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And why Jeff Goldstein, Israel, Michael Steele, and Thomas Sowell are viscerally reviled with obscene projectile spewing----they don't follow the leftist narrative taught to aspiring revolting revolutionaries by their Marxist mentors holding tenured positions in tax-exempt and often tax-supported higher ed institutions. Or as Goldstein, a professor of semiotic horse manure puts it:
I’d simply add that I think one of the prime reasons the Western left, for all its purported "progressivism," is so concerned with punishing Israel is that Israel, like, say, Michael Steele or Thomas Sowell, has wandered off the progressive plantation and rejected the narrative assigned it by those who presume to speak for a larger identity agenda. Which is to say, kibbutz culture has given way, over the years, to a strong capitalist system—and so Israel is considered by many on the left to be a traitor to the cause of worldwide socialism, just as surely as Steele and Sowell (among others) are considered race traitors for rejecting the political narrative assigned them by those who have assumed the mantle of "authentic" blacks.
Yep, the Orwellian funhouse mirror on the left makes phony freaks like Jesse J and Al [Tawana Man] Sharpton "authentic" and Booker T. Washington "pull yourself up by your bootstraps and don't whine all the time" blacks "inauthentic." It should be a joke, but sadly it is true. Ace of Spades takes up the narrative of Progressive ego-inflation:
On the other hand, there's Jeff Goldstein. He's a college professor. He's even in a field they respect as being particularly intellectual-- literary criticism, semitiocs. You know-- bullshit. (Sorry, Jeff.) So he represents to them a threat that I'm not, wish though I do that I were. He's a member in good standing of the intellectual class and has an official credential to prove it. Something that, for example, Jane Hamsher does not. (Unless serving as a producer on such movies as Natural Born Killers and, um, Double Dragon is considered to be a credential of intellectualism.)
He believes almost nothing that they do and in most of the things they don't. And, unlike them, his status as intellectual is founded upon something more tangible and indisputable than a mere belief that Al Gore is the currently elected President of the United States.
Ergo, a direct threat not so much to their politics -- they get that from all over the blogosphere -- but to their egos. And that is an insult they simply cannot let stand.
He should agree with them. He should be a pious member of their church. But he strayed; he is Heretic. His very existence is anathema.
It's about identity politics, of course. They say that in the progressive mode of thought, "victim" is the most holy identity of all. But that's not quite right. He holiest status among progressives is their own status -- the status of Redeemer, the Hero who Saves the Victim, who liberates the enslaved. Not through actual action, of course, but through the sheer power of caring. By their lofty rhetoric shall we know them.
Moreover, Jeff Goldstein actually reads their claptrap hooey-filled regurgitations of whack-job Froggy interpretations of Nietzschean nihilism. Then he expertly DECONSTRUCTS these tropes with tools of analysis employing the very same methods invented to deconstruct American power. Ace finishes them off by showing Jeff is better at their game than they are!
When progressives talk about the oppressed, those who died in Katrina, have no doubt-- they're mostly talking about themselves. They are the ones who are concerned, who worry for the fate of this Republic. To borrow Goldstein's schtick-- the text of their expressions of outrage and compassion is merely a complex system of signifiers for the true authorial intent, the subtext, or maybe even the supertext, that they are among the chosen.
Bush lied, people died. Message: I care.
Is all of this overstated? Generalizing? I suppose so. But I do think this is primarily what fills the left with such emotion over so many issues. Emotion is a response to a stimulus that affects one personally. Not abstractedly, or intellectually, or theoretically, or even politically.
And looking at the unhinged rantings of the left-wing of the blogosphere, and left-wing poltiicians and pundits, I simply cannot accept that all we're talking about is politics here. I got physically angry when psychopathic death-cultists killed 2700 of my fellow Americans just 100 or so blocks south of my home. Jane Hamsher and Kos seem to get physically angry about-- well, what don't they become angry about? Why is humor and irony so common on the right and so hard to find on the left? Humor and irony require emotional distance from a subject-- something I would contend the left is in of rather short supply.
As they say-- the politics is personal. And they're quite right, though perhaps in not the way they think.
Edward Said began this current obsession with his literary-based critique of western imperialism in 19th century lit [Said was a professor at Columbia in lit and also wrote about music] which he transposed to the Middle East. In Said's demonology, Israel's role in the 20th century mirrors Europe's colonial imperialism in the previous centuries. And the Palestinians play the role of victim of Israel and its guilt-tripped western supporters---Palestinians are the passive recipients of crimes concocted on another continent. Much of the current lefty blah-blah about Iraq is derived from Said's narrative matrix. Pat Santy has a comment in Dr. Sanity:
The truth is that reality itself -- when it is imperfect and/or doesn't conform to their preconceived ideas -- is a slap in the face to this crowd. How dare Jeff Goldstein, a university professor who should know better, think differently from us? How dare bad things happen in a war? How dare the military, including every single individual within it, not be perfect like us?
In fact, (if I may digress from their hatred of Jeff, who doesn't conform to their positive stereotype of the intellectual; to the US servicemen and women who do conform to their negative stereotype of the "warmonger") they long ago dismissed the military and anyone in it as semi-literate, oafish, tools of oppression; whose only purpose is to kill innocents and advance the evil objectives of America (particularly when a Republican is President). Military action is never good enough, fast enough, tidy enough, perfect enough for them.
They are so threatened on such a fundamental level at the idea that the US military could still be a force for good--despite incidents like Abu Ghraib or even Haditha (and we still do not know all the facts about the latter, but justice will be done)--that their reactions to any problem are overblown, histrionic, and completely irrational
You don't have to have a PhD like Pat does to agree. Done With Mirrors notes:
Intellectuals, professional intellectuals, are supposed to be progressives. The only other blog personality I can think of on the right who regularly gets bathes in leftist vitriol the way Goldstein does is Michelle Malkin -- an Asian-American woman. She's supposed to think of herself as a victim of America's racism and fascism. She doesn't; another one who slipped the plantation.
Yes, Hewitt and Reynolds fit their preconceptions. The fact that Goldstein and Malkin do not is a slap in their heavily cosmeticized faces, and puts the lie to their identity politics.
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