EFFin’ Unsound

– posted by thehim

My lord, Carl, what a bizarre week this was. The local wingnuts either became resigned over the fact that Luke Esser made it impossible for any Republican to be taken seriously criticizing the Democrats on election integrity, or they completely lost their mind over it. As for the latter, Pudge is still arguing with me that he’s not a blogger, apparently because words have no meanings at all - they’re just random arrangements of symbols that everybody gets to interpret in their own way. But this post is not going to be about Pudge, as much fun as that would be, it’s about a man who had an even more spectacular meltdown this week.

Let’s give our liberal blogger friends a second chance
By Mathew Manweller

Up until this week, I’d never corresponded with WhackyNation’s resident academic, Central Washington University Political Science Professor Mathew Manweller. He posts at the green goofball circus much less frequently than Guzzo and Gardner, so giving us a shout out was an unexpected development. As WhackyNation has become more and more well known to the HorsesAss community as a source of unending hilarity, commenters like ‘bma’ and ‘correctnotright’ have been having some fun over there as well. But what happened after this post from Manweller went up took me by surprise.

Way back in June, 2005 I wrote an essay that suggested that our war on terror would eventually become a more bipartisan affair. The basic rationale of my argument in 2005 was that once the Democratic Party had served a turn being responsible for security, they would have to shed their self-righteousness and actually make hard decisions to protect the country.

At the time I first saw this post, there was already a brief back-and-forth in the comments between ‘bma’ and the nutty professor over this first part. Manweller seemed unaware that much of what the debate focuses on is whether or not there should be basic oversight when we spy on potential enemy communications. He simply equated the Bush Administration’s actions with “responsibility” and equated the desire to protect civil liberties as “self-righteousness,” without even being aware of the specifics of what was “responsible” and what was “self-righteous.” The specifics didn’t matter. The fact that what the Bush Administration wants more than anything is amnesty for the telecommunications firms that broke the law is simply ignored.

In August, 2007 it turned out that my prediction was correct. The Democrats had taken over Congress in the 2006 elections and were immediately faced with some important national security votes. On August 4th, 2007 the New York Times reported that the Democratically controlled Congress had authorized “broader spying authority” for the President.

I wrote about it here at Whackynation.

The huge mistake Manweller makes here is that he makes a really terrible assumption that the fact that Democrats are caving to Bush is proof that Bush is right. The possibilities that Democrats are being cowardly, playing politics, or that they just buy into the same ideologically driven false choice that we can gain security by giving up liberty are simply dismissed. Recognizing that this is the same terrible assumption that many make about the war on drugs, I left a snarky little comment:

Hey, maybe the war on terror can become the kind of bi-partisan success that the war on drugs has become.

I then followed it up in the next comment with a helpful re-write of his first paragraph to demonstrate the flaw in his logic. When I next checked my email, I had something in my inbox from Dr. Manweller which contained the exact same text as comment #6, claiming that I’m “completely unqualified to participate in these debates” and that I have “neither the education nor the understanding to engage in serious dialogue about public policy or foreign affairs.”

Soon after that post, I was attacked by a variety of liberal bloggers.

At that time, I was not one of them. Sleeping on the job, I guess. Carl, did you get in on that?

I was called an “idiot” and various other names. (As an aside, I have come to the conclusion that most liberal bloggers only know adjectives that are spelled with four letters.)

“Idiot” actually has 5 letters, Mathew. So does “moron.” “Buffoon” has 7, and “clueless professor at a small state school who has grossly overestimated how intelligent he is” has 80.

But, back to the point, the gist of their arguments were that most of the votes for expanded spying power were from Republicans so it didn’t really count.

I’m not sure who it was that was arguing with him over this (could’ve been one of his students for all we know), but that doesn’t make any sense at all. But this time around, different people were arguing with him, and Manweller was not quite ready for it. I won’t post up the result of the email exchange we had (unless Manweller wants me to), but after my second email reply to him, he became quite a bit more cordial and thanked me for the discussion. Unfortunately, his newfound awareness of the limits of his own knowledge and the misreadings of the intelligence of others hadn’t carried over to the original comment thread.

Well, as Gomer Pyle used to say “surprise….surprise…surprise.”

Speaking of dimwitted southerners, we still haven’t gotten a clarification from Manweller on his unwarranted slam on South Carolina Republicans. As you may recall, he said the following in a recent post:

Finally, the Ron Paul over Giuliani vote in S.C. is just scary. What does that say about the sophistication of Southern Republican voters? On one side you have a man who wants a complete pull out of Iraq…the consequences be damned and an economic policy that suggests we should eliminate the Fed. On the other side, we have a man who turned the biggest city in American around. He cleaned up the crime, brought the city back in the red, performed magnificently on 9/11, and is the only guy in the debates to actually answer the questions. But S.C. voters picked Paul over Giuliani 2 to 1.

As I’d pointed out, Michigan, Iowa, and Nevada also voted for Ron Paul over Rudy Guiliani in those ratios. And now, after Ron Paul got 21.5% in the caucuses here, I’m wondering if Professor Manweller will have the same harsh words for the sophistication of Washington State Republicans.

Back to the original post:

There was another vote in the US Senate today. The New York Times once again reports that the Democratically controlled Senate “After more than a year of wrangling, the Senate handed the White House a major victory on Tuesday by voting to broaden the government’s spy powers…” Except this time, the Senate passed the bill with 68 votes. So….who should the folks over at the aptly named Horses Ass and Effin’ Unsound blame for this vote?

The cowards who voted for it. Who else? There are a number of possible reasons that a Democratic Senator would vote for it. They may worry that if there’s a terrorist attack, it will leave them vulnerable politically. They may be thinking that a Democrat will definitely be in the White House in 2009 and would like to have the spying powers as well. Hell, they may even believe that allowing unchecked spying is the right thing to do. Regardless of what they thought, the fact that the bill passed is not proof that the bill is the right thing to do, or that the bill is less ideological simply because it had both Democrats and Republicans voting for it. And the fact that a political science professor doesn’t understand that is too stunning for words.

After getting thoroughly beaten up over this point in the comments, Manweller’s only response - holy fucking shit, you can’t make this stuff up - was to post the link to his page on the RateMyProfessors website, as if the fact that 5 out of 6 students from the past 3 years rated him favorably is proof that he’s a genius and we’re all uninformed rubes. Awesome.

In the end, it comes back to the same point I made in the Seattle Times: only the impotent and naive have the luxury of self-righteousness.

I gave a critique of that article over at HorsesAss.

It is easy for the folks at the Daily Kos, MoveOn.org, and other lefty commentators to criticize.

And thank you for making it so easy.

It is a complete different task to actually govern. Rhetoric is one thing. Responsibility is something different.

Yes, Mathew, and when you figure out that you’re confusing rhetoric with responsibility, you’ll stop being a complete laughingstock.

It is why Obama is a good candidate, but would never be a good president.

As the election draws nearer, hearing this from people who’ve supported President Bush will just get funnier and funnier.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 11:13 am and is filed under TheHim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.