Glenn Reynolds links to a post ‘discussing’ why intellectuals like defeat, another in the never-ending series of smears in which it is asserted that Democrats simply wish to lose.
Glenn Reynolds, the other day:
Is this a “detached and academic” perspective? Well, I am an academic, after all, and I’d probably be detached about the end of the world, which this isn’t. Maybe I “lack fire,” but I think it’s a realistic perspective, borne of experience. It’s okay to feel bad for a while. Maybe it’s even therapeutic. But ultimately, things happen because people want to make them happen, and work to make it so.
My question for you readers- are we to assume that Glenn is telling us he wants America to lose and he loves defeat? Or is he merely demonstrating, by example, that an ‘academic’ and an ‘intellectual’ are two different things.
Discuss.
(And yes, I am so very sick and tired of the right-wing blogosphere smearing everyone they disagree with as defeatist.)
Zifnab
Don’t die on me Tinker-Iraq.
America needs to clap harder, damnit!
Pb
Does Bill Kristol like defeat too? How about Josh Manchester? Or Wolfgang Schivelbusch (himself the author of “Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939”)?
The Other Steve
That’s interesting…
Considering it was the “Intellectuals” who got us into Iraq.
Punchy
Then why post daily thread #4 (5?) on something like this when you could start a Steelers/WV thread, or just a sports thread in general? Been quite a while since we debated why the BCS sucks…
Shorter–why Glennnnnn and not Worthlessberger?
The Other Steve
To further clarify my point. If you read Reynolds, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al they also lament about how stupid we all are for not understanding their arguments.
Pb
We may be stupid, but at least we don’t love defeat! :)
Adam
Strikes me as nothing more than simple self-reassurance in the face of a serious defeat. There’s been a lot of that on the left side of aisle for 6 years now.
Glenn’s right that this is the way to deal with getting your ass handed to you, but I’m skeptical that (a) he’ll be able to put it into practice in a positive way or (b) that the rest of his side will be anywhere in the neighborhood of sanguine and practical about getting facecrushed in the election.
Pooh
Reynolds = intellectual?
He’s just being teh funny…
Adam
Actually, I can take it a little further than that — the whole trick of the “Democrats like to lose” notion is the not-so-subtle suggestion that the Dems’ entire raison d’etre is to be a spoiler party.
It’s an implicit assumption that the GOP = America, and that the Democratic party merely expands and contracts in response to how well America is falling in line with Republican priorities. Intellectuals like to lose because they’re somehow ahead of a curve, which by definition is a temporary state of affairs.
ThymeZone
If staying on track for Victory In Iraq is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Teak111
What’s that saying about believing your own propaganda? Think Glen and his kind are in the rut from drinking too much koolade and now that the winds have changed, they can’t shift gears and are in real danger of becoming irrelatvant. When times change you either adapt or die. Rush, OTOH, is a survivor. Wed after the election, he’s already detached his wagon from the GOP and hitched to the idea of being a real “conservative” which is now defined as something different then the GOP. Same with others from the niose machine. Adapt or die (in this case, become irrelevent). Oh, Glenn and others with will hang on through 08 smearing dems in all the old ways, until the message becomes crystal clear, but by then the rest of us (the adpters) will say, Glenn who?
Pb
Adam,
Whoa, that’s way too smart. You must love defeat!
But seriously, I think you’ve got something there. However, Republicans don’t seem to like it when people take that claim at face value, and then go on to ridicule them. For instance, I just saw Borat yesterday, and I noticed that some conservatives were complaining about how he didn’t make fun of liberals enough! Well, suck it up, guys, he went through America’s heartland, and reached out to the real people out there!
Mike S
Why anyone takes instahack seriously is beyond me. His posts are 99% link with something like “indeed” to show his readers what a deep thinker he is.
SeesThroughIt
Adam clearly majored in Capitulating to Terrorists (and minored in Hating America–though really, doesn’t every college student?). What an Osama-loving Defeat-o-crat.
