Say Anything Blog

Why, oh why, do they hate Dick Cheney so?

The left, that is, not the Taliban.

It can't be because he was a draft dodger, because the left has nothing at all against draft dodgers - even ones who start illegal, preemptive unilateral wars (i.e., Bill Clinton).

It can't be because he swears a lot. After all, who swears more than leftists? Or Hillary Clinton for that matter?

It can't be because he got a DWI. For all the leftists who think that is a bad, bad thing, I have one word: Chappaquiddick.

And for those who think his relationship with Halliburton is such a terrible thing, I have news for you - contrary to what you read at the Huffington Post, Halliburton is not, in fact, the black hole singularity of all evil in the universe.

It can't be because he actually likes JOOS and cares about Israel. Hell, I bet some of you leftists out there know some jews yourself! You might even be one!

I feel like I have said it a million times - the left blogosphere is far nastier, puerile and stoopid than anything found on the right. Isn't this exactly what the Amanda Marcotte deal taught us? Oh, but the collective personalities that are Glenn Greenwald warns us against 'cherrypicking' hateful comments to somehow prove that leftists are inordinately vile (and sorry, Glenn, if I can't squeeze out a tear if any Iranian nuclear scientists meet an untimely end). Talk about low hanging fruit. You can't surf through the leftist blogosphere without being assaulted by f-bombs, infantile political 'reasoning' and constant, unrelenting demonization of all things Republican. So naturally, all of their spite aimed at Dick Cheney is vastly overblown and way out of proportion to any faults that guy actually has.

Why all the leftist hate?

Glad you asked! Apparently, when there is a chicken in every pot, there is peace in the land, and a full gas tank in the hybrid, there remains this unfulfilled longing to have an enemy, some kind of enemy, to rail against. Stanley Kurtz, in reviewing Peter Wood’s new book, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now tells us that

"Americans must now imagine and oppose oppressive authorities or hateful enemies, even where none exist. The newly unbounded American self, says Wood, is a ghostlike figure, perpetually in search of “something solid against which it can prove its own existence.” New Anger, Wood concludes, “is the desperately intense effort of these ghosts to feel real.”

Not everyone agrees with Wood's analysis, and in fact Jamie Malanowski complains that, no, anger is good!

When a man who ran as a moderate conservative governs from the far right [heh, if only! - ed.] after winning an election he has arguably lost, when he lies about the reasons for launching a war and then criminally bungles the management of that war in such a way that it will redound to the country’s disadvantage for at least a generation, I think folks are entitled to be miffed. I also think that after a man takes an oath to faithfully execute the laws of the country, and then takes another oath to always tell the truth, and then tells lies, people are entitled to get a little hot under the collar. Moreover, when one of the corporately underwritten political parties who run this country gets us into a quagmire of a war, and the other corporately underwritten political parties can’t get us out, I think all of us are entitled to be righteously, Old Testament Yahwehly, smite-them-with-a-thunderboltly pissed off. But maybe that’s just me.

Yeah, actually, it is just you Jamie - because there is not one scintilla of truth in anything you have written there. Actually, I suspect Jamie secretly supports Wood, and has graciously written an article to illustrate Wood's point about needing to invent enemies.

Update: Well ain't this rich. The 'cherrypicked' comments are falling from the tree so fast and furiously that Arianna decided to do a little ethical cleansing on scores of the egregious comments to salvage some semblence of nascent decency over at HuffPo. Too late for that, I think.

Crossposted from WILLisms.com