| Subject: Davis piece |
| From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
| Date: 8/25/10, 11:56 |
| To: Tim Rogers <timr@dmagazine.com> |
Newly-elected Dallas County Community College District trustee Bill Metzger was understandably excited at having been picked to be among those speaking at last Augusts Freedom Rally. I had written some stuff, what I wanted to say, Metzger told a Republican audience at Hillcrest High Schools Franklin Stadium, 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 must have been of some noticeable assistance by virtue of having held the same seat immediately prior to his taking it, and thus possessed of helpful connections. Still, Metzger did find time to mention his son and even went to end the speech with a rhyme that the young fellow had supplied to him for the occasion. 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 an event sponsored by area Republicans, has a more nuanced 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!
The San Antonio-born Davis has done quite a bit
to earn his status as Dallas most influential conservative commentator; after
graduating from Maryland?, he worked
stints as a news reporter in a couple of markets and even managed to get his
first radio show at a station in Florida at the age of 24, later hosting
similar programs in Memphis and D.C. before making his way back to Texas in 1994? to take what has become an
extraordinarily successful spot on WBAP. More important than Davis resume,
though, is his admirable 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.
Davis has even 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 he thinks so because the questions I asked him 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, at which point a distressed King Fahd of Saudi Arabia called Reagan and asked him to intervene against Israel. Agreeing that intervention was prudent, Reagan called Minister Menachem Begin and informed the Israeli Prime Minister that 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 particular expedition 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
even 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 deer in an effort to shoot them. If that is the case and it is not - 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; let us see if Davis can write a column in which he accidentally attacks Reagan without any prompting from me. Better yet, let us see if Davis can write a column in which he accidentally attacks Reagan even while bringing him up himself, and does so in the course of lauding him for having refrained from doing several things that he actually quite famously did. I mean, its hard to imagine that a person so incompetent would be given a position of great prominence, but lets check just for fun.
A few months ago, Davis took Obama to task for signing a nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Russians. "The ignorant assertion that our nukes and their nukes are the same is not new, Davis noted in a column that appeared in The Dallas Morning News. Ronald Reagan ignored such droning 30 years ago, driving the Soviets to their knees by refusing to gut U.S. nuclear capability and by refusing to scrap missile defense technology."
Davis is correct to note that the sameness of U.S. and Russian nukes is an old idea, but to the extent that anyone outside of Austin has advocated such a view, it would be hard to top Reagan, who routinely painted all nukes with the same brush. Such weapons, Reagan proclaimed, are "totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization. The Great Communicator, then, not only failed to ignore such droning, but routinely engaged in it himself, having greatly communicated in 1984 that "nuclear arsenals are far too high" and that his "dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the earth, never once stopping to qualify his statements in such a way that Davis might have preferred. It wasnt for nothing that Terry Dolan, chair of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, complained around then that "[t]he administration hasnt co-opted the peace movement. The peace movement has co-opted the administration."
Reagan did not confine himself to mere high-flown rhetoric; Davis to the contrary, Reagan did indeed gut the republics nuclear arsenal by way of SALT III, later known as START, a series of treaties that were updated by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and area man George W. Bush, and which eventually resulted an 80 percent reduction of all nuclear weapons. Obamas 2010 version of START is simply a long-scheduled continuance of a policy that Reagan considered to be among the most important of his own accomplishments and which had been American policy since the first SALT treaty was signed by that dreamy idealist Richard Nixon. Davis does not get around to mentioning any of this, perhaps due to space constraints; though he is presumably more erudite than DCCCD trustee Bill Metzger, he does not seem to be much more proficient in the budgeting of his output.
The problem here is not that Davis is a particularly bad pundit. He appears to be better-informed and more prone to intellectual honesty than most of the people who believe the things that he believes, which is to say that he is in the regular habit of taking his allies to task for doing those things to which he believes himself to be opposed. That he sometimes does so on purpose makes him a particularly good pundit. That is the problem.