Re: d mag

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Dallas County Community College District trustee Bill Metzger was understandably excited to have been chosen to be among those speaking at the Freedom Rally held at Hillcrest High Schools Franklin Stadium.

"First of all, thanks a lot for allowing me to be here, he began, politely enough. Its something thats really important to me. I had written some stuff, what I wanted to say, but I knew when I got here it didn't mean anything because I'm here for one reason - my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, without whom I wouldnt be here today, and Ive got to give him all the credit. Having thus dispensed all available credit, Metzger was unable to thank or even mention his mother, who had held the seat before him and so must have been of some noticeable assistance.

Perhaps Metzger could have won his post without the help of his mother, Jesus, or even the Dallas Morning News, which endorsed him in the May election. The race that I ran in was a no-brainer, he reported to the crowd. I had a Democratic precinct chairman running against me, and someone who believes in an alternative lifestyle running against me, meaning either that the fellow was gay or that he was in the habit running for office without the help of his mothers contacts. Our budding Kennedy did find time to mention his son, though, who had provided him with a helpful reminder to attendees, one on which Metzger chose to end his speech. Be a star - vote straight R.

Mark Davis, the Dallas Morning News columnist and local radio host who also subs for Rush Limbaugh and was thus the natural choice to MC the event, has a different take on the duties of a conservative to his party of preference. Here at the rally, Davis made a point of noting that a candidate doesnt necessarily merit conservative support simply by virtue of his name being listed next to an R; attendees, he said, should be voting for the right kind of Republican... Because there are two kinds of politicians that need to fear the passion of a little group I like to spread some love to every once in a while: the Tea Party! There are two kinds of politicians that need to fear their wrath: Democrats making government too big, and Republicans making government too big!

Davis is admirable in his willingness to criticize figures of his own party when appropriate. In the course of hosting the Limbaugh program a few months back, he lauded Rand Paul for appearing on NPR at the risk of hostile questioning while also criticizing the candidate for having recently cancelled a scheduled appearance on Meet the Press. To agree to and then bail on such an appearance, to not have the guts to show up, is among those things for which Davis will happily attack a fellow Republican on the nations most popular venue of Republican commentary. When a caller claims that liberals dont have the guts to show up on Fox News, Davis corrects him, noting that many of them clearly do seeing as how the network indeed routinely plays host to liberal guests, none of whom appear to have been kidnapped for the purpose. From the same venue, he has gone so far as to criticize Sarah Palin in response to her expressed grievances against the mainstream media for asking her questions that she and her supporters consider unfair. There are no unfair questions, Davis asserted, and I am glad that the two of us share this opinion because the questions I asked him for this article were composed in preparation for a rousing game of Get the Conservative to Denounce Ronald Reagan in Extraordinarily Harsh Terms Without the Conservative Realizing That This Is What He Is Doing.

Rules:

1.    Locate a conservative.

2.    Ask him what he thinks about certain behavior that you know Ronald Reagan to have exhibited.

3.    Inevitably receive an answer in which that behavior is denounced.

4.    For every insult that is accidentally directed towards Reagan, add a point.

5.    Add a point if the conservative is merely of the fiscal or foreign policy sort and thus potentially knowledgeable about history and harder to trick. Subtract a point if its a social conservative.

6.    Subtract a point if the conservative acknowledges that conservatives also engage in this behavior.

7.    If the conservative does not accidentally insult Reagan, you are the first person to lose this game.

Now, lets see how we did.

Question for Mark Davis: Speaking of moral equivalence, there seems to have been a significant rise in rhetoric against Israel on such occasions as it reacts against outside threats in which that nation's actions are equated with those of Nazi Germany. Is such deliberate use of that kind of terminology the result of mere sloppy thinking or is it something worse?

Explanation of Question for the Reader: In 1982, Israel launched an attack on West Beirut in an effort to strike at the PLO. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia called Reagan and asked him to intervene against Israel. Reagan called Menachem Begin and told him he was perpetrating a holocaust. Begin, whose parents were both killed in the actual holocaust, responded that he knew perfectly well what constituted a holocaust and that he did not believe this to fit the criteria, but nonetheless backed off at Reagans request.

Answer by Mark Davis: Nazi Germany and Hitler have sadly become the go-to references when rhetorical bullies seek to end debate with a cheap shot. Whether it's an Obama critic suggesting his socialism has a Hitler flavor, or a Bush-basher attaching Hitler-style motivations to George W's exercise of executive power, these playground taunts achieve nothing to advance discourse. It stems from two common characteristics of today: immaturity and laziness. The thin-skinned adolescent rants of much of today's dialogue show that we often prefer to use flamethrowers to incinerate opponents rather than scalpels to dissect what they are saying.

Results: Davis has accidentally characterized Reagan by way of a total of seven negative descriptions. He subtracts a point from my score by noting that conservatives engage in such behavior and also gets the handicap point for being a social conservative, leaving me with a score of five. I remain the grandmaster of some stupid game I made up.

Now, the reader may perhaps object that it is unfair to set someone up in such a fashion, akin to baiting on deer hunts just to see if the deer will fall for it. If that is the case, then let us do something more akin to sitting around in the woods and waiting for a deer to walk into a tree over and over again until it dies of head trauma; let us see if Davis can write a column in which he is actually talking about Ronald Reagan without accidentally attacking him in even stronger terms, and without any help from me.

A few months ago, Davis took Obama to task for signing a nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Russians.

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Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302