Seriously, though, I think Adam is definitely on to something. It certainly falls in line with a lot of the wingnut attitudes one runs across, what with the conflation of the GOP with patriotism, America, and American patriotism, setting up anybody non-GOP as Osama’s personal Farnsworth Bentley.
Sherard
All I can say is WTF ?! I have no clue how you string together those posts and conclude that the right wants nothing more than to smear Democrats for wanting to lose.
And “Hobgoblin of Small Minds” ???
You are SO off the deep end.
Pb
Sherard,
Do tell. How would you interpret it?
Perry Como
Does it involve a fruit filling with whipped cream on top?
ThymeZone
You are so full of spoofy shit.
The right wants to smear Democrats? That’s about as controversial as the idea that car exhaust causes smog.
The deep end? Yeah, we’ll be looking to you to lecture us on what is and is not “off the deep end.”
You might try some posts about making Christmas wreaths from yard clippings or something if you want to be taken seriously.
Ryan S.
How dare those people actually try to apply rational thought to predict outcomes. When will they realize that “reality” is a loseing strategy.
I think this Administration should declare a global War Against Reality, WAR for short.
Quick I better coprght that I want 1c everytime its uttered.(/spoof)
jcricket
It’s all part of a “demonize the enemy” strategy. This allows Republicans to eventually get to the point where only they get to define who “Americans” are. There’s a good reason that all vicious political parties use it, especially in America. There’s a good reason Orwell made this “hatred of the other” such a central part of his 1984 story about totalitarianism.
In America many seem to have internalized the idea that there are some people more “authentically American” and “moral” than others (this is true even for most Democrats). This usually applies to people that live in the “heartland” and “work with their hands”. What these “Real Americans” ™ say is always a “better” view on what “Americans” believe, even if you have 2 or 3x the number of people across America believing the opposite. Couple this with the long trend of anti-intellectualism in America [1] and it’s a short hop to the idea that there are people who are less authentically American, and thus their ideas should be shunned. Intellectuals, gays & atheists are easy targets (small minorities, perceived to be egotistical about themselves). Republicans are just pushing the idea out further, to encompass all Democrats.
Here’s similar rhetoric about gays, who are not Americans and don’t live in America
There’s a reason Hindrocket and Instapundit use shoddy logic and syllogisms in their writing – it allows them to use faulty premises to support faulty conclusions that damn all Democrats and anyone who supports them. Or, it allows them to use tautological reasoning to explain their way out of any electoral loss – Before the election Democrats were too liberal to get elected, but since they were elected, they’re obviously conservative, so it’s not an anti-Republican wave.
At this point the Republican talking points are nearly all based on these faulty assumptions, but they keep insisting on building more stories on this house of cards. Push a little, and it all falls down.
tufdaawg
Glenn is an academic? Since when? what college or school does he work at? and who would hire such a rabid dog?
and please give my blog some love: http://tufdaawg.wordpress.com.
TenguPhule
Shorter Sherard: I need to learn how to use a dictionary.
Adam
Clearly I’m more transparent than I’d hoped.
If I may, I’m not sure what I said came across right. I’m not making the Lakoff argument about framing discourse. I think that “conflation” implies co-opting. I think that’s distinct from an equivalence: assuming that any difference between the Party and Reality is merely a temporary aberration. That’s a critical difference.
That’s how Glenn Reynolds can say liberals intellectuals like losing, and it makes perfect sense to him — because their purpose is not to be advocates but contrarians, the dunces who gets endlessly smacked down by Socrates. (Particularly ironic considering the way Glenn prefers to argue. Indeed.) The application to John Hinderaker’s craziness that John discussed a few posts ago should also be apparent, I think.
Also, there’s much more to be said about how Democrats take the view that they’re trying to persuade rather than return to the natural, proper way of things, but that’s a different topic.
The Other Steve
Did he make fun of liberals at all?
I mean, the meeting with the feminists. Ok, they came off as a bit angry, but he was telling them that they have minds the size of squirrel.
