Burnt Orange Report

Crazy, reckless, and anti-social, in an honest sort of way.

By Jim Dallas

Mark Kleiman, The Poor Man, Atrios, are all flabbergasted at a recent column whereby Gregory Djerejian argues, in essence, that it would have been horribly polarizing for John Kerry to condemn torture (quoting world-famous mental contortionist Andrew Sullivan), but the fact that he didn't showed that he was a wuss and wasn't worth voting for.

Apparently after taking enough pot-shots, Dejerejian shot pack with a little post-script:

Spare me the flames that my position is absurd--ie, voting for the guy who presided over the torture mess--and against his opponent, simply for not condemning it more loudly. This episode was merely one of many (if a significant one for me) revelatory of Kerry's character. Here, in case you missed it then, is a piece on why I supported Bush contra the Massachusetts Senator.

And therein lies the key; Dejerejian knows that he's being non-sensical, but it doesn't matter because it's really about "character."

And that pretty much fits the profile. For example, "Democrats don't really mean it when they say they care about the poor" (despite, well, an occasionally decent track record) somehow justifies, for one relative, voting for the Republicans which loudly and proudly proclaim their indifference or outright antipathy towards social justice.

Now, say what you will about Kerry, but we already knew what the script was going to be before the campaign started. Because it's the same script that was applied to Gore, to Clinton, to Dukakis, and Mondale. That they're lilly-livered limousine liberals who don't believe in anything, are at best spineless debaucherers and at worst criminals.

If I ever go on Jeopardy! and Alec asks me, "this was the Republican party line about the Democratic candidate in [random year]," I know with certainty that the answer will be "what is 'he's an untrustworthy, flip-flopping extreme libertine?" (Now give me my "Cliches for $400, bee-yotch.")

See, it's not about results at all. If it were about results, a reasonable person would say, as the Poor Man does, that:

[T]he way to oppose torture is by opposing torture. That's how you do it. You don't do it by voting for the torturer, attacking the people who won't, and then saying "oh, but torture is bad." You don't do it by sitting above it all and denouncing those with more courage for their unsightly partisanship.

It really boils down to the buying into of crude stereotypes about liberals and Democrats (Kerry is a nominal member of the former group and the archetypal member of the latter), perpetuated by years of demonization and demagoguery (as well as an inability to fight back and creater a positive image by said liberals and Democrats). And now it's built up to the point that people are willing to put up with torture - even rewarding its architects! - just so long as they don't have to put up with those "lie-beral demon-crats." For a brief reminder of what I mean by torture, go here.

Now, can we agree that it's time to fight back? Do we really need any more examples of just how things have gotten out of hand?