Roy makes my head hurt again. Reading the latest travesty by Megan McArdle (yes burning a flag is just like carrying a gun to a presidential event), I was struck once again at how being a right winger remains the ultimate affirmative action gig in the world. Seriously, in what universe could someone who is as big a dumbass as this Upper West Side twat score a gig at the Atlantic absent the big thumb on the scale that accompanies having right wing views? (See also Douthat at the NY Times and Goldberg at the LA Times -- it is hard to evaluate which world view is more jejune -- McArdle's ahistorical libertarianism rooted in the kind of vicious abstraction that anyone over the age of 16 should long have gotten over or Douthat's nostalgic 1950s Catholicism that never quite existed, the philosophy of a 12-year old who finds girls scary, icky and alluring -- neither seem like they have ever lived among flesh and blood human beings -- Goldberg is just a lazy legacy pick who thinks the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were the fascists and Franco the freedom fighter; no one with a three digit IQ and an ounce of good faith could really take him seriously.) If these people were liberals, they would be making copies or fetching coffee at any mainstream publication. But since they are right wingers who are relatively young, walk upright, can more or less write in complete sentences and have shed their prehensile tails, they get the choice media real estate.
[The McMegan media assault has opened a new front with a sometime gig on "liberal" NPR's "Marketplace" where she is treated as some kind of expert on economics. I swear to God if my kid wasn't in the car with me the other night I might have just driven into a tree to make the banal disingenuousness cease. (Maybe NPR should consider a show called "Workplace" which would focus on the 90% of Americans who really don't give a fuck about the "numbers.")]
Let me explain the issue so even McArdle can understand it. The guns that people bring to these events are designed to kill people -- that is their sole purpose. When I strap one on and wear it to an event I am saying to my fellow citizens "if you fuck with me, I am willing to kill you." The gun is not designed to stimulate debate, it is designed to end it. It is not a symbol of civil liberty, it is an instrument of solipsistic incivility saying rather clearly that I intend to have the last word -- and not in the way that Megan imperiously proclaims from her perch on high in her blog post.
Can you imagine, by the way, the reaction of right-wingers if liberals had taken to showing up armed outside of events held by George W. Bush, say in a manner that looked like this? (The comments on this link are priceless -- thank God we live in a post-racial society.)
And how freakish does it look to every other democratic nation on earth when we permit clearly disturbed people with guns to come near presidential events?
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