alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

April 18, 2009

Question: Do progressive bloggers have an inside voice?

by AltHippo @ 5:28 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

Originally, I wasn’t planning to go to the conference formerly known as Take Back America. Now, I’m thinking of going. I’m interested in studying the question of whether there’s an actual rift among progressives, or whether there’s a microscopic sampling of former Hillary supporters bellowing and squawking that skew the sampling.

If there’s a rift, it would be along these fault lines:

  1. Obama is a fundamentally progressive figure who is cautious in moving the country towards a more European model.
  2. Obama is the anti-Christ, who cheated in the primaries, and who is indistinguishable policy-wise from Bush 43 or from Hitler.

Now, you may think I’m exaggerating the part about Obama and Hitler. But today, Paul Rosenberg at Open Left is pushing just that line:

But now, Obama thinks the Nazis were right, after all. Movement conservatives have always thought so, of course. But this is the first time that a Democratic President has agreed with them, in flagrant opposition to the rule of law.

So, score one for Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and all their wingnuts legions. Obama may not be Hitler, but he agrees completely with Hitler’s underlings, and he thinks that the Nuremberg prosecutors, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill were all dead wrong.

If this isn’t evil, it will just have to do ’til the real thing comes along.

Now, I know a few of the people that run the Open Left site, and it pains me to say that over-the-top statements like this are why I don’t become more involved in commenting, writing posts, etc., on Open Left. It’s also painful that people like me need to explain why Obama isn’t a nazi. It makes me wonder whether the blogosphere is a waste of time.

The question here is not whether CIA interrogators tortured prisoners. They did. Nobody wants to defend that. Well, maybe Rush Limbaugh and Jonah Goldberg, but they’re special.

The question is whether a reasonable person would have received an order and deemed it kosher or not. And, I think that most people in that position, particularly given the state of our culture at that time, would probably have gone along with the legitimacy of the Bybee memos. Remember that this is a time and place where we see Kiefer Sutherland do the most outrageous things on 24. Popular culture doesn’t object to the notion of torture for information. It also doesn’t do a good job of distinguishing fantasy from reality, but that’s gruel for another day.

Now, let’s take a second and imagine that we’re nazis. It’s WWII, and we’ve just been given a new mission. Our mission is to round up all of the civilians belonging to particular religious and ethnic groups and put them on a train to nowhere. A fellow soldier has the mission to take the people off of the train, put some of them to work, but mostly lead them to mass execution chambers.

I am arguing that the scale of these two situations is so different that a comparison has no merit. In the first case I can believe that a CIA agent might believe that what he is doing is wrong, but within the boundaries of justice at that time. The soldier in the second case ought to understand that he is committing an atrocity on a planetary scale.

QED: Obama isn’t a nazi.

Next week: why Michelle Obama is not the same as Michelle Malkin.

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16 Responses to “Question: Do progressive bloggers have an inside voice?”

  1. dcblogger Says:
    May 6th, 2009 at 2:04 pm

    So, will Eric Boehlert be invited to DC Drinking Liberally to discuss his book?

  2. AltHippo Says:
    June 13th, 2009 at 3:03 pm

    Book sales have been down as of late. I’m staying away from book nights for the next couple of months. Unless Bob Woodward has a tell-all book on Bush’s Nigerian birth certificate, I’m going to wait until the economy normalizes.

    While I don’t agree with the chapters on the Blog Wars in Eric’s book, that has no bearing on doing a book night. The biggest factors are: a.) issues of current interest. So, a health care night would be interesting. Or on closing Guantanamo. b.) whether or not we can butts in seats. c.) relationship to life in DC.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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