The Day Progressive Bloggers Exploded in a Partisan Frenzy (updated–again)

Bang!  Boom!  Shriek!   Owwwww!

Progressive Bloggers exhibits all the signs of a collective nervous breakdown as it spins into a frenzy of partisan rage over the long gun registry, with Liberal bloggers hammering Jack Layton and NDP bloggers returning fire.   Check it out, but keep your head down and don’t get caught in the crossfire!

Ironically, most of the people slugging it out on the progressive blogs sort of want the same thing — to keep the registry happening. Layton himself will vote against the bill that would kill it… he just won’t crack the whip and dictate that his caucus do the same (which to me sounds like the populist, grassroots, democratic thing to do, but I would think that, now wouldn’t I?).

Apart from how ridiculous this all looks to us non-partisan types, and how awesomely wonderful it probably looks to Steve-o, it’s even more interesting that this burst of partisan fury should explode the same day as the publication of the much-vaunted Second RCMP Report that was expected to Completely Vindicate the registry and definitively prove that it “Saves lives!”.  It was a report so explosive, so incendiary, so positive to the pro-registry case, that the officer responsible for it was sent away to Francais Camp, a move that seemed suspiciously designed to keep him from presenting it at a Coppapalooza shindig last week.

Today as partisan bloggers sparred viciously over the registry, the publication of the report that Liberals were screaming for last week was met with great…

…*crickets*?

Um err yeah, okay.  What?

UPDATE: Et tu, Heather?

Mallick’s column shows exactly what’s wrong with this whole debate — inasmuch as one could call two sides shrieking past each other a “debate” — the hysteria and perpetuation of myths. Consider these spittle-flecked little gems:

They will help turn Canada into an unregulated gun zone that is especially dangerous for women.

and:

The corpses of the Montreal Massacre are silent and the yapping gun-freedom brigade is so very loud.

This is intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.  While she doesn’t come right out and say that ditching the registry would mean the End of Gun Control! or that the registry would have saved the Polytechnique victims, both provable falsehoods, the inference is definitely there and the uninformed eat it up.

I have said many times that I am not opposed to gun control in principle, just this registry.  I think gun control is a valid discussion for Canadians to have.  But it often feels as though this debate is dominated by two extremes:  those who think their rights are being trampled if they can’t stroll through the mall with an AK47 strapped over their shoulder and claim the registry is totally useless, and those who insist that to oppose the registry is to spit on the graves of everyone ever killed by gunfire, and that the registry is so useful it does everything but give you a BJ.  Most of us dwell philosophically somewhere in between, and that is really where the discussion should take place, don’t you think?

UPDATE II (Sept.2):  In fairness, a few words from the other side of the spittle-flecked divide — CPC MP Garry Breitkreuz dons his tinfoil hat and without further ado, gets his freak on:

Why are the police chiefs so strident in their quest to keep the registry in place? They won’t admit it, but it appears they don’t want Canadians to own guns. To that end, they need a database that will help them locate and seize those firearms as soon as a licence or registration expires.

While there’s good reason to be concerned about police powers of search and seizure, Breitkreuz is engaging in some pretty frantic fearmongering there.  Of course police would probably prefer citizens to be unarmed — it would make their jobs a lot easier.  But so too would submitting our fingerprints, DNA and retinal scans, and opening our homes for weekly police inspections.  And maybe microchipping our bad selves — why not?  We do it to our dogs! Fortunately, I think we’ll start doing those things about the same time as police start confiscating guns due to lapsed registrations.  It’s unlikely such an offense would merit any worse retribution than the good old “strongly-worded letter”, perhaps including the always-useful “veiled threat”.  Oh and of course, the ever-popular “Fine”.

And anyone who wonders why this debate seems to generate so much more heat than light need look no further than those articles.

The definitive word on Beckapalooza

… didn’t come from Brother Beck the Mad Monk, it came from NAACP president Ben Jealous:

“They were told not to bring signs. Can you imagine Martin Luther King telling his marchers not to bring signs?”

Amen.

Now is the time when we juxtapose!

June 30th:

The cops are brutal, jackbooted, not-to-be-trusted thugs who abuse civil liberties, make up their own laws, conduct mass arrests and random searches without cause and generally stomp all over dissent and democracy.

August 26th:

Mr. Policeman is our Friend who has only our very best interests at heart, therefore everything he says must be True.

Go on vacation and look what happens:  you come back to discover that Mr. Policeman has undergone rehabilitative therapy of such intensive magnitude as to render him virtually unrecognizable!

Hearts, minds and rhetoric

Hey kids, remember this?:

And this?:

And this?:

Remember how we laughed and laughed and laughed at the feverish teabagger imaginations that produced such lurid spittle-flecked hyperbole? Obama, a nazi?  A Stalinist?  Hahaha!

Yes yes, and you might also remember that while we were leaning over the fence pointing and laughing at the lunatic fringe to our south, in our own back yard progressives just couldn’t seem to catch an electoral break.  Sigh.

Over 4 years and another election since Stephen the Corpulent first waddled to power, resplendent in the Blue Sweater-Vest of Authority and with a death grip on the Kitteh of Don’t Let This Happen to You, the Prime Minister’s chair still creaks and groans beneath his girth, and some days it seems like nothing short of a giant turbocharged Crowbar of Social Justice will pry him out.  Or maybe removing Harper hinges on winning back the hearts and minds of an electorate that’s clearly soured on the concept of left-leaning governance.

