empty rhetoric

This morning, I noticed a pingback on a post I made a few days ago wherein I mentioned Wonkette’s “cross our fingers” comment regarding John Robert’s death. Confused why a post about a slow news day would warrant a trackback, I followed the included link to this post [update: link fixed] at “Culture Warrior”– the apparent author of the comment, who writes:

The other day, I made a little joke over at Wonkette about John Roberts being dead that raised some ire among some self-righteous conservative folks. They took a break from pretending not to get erect from hate speech long enough to produce pages and pages of Technorati listings. All the big names are there (Malkin, LGF, Althouse) and lots of little ones, in no particular order, after the jump.

The post is called, ironically enough, “echo chamber”– supposedly, the fact that quite a few people thought the comment offensive enough to be worth mention is now evidence that the “self-righteou conservative folks” are building an echo chamber. Never mind that a “joke” that builds its premise on the death of one’s political opponents might be, in the increasingly acrimonious political environment in which we find ourselves, somewhat inappropriate. Notice too the clever attempt to smear conservatives simply for pointing out the rather obvious fact that the rhetoric on display is, in addition to being ugly and viciously partisan, at the intellectual level of a frustrated middle-schooler.

Its difficult to imagine the sort of response that this kind of comment would engender were it written by a conservative blogger– no doubt several million Daily Kos diarists would be up in arms and demanding the immediate impeachment of Cheney for having such violent supporters. The echo-chamber effect is endemic on both sides of the political spectrum, and frankly, simply part of how the internet and the blogosphere work– I imagine that sites like Wonkette and Culture Warrior would probably be in on the leftist dogpile upon whoever let slip that they wished, say, Justice Kennedy an early trip to the other side. Not that I think 45-50 blog posts represents an “echo-chamber” (especially since that objection is usually raised by people who are in the unfortunate position of being wrong), nor do I think its unfair to point out the incredible hypocrisy when a blogger can breathlessly suggest that conservatives “get erect” from hate speech after “joking” about the untimely death of a government official they disagree with.

It is, in a sense, an attempt to corner the market on what “hate speech” is. The progressive movement has long attempted to define “hate speech” as the same or equal to certain conservative positions (against the redefinition of marriage, opposition to affirmative action, etc.) in order to avoid a systematic intellectual defense of their political opinions. If joking about the death of the Chief Justice of the United States in an overtly partisan manner doesn’t raise the hate speech flag, I don’t know what should. The left, it seems, has given up on trying to mask their intellectually dishonest agenda to corner the market on the definition of certain terms, and is now throwing epithets right and left at anyone who will listen.

But just remember– its conservatives who are poisoning debate and filling the air with hate speech and intolerance. Conservatives are the hypocrites here.

If you can’t realize that, you’re just a bigot like one of them.