Either|Maybe|Or
Alternately
Child molester Woody Allen is for HRC.
Are all child molesters for HRC?
Does that mean that everyone who is not a child molester is deplorable?
Wow, you're really putting some effort into your support for human atrocity, aren't you?
Is Hillary Clinton accused of raping a minor? Donald Trump is.
Did Hillary Clinton ever have to send out her lawyer to give a fake explanation for why rape isn't rape? Donald Trump did.
No, seriously, Sculptor, what's your point?
Convince me this isn't trolling. Convince me there is an educated political thesis about your advocacy. You don't like that HRC qualifies as a warmonger by your definition―nor will I utterly refuse your definition―but your "moral compass"° what, then,
surrenders to the man promising to one-up the warmonger you don't like?
You keep posting these weird, nearly paradoxical arguments that only hold stable as long as they are reserved motionless in their own independent sphere of existence devoid of interaction with any other information. I start to wonder if maybe this is why conservatives so ostensibly loathe Hegelian dialectics, because their political theses so frequently require a condition of informational and psychological stasis that just doesn't exist.
You know, it's been over twenty years since I wrote in the name of a friend for a local election. The funny thing is that I'm the only person he specifically knows voted for him; he had no idea who the other six were. And in all that time, the biggest write-in event I've witnessed is an establishment Republican overcoming an insurgency that won the primary. We always say you don't have to like the candidate you vote for, and that's largely true because nobody gets an idyll, much like averages generally represent an impossible condition for any one human being. We're in a year when one of the apparent headlines is the astounding unpopularity of the candidates themselves, which is itself seemingly paradoxical. But part of that sense of impossible contradiction falls away when we stop presupposing them, for the sake of argument, equivalent.
For instance, it's hard to explain the full measure of GOP insanity. Perhaps the historical asterisk will glitter with the implications of a party (
i.e., collection of individuals) of Machiavellian individualist capitalists (
i.e., in it for themselves) trying to cooperate toward a common goal in which no one person gets everything desired. In the end, though, Donald Trump is who Republican voters want; this is how their process worked out. And Mr. Trump really is appalling. We're not just throwing out electoral and political customs, we're setting aside a large swath of our American psychomoral assertion of decency, in order to accommodate him.
If you could actually explain yourself, Sculptor, perhaps your
pathetic maneuvers and excuses↑―
e.g., "I borrowed it from the HRC supporters"―might make sense as something other than desperate and pathetic trolling. But it is clear, Sculptor, that you are not arguing in good faith.
Still, though, if your "moral compass" points away from Hillary Clinton, one can reasonably wonder how much of that revulsion is founded in reality. After all, one of the reasons the email scandal is a scandal is that we decided arbitrarily to declare scandal. We don't know about Colin Powell's security situation because he's not Hillary Clinton so nobody cares what he did. We don't care about the evidence of actual pay for play with Powell's foundation because he's not Hillary Clinton so nobody cares what he did. We haven't investigated the foreign service personnel deaths that occurred on his watch because he's not Hillary Clinton so nobody cares what he did. Your "moral compass" trembles and falters at the mere whiff of rumor when it's HRC, but like so many other people you don't give a damn if it's anyone else. The liberal critique against Hillary Clinton is generally far more valid than the conservative, but it, too, falls apart if it skips out on history.
Borrowing a rape metaphor in order to explain why your "moral compass" points toward the guy whose attorney once had to assert, on his behalf, that it's not rape when it's your wife probably wasn't the best of ideas.
And there is something of an
I dare you feeling about it; I really want to know, because, seriously, the one thing you can't convince anyone right now is that you're thinking this bullshit through.
Is malice
really the best you have to offer?
It's like you're just making up atrocious things to say as if they have some actual meaning. The reason why is probably fascinating, but at this point I doubt you're capable of telling us, because part of it is mere vice.
But here's the other problem: What if it's not vice? What if you really did fall for it? When
Jonathan Chait↱ recently wrote―
The critics are suggesting that the fact that Clinton and Trump are both trusted in roughly equal measure is a problem for which the news media bears at least some responsibility. Perhaps they are about equally distrusted because the liberal media has portrayed Clinton as a criminal? No, Spayd replies, the media is doing it right because people dislike Hillary Clinton almost as much as Trump.
―my memory tumbled back a bit over eight years, to the waning days of the Bush administration, and the Senate Intelligence Committee report that, as
Dan Froomkin↱ put it, "further solidifies the argument that the Bush administration's most blatant appeals to fear in its campaign to sell the Iraq war were flatly unsupported":
The White House response? That officials in Congress and elsewhere were saying the same things about Iraq. Or in other words, that other people bought the administration line. It takes a lot of chutzpah to defend yourself against charges that you've engaged in a propaganda campaign by noting that it worked.
It really
is a remarkable occasion. Yes, they really did do that. It's one of the weird things about the way we've treated the "Iraq War Vote". Not that we shouldn't criticize, but Congress saying no to the president right then and there would have been, historically, extraordinary to the point of unspeakable.
But the flip side here is the idea that "it worked", a very important consideration in Chait's context.
Because the problem is that not every complaint about Hillary Clinton is invalid; it's just that the whole discussion takes place amid an insistent dishonest framework. Consider the idea of the squeaky wheel. Conservatives have been about trying to prove, for some years now, that simply repeating oneself enough is sufficient, and whether one is correct or incorrect is irrelevant.
And that's pretty much the standard Spayd appeals to:
Whether it's true or not, it's Hillary Clinton's fault that people think it's true because people don't like her after all that other stuff that wasn't true.
Actually, tellyawhat: One of the interesting phrases you'll hear these days is "without context"; it's part of the complaint against the media critique of Hillary Clinton, that too much is presented "without context". It's also about to come to the fore in Charlotte, where the police have gone from very definitive statements to acknowledging ambiguity, and I'll have to find the columnist who phrased it that the department didn't want the footage released without context.
Still, though, how about the time
Matt Yglesias↱ felt exasperated enough to tweet:
You'd think hosting the 5th Fleet would be enough to buy Bahrain "access" to the Secretary of State but I guess is took that donation.
See, by Spayd's argument, it's Hillary Clinton's fault the AP deliberately left the 5th Fleet out of their alleged exposé. And it's Hillary Clinton's fault that the AP's readers might think there was something untoward about the Secretary of State having official business with a host of the 5th Fleet.
At some point, I blame the audience for gullibility.
____________________
Notes:
° (chortle!)
Chait, Jonathan. "New York Times Public Editor Liz Spayd Writes Disastrous Defense of False Equivalence". New York. 12 September 2016. NYMag.com. 24 September 2016. http://nym.ag/2cxjabr
Froomkin, Dan. "The Propaganda Campaign Dissected". The Washington Post. 6 June 2008. WashingtonPost.com. 24 September 2016. http://wapo.st/2cVkMxE
Yglesias, Matthew. "You'd think hosting the 5th Fleet would be enough to buy Bahrain "access" to the Secretary of State but I guess is took that donation". Twitter. 26 August 2016. Twitter.com. 24 September 2016. http://bit.ly/2d7JKb8