Where as when he spoke to the rodeo manager, he agree with him completely and the guy went off explaining how he wants to implement the Nazi Final Solution in America.
Same with the Gay Pride Parade, he bonded with.
The hip hop gang in Atlanta, he bonded with.
If conservatives think he made fun of liberals anywhere in the movie… it’s a case of just not getting it.
jcricket
[1] Just look at GW Bush – who was born in the Northeast, comes from a rich family, went to upper echelon private schools, including Yale. And yet he runs as a “Ranch Owning Texan Entrepreneurial Businessman”. Why is it bad that he went to a great college? That he had a lot of money to start?
Salty Party Snax
If this “defeat lovin'” charge is true, then shouldn’t intellectuals just be adoring Georgie Bush right now? After all, he’s set America up with a double orgasm of losses in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Don’t know if anybody here has been following this, but apparently Chad Castagana (the domestic terrorist who sent bags of white powder to Pelosi, Letterman, Olbermann, etc) is a card-carrying member and active poster over at Free Republic.
Describes himself in the profile section as a lifelong conservative Republican and an Ann Coulter lover.
Zifnab
The pie helps. *passes pie*
Zifnab
$5 says if he gets more than marginal media attention and the media gets to choose between his facination with Grand Theft Auto and the Ann Coulter “Let’s all poison Supreme Court Justices We Don’t Like” tape he’s got playing on repeat in his room 24/7, it’s Rockstar Games that gets all the credit.
SeesThroughIt
It continues to astound and amuse me that there are still people who buy into this 100 percent. “He ain’t no pointy-headed liberal smartie, he’s just a regular ol’ down-home, brush-clearin’ ranchin’ man!”
Blood doesn’t get much bluer than Bush family blood.
Jay
Because then he cannot curl his upper lip at the Liberal Intellectual Elite Pointy-head Creatures from the far planet of the NorthEast, thus allowing him to dismiss any statement made by the LIE-PCs as so much high falutin’, lock jawed gibber jabber. Facts? Figures? Who needs that when you can follow your gut?
I never got that one. Or rather, I never got why The Base bought that one. They knew where he went to college, knew about his up bringing but the ditto heads yummed up the good ol’ boy routine. Maybe they thought he was some sort of bizarro George Bush from an alternate universe. Where he was born a poor black child…
And yes, it pissed me off no end that Gore twanged his way through the 2000 elections. Talk about dueling banjos.
RSA
What would you do if you were a blue-blooded Bush and realized you weren’t the sharpest pencil in the box? Pretend you’re a Texan. </offense to Texans>
Pb
I’ll tell you why I think Bush does it, anyhow. It’s because of his first race in politics, the one he lost:
The Other Steve
Don’t mess with Texas!
It’s not nice to pick on retards.
Bombadil
Pssh. If the Alamo had a back door, they’d all still be Mexican.
Davebo
If the Alamo had a back door, they’d all still be Mexican.
You guys are just cold! Must be the fact that the lowly Texans have the same record as the Superbowl winning Steelers!
jcricket
He’s certainly succeeded on that one. No one is more Christianist or good-ol-boy than our Preznit. Victory!
Isn’t it great that we seem to enjoy electing people who do as much as possible to hide the fact that they were college educated in one of the best schools in the world?
grumpy realist
What is this thing that America has about thinking Stupid Is Good?
Sheesh, at least during the 1950s we had this faint idea that letting ourselves slip behind those Rooskies in science and technology maybe wasn’t such a bright idea. Remember Sputnik?
Now, from what I can tell, the next time someone slaps us in the face with a superior technology base, we’re going to try to pray our way out of it.
Americans are idiots.
Andrew
We need put retards back in cage. With the womens and homosexual. Waawawiiwah!
Otto Man
Why do you hate America, John?
p.lukasiak
Glenn Reynold’s new theme song….
chefrad
This is a classic version of what Nietzsche called ressentiment— a variety of intellectual envy. It is also related to what Gore Vidal discusses in a new work. Vidal notes how the far right now depicts any attempt to ameliorate the lot of the poor as little more than arrogance and condescension from the “liberal elite.”
