phenomenon is unique to the left; I have seen such personal vendettas on the fringe right as well. But more and more it seems like something the fringe left does. Whether it’s the thuggery involved in the Prop. 8 battles, the smears against the Tea Party, or the attempts at intimidation we have all witnessed in other areas (such as Weinergate, for example), it seems more and more common for people on the left to tell you that your beliefs make it fair game for them to try to rip your private life apart.
Every time it happens, it needs to be exposed. As long as we stay alert to it and refuse to be intimidated, it is not a winning strategy for them — as long as we keep the spotlight on the cockroaches. One such cockroach? Wemple.