Jun 22, 2009 03:07 PM
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Tue Feb 9
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We thought we'd read nothing worse today than Kathryn Jean Lopez's op-ed on John Ensign's affair. But then we read her NRO colleague Andy McCarthy on how Obama is totally an Islamist Fundamentalist!
K-Lo's excuse is that she is simple-minded. Former assistant US Attorney Andy McCarthy can say no such thing, as idiotic as the things he writes are.
At least K-Lo's apologia for Ensign succinctly exposes an important difference in how dumb conservatives and dumb liberals interpret the world: dumb liberals justify their mean-spirited glee at seeing a member of the other team brought down in shame by claiming it exposes hypocrisy; dumb conservatives don't understand that it's not a tragic tale of a moral man felled by temptation, it's just a holier-than-thou asshole getting his*.
All McCarthy's doing, though, is absentmindedly flinging shit at the wall in the hopes that something sticks.
So Andy McCarthy's piece is a helpful attempt to explain just why Barack Obama has not yet personally flown into Iran to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei and grant free-market democracy to the grateful protesters. Some apologists have suggested that it would, in fact, strengthen the ruling regime for the American President to more actively take sides. Others have suggested that Obama might be better able to bargain with whomever eventually runs Iran if he hasn't pissed them off. You can fairly criticize the rationale behind both of those interpretations! Unless you are Andy McCarthy. In that case, this is your explanation.
The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.
Andy McCarthy is well-educated enough to know that a theocratic dictatorship is not compatible in any way with Leftism. He knows, when he writes that the "hard-Left... was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists," that many of these anti-Communists were, in fact, fascists, theocratic totalitarians, and dictators. (Like the heroic Afghani freedom fighters who beat back the Russians! Now we call them "the Taliban.") He knows that a ridiculously inequitable oil state that throws occasional sops to its massive underclass is more or less the opposite of the Socialist ideal. And yes, of course he fucking knows that Barack Obama is not even close to being "a man of the hard Left." (Why did President Barack Castro over here appoint Geithner?) Any idiot knows that the President of the United States would obviously rather see a non-insane moderate in charge of Iran, because seriously, how does Obama benefit by having Ahmadinejad still in power, again? He just likes the dude because they both hate America so much? In fact not a single one of the sinister insinuations made in that one simple sentence should even require any sort of rebuttal, because it is all just half-assed trolling.
But it is all especially shameless because neo-conservatives—not the "hard Left"—were the only Americans publicly begging for an Ahmadinjead victory, so that they could—as they are now!—demand that Obama take a harder line against the Iranian regime. One guy said it right there on National Review Online! And look, they won, and they are doing exactly what they said they would!
Anyway. Andy McCarthy: what a prick.
*Seriously, her attempts to frame Ensign's Clinton-era harangues about the sanctity of marriage as a bold truth heroically stated, one that Ensign, tragically, could not live up himself, are mind-boggling, unless you are as dumb and conservative as she is. Like, if she believes that his moralistic pandering was actually an attempt to preach the gospel, then she will forgive him for not living up to those high standards (the high standards he demanded Bill Clinton live up to, but whatever!) himself, because we are sadly all too human, except for abortionists. "I confess that my first instinct was certainly not to praise Senator Ensign upon learning of his infidelity," K-Lo writes, but then she performed the mental jujitsu necessary to align the facts—a man on "her side" does not live up to her standards of morality—with her worldview—she and her friends, the Republicans, are Holy and Right. And so, John Ensign's affair with a married woman is the fault of "the left-wing blogosphere," and all is right with her world. If K-Lo's boyfriend Mitt Romney was caught on video nailing an underaged Thai sex slave she'd probably find a way to make it Keith Olbermann's fault. Ok we promised we wouldn't actually talk about this column so much but come on.
Send an email to Alex Pareene, the author of this post, at alexp@gawker.com.
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