Fellow feeling is an illusion, compassion an act of inverted aggression, public spirit akin to Marxism lite.
It must be sad indeed to live in such a bleak world, especially with the holidays coming on.
BARRASSO
Anyone notice that a Freeper was arrested for sending white powder to Keith Oblermna, surrprise surrprise surrprise.
DougJ
John, the fact that you’re even writing a post like this proves that you’re objectively pro-defeatist. If you wanted to win, you’d be out there killing terrorists, not writing anti-Glenn, anti-American, anti-freedom blog posts.
Salty Party Snax
Barrasso – Yeah, the dude’s name is Chad Castagana. Posted above a few notches.
Free Republic is a terrorist site. I hope Bush bombs them forward into the Stone Age.
Zifnab
Olbermann and about half the Democratic leadership.
Murdock’s New York Post ran an article claiming Olbermann pissed himself and cried like a girl over the incident. Olbermann ran a Special Comment calling Murdock a goon and a terrorist-wannabe. Murdock cried on O’Reily’s shoulder. O’Reily ate a baby. And the world turned on.
Mr Furious
Or the right-wing radiosphere…Limbaugh’s new meme is that the Democrats won with “hatred and anger.” Even even took it to the level of admitting he was wrong and had misjudged the electorate. “The Dems will never win because all they have is hatred and anger.” they won, and he is sticking with it. The moderates and independants must have been swayed and found hatred and anger appealing.
It would never occur to him that maybe they just found corruption and incompetence revolting.
Ryan S.
I wonder how long it will take before it becomes the base for a Law & Order episode.
chopper
they’ve gotten to the point where they write the episodes before the news happens.
Pooh
I feel a little guilty for it, but I’m pulling the trigger: POTD.
Zifnab
Have they written the Law & Order episode where a guy commits a crime after watching an episode of Law & Order? Because that would be recursively awesome.
Don
Claiming people love defeat comes out of the same playbook as tossing around the word “coward.” It makes the people saying it feel superior and lets them gloss over any unpleasant difficult emotion or complicated reasoning.
If they think of suicide/airplane bombers as misguided or devoted to a cause, however questionable, then they have to think about all those people out there who might be willing to go over the precipice to cause them harm. That’s hard for them to face when they might not ever have encountered a single idea or goal they were willing to make the slightest personal sacrifice for. Better to call them “cowards” than confront fiercely motivated people who have some reason they hate you. Simply calling them ‘reasons’ means that you have to deal with the fact that people have perceptions! It’s not good enough to just say their perceptions are flawed, you’ve got to completely deny there are any reasons, anywhere, good or bad. Nope: correct or coward – we don’t even have room for ‘wrong’ anymore.
Similarly, the defeat thing keeps them from confronting the idea that there are people with an ideology that they’re rather stick to and lose than abandon in order to keep power. Unlike, say, small government or personal liberties, which they themselves were willing to throw aside just so long as the horrible Them didn’t get power. Correct or ‘quitter.’
TenguPhule
Obviously Free Republic and its related sister sites need to be probed for More Terrorists…I hear Guantanamo has plenty of available openings for them.
After all, it’s not like they have rights anymore.
DougJ
Sure, a Freeper sent threatening letters filled with fake antrax letters to several Democrats, but the letters weren’t shrill. That’s the important thing.
Jay
And they can use an inter-tube to do the probing.
Now the countdown begins: How long before Rush claims FR is a liberal commie pinko blog run by gay illegal immigrants?
jcricket
Awesome DougJ. That’s funny. Yes, civility is the most important thing, unless it’s righteous anger at the Democrats/Terrorists (which is redundant, but I thought I’d write them both for emphasis).
capelza
Well..I have been wildly entertained this afternoon by the faux anthrax mailer dude and all the reaction across the web.
