My first inclination this weekend was to ignore the world of political news, blogs, and social media. Just take a break and ignore the wider world.
I should have listened to myself.
So I’ve been trapped in debates over this Roy Moore situation. If you don’t know what I mean when I refer to the Roy Moore situation, then you’ll just have to familiarize yourself with Google.
Or Bing, if you think Google is a biased source and not worthy of your time.
It’s been maddening because there’s not just one debate, at least on the right, over Moore. Rather, there are about three or four different spats being had at once, and each of these have a number of sub-debates. Whether or not one is inclined to believe the Post’s story (or at least the women who were interviewed) leads to debates about the overall credibility of the main stream media. Bring in a perspective from a conservative, though anti-Trump (or Trump skeptical, or “Never Trump [and heavens, let’s not even get into that term of art, which has become the new neocon for our day]) perspective, and that leads into a debate about purity. Which I’m totally not going to get into here. Except maybe to note that the same sources which weren’t adequately conservative enough two years ago are suddenly too rigidly ideologically pure. Because I think we are in fact living in the upside down.
Then there’s the argument that even if Moore did have sexual relations with a 14 year old, who cares? It happened four decades ago, and it’s more important to keep Democrats out of office. And this is no strawman either. David Horowitz, some of the boys at Breitbart Bannon, and others I’ve encountered on social media have basically made this point.
And so, after a weekend of this, I was at the point of existential despair, questioning my very purpose in this universe. Frustrated by the intransigence of a large segment of the right side of the political spectrum, I wanted off for good.
So then I checked Joe Posnanski’s twitter feed, because I wanted to see his reaction to Hue Jackson’s incomprehensibly stupid decision to call for a quarterback sneak at the end of the first half of the Browns-Lions game with 15 seconds left on the clock, on the TWO yard line, and NO timeouts. Then I saw a link to Ken Tremendous’s (Michael Schur) twitter feed, where I saw this tweet retweeted.
If true. If true. If true. All these men have opinions on my marriage and your uterus, sight unseen. But hand them a story told by a dozen women and suddenly it’s the riddle of the goddamn sphinx.
— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) November 12, 2017
Excuse my language for a moment, but what the fuck does this have to do with anything? This a random assemblage of words that I guess is supposed to make some kind of point about the hypocrisy of the right, but only highlights the writer’s own terrifying lack of brain matter.
Now this may have made some sense if the writer was addressing those who seem to think that opposition to abortion gives one a “get out of a pedophilia charge free” card, but he’s talking about people who haven’t simply condemned a man yet based on the allegations that have been made about him.
Now I happen to think the charges are likely true, and they’re enough to make me not want to vote for the man (if I actually lived in Alabama). But despite the ferocity of my online spats this weekend, I don’t think it is unreasonable for people to have reasonable doubt.
Moreover, the analogy is just insanely stupid. Harris compares a person’s thoughts on well-established principles (abortion and marriage) to their thoughts on a very specific charge brought against a person. If Harris made this argument on a Basic Logic exam (do they even teach logic anymore?) he not only would have received an F, he would have been laughed out of the classroom. And yet this imbecilic tweet gets 12,000 retweets and 36,000 likes.
A walk through the rest of Schur’s twitter feed is chock full of virtue signalling inanity. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to run out and get a MAGA hat.
Until I remember that one side’s foolishness doesn’t justify the other’s.
Which leads me back to my existential crisis.
I’ve long mocked writers who do nothing but write “pox on both your houses” navel gazing tripe. It’s all too easy to think everyone but you is off their rocker, and that you and a select few are the only ones to have it figured out.
And now I find myself thinking, all too often, “pox on both your houses.”
And that makes me depressed far beyond reason. And frankly I don’t know where to go from here.
The Cranky Conservative 