Question of the Day:  is this effort helped or hindered by frenzied left-wing rhetoric about Steve the Fascist-Nazi-Totalitarian, or would it be more productive to critique Harper for what he really is:  a sleazy and unprincipled right-wing authoritarian political opportunist who pushes the envelope of power as much as humanly possible within the limits of a democracy?  I’m going with Door #2.

Harper and his sycophantic little crew have earned titles like “bullies”, “toadies”, “douchebags” and “lying slime-ridden weasel shit on toast”.  There are certainly many rational and valid reasons for opposing the Harper government.  But the vapid idea that Harper is a “fascist” and a “totalitarian” — you know, like Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot — might be a hard sell outside the left-wing blogosphere.  The far left-wing blogosphere.  Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little creative license to add impact — I do it myself all the time, and it’s fun.  But to seriously suggest that Stephen Harper is the equivalent of Kim Jong-Il or Hitler is to invite… questions… about your mental stability.  It’s doubtful that such teabaggy-good rhetoric would help make the case against the Harper government anyway, and it might even reinforce Jane and Joe Average Canadian’s shaky support for them.

Which brings me to those average Canadians whose hearts and minds must be won to prevail over Harper, and another troubling trend I’ve noticed among some progressives.  Call it liberal elitism or a misplaced sense of superiority, it’s the attitude that the Canadian middle class is a great monolith of human dumbness that votes Conservative because they’re too stupid or brainwashed to know any better.  (Never mind that once upon a time this same monolith of human dumbness was a large part of the Liberal constituency, delivering them to power with 3 consecutive majorities.)  It’s not a widespread attitude, but it’s a dangerous one, not calculated to win anything but another decade in the political wilderness.

I’ve often wondered why progressive political parties have fallen so badly from favour with the Canadian middle- and working-class, and if it’s possible to win them back.  But I have a feeling that elitism and psycho-talk about fascists and totalitarians not only won’t win them back, it may in fact be counterproductive to the task of ousting Harper and his squalid cabal of criminally-insane, democracy-raping theo-nazis.  (*wink*)

UPDATE: Scathingly reality-based criticism:  Exhibit “A”.

Tyranny of the majority overturned in California

Few things exemplify the brainless white noise of howling human dumbness and tyranny of the majority better than “Proposition 8“, the 2008 ballot initiative that banned marriage equality – by majority rule, no less — in California.  Prop 8 is infamous for many reasons, among them putting a twisted, ironic shit-stain on an election day that was being heralded as a “transformative” civil rights landmark.

But not for everyone.

So there is much to celebrate in the wake of a scathing decision yesterday by California’s district court to overturn the vicious “Prop 8″, and return gays and lesbians to the fold of the full complement of rights under the law that every other Californian enjoys. It was a crushing and well-deserved defeat for those born-again pinheads and punishment freaks who would give the state the authority to legislate “morality”.  (It’s only slightly ironic that the decision came down on the Transformative President’s birthday.)

And the opinion written by District Judge Vaughn Walker (Maddowblog has a .pdf, well worth the read), while careful and well-researched to a fault, was indeed scathing as legal opinions go, stopping just short of ridicule at times (and that in itself is an accomplishment, given the unrelenting ridiculousness of Prop 8 proponents).  It’s indicative of Prop 8′s utter inane absurdity that its proponents’ arguments fell apart like wet 1-ply toilet paper under legal scrutiny, “legal scrutiny” being that which examines and argues only The Facts.  Stripped of its imaginary monsters and fear-mongering and bigotry and religious delusions, there was little to support Prop 8.

But you already knew that.

An important aspect of the overturning of Prop 8 is that it reinforces the truism that rights are not something that can or should ever be put to a vote. Rights are innate, intrinsic to humanity, and in some lucky parts of the world, protected by the state against just the kind of tyranny of the majority that gave California Prop 8. It’s ludicrous to imagine that we can “vote” on who has rights and who doesn’t — and no decent person should even want to.

Prop 8 was a public opinion, but that is all it was — an opinion — and public opinion, even majority public opinion, even when the majority is vast (which in the case of Prop 8 it wasn’t) is completely irrelevant to individual rights.  Some of us have always known this, but for others there’s apparently a learning curve.

*****************************

On that happy note, let’s congratulate blogging buddy Mark and his beloved on their marriage this week.  See?  No earthquakes, no storms, no plagues of locusts.  (I was hoping it might set off the Rapture, but no luck there either.)  Just another joyful couple looking forward to a long and happy life together.  (Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t that sound kind of, you know, traditional?)  Cheers, guys!

UPDATE: You could set your freaking watch by these half-baked halfwits.  Right on schedule, the shrieks of “judicial activism!!!” began reverberating through the moronosphere as word spread that Judge Vaughn Walker has a private life, and in that private life, he is gay. (How this affects his ability to interpret the Constitution is anyone’s guess, but anyway…)

Unfortunately, he’s also a registered Republican, nominated first by Reagan then again by Bush the Elder, a nomination which was opposed by liberal Dems and gay rights groups.  But don’t take my word for it, listen to the conservative libertarian Cato Institute:

In other words, this “liberal San Francisco judge” was recommended by Ed Meese, appointed by Ronald Reagan, and opposed by Alan Cranston, Nancy Pelosi, Edward Kennedy, and the leading gay activist groups. It’s a good thing for advocates of marriage equality that those forces were only able to block Walker twice.

Aw, snap!

UPDATE II: Social Conservative idiocy was showcased on Hardball last night with the appearance of nutcase Wendy “Concerned Women of America” Wright, who artlessly sleazed out of answering any of Matthews’ direct questions about why she actually opposes gay marriage:

If ever there was someone who needed to be smacked across the side of the head with a phone book, pushed down a flight of stairs and set on fire, it’s that brainless twat.