One poster call the mailer a “prankster”, but what I’m getting more out of this is that most ever thread posted about it on FR gets yanked. I also discovered a site of right wingers with brains (and that pretty much got them banned from FR). Even the rightwingers realise that FR is full of crazy, and dangerous people.
jcricket
No way. This guy was a Democratic plant sent to discredit Republicans, much like that fake Terri Schiavo memo.
Zifnab
I’m sure he was one of the guys calling the Foley e-mails merely overly friendly and excessively pleasant.
Barry
I followed Glenn’s link, and then to the blog of the TCS propagandist. Gaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwd, the guy’s a dumbf
*ck. And he’s claiming to be a veteran.
Everytime that I see some veteran acting stupid over Iraq, not understanding that the enemy doesn’t give you a do-over just ’cause you’re the good guy, I feel a loss of faith for the future of America.
DougJ
What this proves is that Democrats have no sense of humor? Why does the left hate laughter? Is it because they are atheists who reject this gift, the second greatest gift — after freedom — that the Lord gave to His People?
craigie
Sure, sending fake anthrax to people you disagree with is a well known fraternity hazing stunt. Every frat boy knows that. W ought to know that.
Hey, wait a minute…
Perry Como
People on the Freeper thread already beat you to that excuse.
jcricket
Once again proving that parody can never keep up with the GOP.
Krista
Ooo…on what thread? I have to go see this.
ThymeZone
In keeping with the Hobgoblin of Small Minds theme, may I suggest a daily feature called “The Craziest, Stupidest Damned Thing We Heard Today?”
Today I nominate the bowl-o-bunk just proferred to the Lou Dobbs Show by Duncan Hunter, who claims to be running for president.
I can’t really describe the load of crap that this guy delivered this evening, but you can hear it later on the rebroadcast or read it later when the transcript is up on their website.
Hunter tries to compare Iraq with Korea, or is it the Philippines? He claims that we are just in “Phase Two” of our mission there and that we just have to work through it. He suggests that talking about a 4-6 month troop redeployment is wrong because the time frame is “arbitrary.” See, if you talk about arbitrary proposals, the terrorists win. Or something.
Questioned by Dobbs about the apparent intrusion of a Chinese diesel-powered submarine into an American task force in the China Sea, Hunter suggests that the explanation for how such an old-tech sub could “run silent” and sneak up on American ships is “classified information.”
Classified, as in … you could read about it fifty years ago in stories about the same type of operations in World War II …. but those old books are now out of print, so therefore the stuff is secret now, I guess.
(Pretty heady stuff … the sub charges up batteries, shuts down the diesel engines, and runs on silent electric motors. Very 21st Century. Not really unlike the theory behind the Toyota Prius, but on a larger scale and for reasons other than fuel economy).
Anyway, this bozo gets air time on CNN and is running a campaign to be president of the United States. Has there been a nuttier package of crap out there today?
Salty Party Snax
In honor of Rudy Giuliani’s rumored run for the 2008
Republican nomination, and what could be a very popular YouTube video in 2008 …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IrE6FMpai8
Perry Como
This one.
jcricket
On this note, DougJ, do you ever worry you’ll be put out of a job by the GOP success at exceeding your parodies?
Dreggas
Yes we have no sense of humor, it’s why we also “hate god” because he is sitting up there, somewhere, laughing his ass off, and to add insult to injury he’s pointing to.
DougJ
I think I already have, to some extent.
CaseyL
Adam nails the GOP’s sense of entitlement.
The GOP was enraged when Clinton won in ’92 and ’96 because the White House “belongs to” the GOP.
The GOP consistently dismisses Democratic victories in which women and racial minorities played vital roles, on the grounds that women and racial minorities somehow don’t count as real Americans.
The same thing applies to any issues the Democratic Party tends to support and/or the GOP tends to be hostile to. How often has the GOP sneeringly referred to environmentalism, union and labor issues, feminism, and even family issues as “special interests,” as if those issues, and the people who care about those issues, were irrelevant or even illegitimate?
