Monday, April 26, 2010

What Was That Book I Wrote Again?

Jonah being Jonah:
Ron Rosenbaum gets himself worked up into quite an incoherent tizzy about the Tea Party and Nazism and Hitler and so on. He takes a swipe at my book, I'd wager unread. But I'm long used to that. As for the bile he aims at the Tea Parties, I think his over-protestation speaks for itself. I should say I agree with him that some Tea Party rhetoric goes too far and some signs are indefensible. We are not on the verge of a dictatorship and Obama is not a Hitler in waiting. The fringe folks who carry such signs help no one (which may be why the Larouchies seem to be the main culprits, a fact the MSM has no desire to clarify).

8 comments:

Smut Clyde said...

Repeating a comment from S,N!, for shameless Smut is shameless:

The fringe folks who carry such signs help no one (which may be why the Larouchies seem to be the main culprits, a fact the MSM has no desire to clarify).

These banner-waving racists have a long track record of being paranoid-style, impulse-control-deficient loonies in the past, which (some might say) makes them representative of the teabag movement, so Jonah is quick to imply that it actually makes them non-representative.

In the absence of evidence that banner-waving racists were previously ‘Larouchies’ (and apparently the MSM is providing no clues), I can only assume that it’s a matter of definition: he has defined banner-waving racists as not true Scotsmen.

If only the Teabag group were centrally organised and funded; then it would be possible for the sponsors to tell the MSM “Do not treat these loons as the public face of our group, for they are interlopers”. But alas, it is a self-organised, self-selected grass-roots movement.

Smut Clyde said...

As for the bile he aims at the Tea Parties, I think his over-protestation speaks for itself.

Puzzled Smut is puzzled. The only way the doth-protest-too-much allusion would make sense is if Jonah is implying that Rosenbaum shares the values and objectives of the most rabid teabaggers, and is denouncing them for self-protection. Yet this does not seem to be what he wants to imply. It is almost as if his column is a regurgitation of half-digested tags and scraps of quotations that he has absorbed through osmosis without ever seeing them in context.

I think he follows the same principles as the cargo cults. He arranges words into the structure of a sentence, as he has seen real writers do, blithely expecting that this is enough to attract Meaning to fly down and occupy it.

M. Bouffant said...

Now I realize what purpose Lyndon LaRouche serves.

It can be pretended he & his cultists are the hard-to-locate crazy "leftists."

J— said...

We are not on the verge of a dictatorship and Obama is not a Hitler in waiting.

"Liberal fascism differs from classical fascism in many ways. I don't deny this. Indeed, it is central to my point."

Once again, Dr. Jones, Jonah wins and you lose!

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

I'm just gonna add a

SIEG HEIL, BUSHLER!

for Olde Time's Sake.

(Accept no substitutes.)
~

mikey said...

"Old Times Sake".

An inexpensive rice wine popular in Southern Japan

Captcha informs us of his expertise in the obscure programming language unlitc

Hamish Mack said...

Big J says; He takes a swipe at my book, I'd wager unread. But I'm long used to that.

Well,you know, if the author is used to people not reading his book...

tigris said...

Jonah is also used to leaving books unread, so the wager always seems a good one to him.