Yet you never hear the GOP refer to tobacco companies, or religious fundamentalists, or the giant energy and defense contract corporations they’ve let steal hundreds of billions of our tax dollars, as “special interests.” Because, to the GOP, those aren’t “special” interests; they’re the ONLY interests.
The Other Steve
Oh come on, you guys complaining about those anthrax letters.
Democrats do that all the time! It’s no big deal, just part of the game.
Tulkinghorn
More than anything else, these college Republicans are entitled to jobs in the various agencies of the executive branch, jobs in the staffs of the congressional committees, and jobs on K street. They think they own DC, and the rest of us should recognize that and stfu.
jake
Certainly they are welcome to that attitude, but only if they will flaunt it in S.E., D.C. down by the Anacostia at around 1.30 a.m. The river has had worse things than a truck load of self-centered snots dropped in it…
I think.
Punchy
I heard it wasn’t really white powder in the envelopes, but lots of crushed up Cheetos folded neatly in the letter. Mentioned “poisoning”, “bed-wetting”, and “Cartoon Network” before trailing off and ending with “Oweberman Suckx”
DougJ
What about all the fake anthrax letters Clinton sent? Isn’t that what Socksgate was about?
Perry Como
Three years ago the really sweet jobs were in Iraq. Great place to cut your teeth as a freshly graduated college Republican. I hear the new hawtness will be Iran pretty soon.
lightning_fast_draw
Reynolds isn’t capable of knowing how intellectuals think because he is a moron. His best ideas range between complaints, critisms, rejections and extremes of all three. Every idea he’s supported has come after some other wacko neocon has endorsed it.
I think he should write a book on how to make optimistic people depressed.
jcricket
No no no. Clinton and his staff took the letters a-n-t-h-r-a-x from the keyboards in the White House on their way out. It was a prank gone wrong. The Democrats just had no idea Republicans took keyboard terrorism so seriously.
Zombie Liar Strikes Again!
Sherard
Simple answer ? NO. Nice job taking his quote out of context and “smearing” Glenn in the process.
His quote – with context – is as follows (my additions bolded):
How you take that to mean he loves defeat and is smearing Democrats is WAY beyond me.
Sherard
Also, it’s useful to note that in Glenn’s link to the piece on why “Intellectuals love defeat”, what he highlights is advice to the Bush White House. Maybe you could address that advice instead of making up a context to suit your virulent case of BDS.
Bombadil
C’mon, Sherard — to (mis)quote Patrick Henry, “Give us substance, or give us pie!”
Zifnab
Maybe he should start winning some elections before he runs off giving advice.
Seriously? Who was the last grass-roots politician Reynolds backed that actually won an election?
One thing that completely divides DKos from the right wing noise machines is the Kossack desire to find diamonds in the rough and bring them into the public square. Maybe I’m just not there often enough, but I so rarely see Powerline or Instapundit or Red State plow any love into the local “true” conservative voice.
Red State can run 21 posts on a bad John Kerry joke, but not one to rally support for Katherine Harris or Mike Dewine or Doolittle or Shelly-Sekula Gibbs or any of the other endangered ‘Pubs. Laura Ingram wasn’t pumping up the base on Nov. 7th, lauding Rick Santorum or George Allen for their meritous service. She was telling her flunkies to go prank call voter fraud hotlines and pissing herself over baby-eating Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. Even in conservative blogs, there’s no real support for the acting administration or legislature, just a burning hatred and digust for the other side.
ThymeZone
Is that the “advice” you were talking about, Sherard?
If so, you have got to be fucking kidding me.
Since you are too stupid to figure it out yourself, let me explain what this “advice” really says: After four years, Mister President, you haven’t managed to convince anyone that this war of yours is going in the right direction, has accomplished its stated purpose of making America safer, or has any end in sight. The voters have sent you a clear message that they are done with this war and it’s time to move on. My advice to you is to ignore that message and just try harder to sell the same failed message that got you into the lamest duck presidency in history. Just try harder. That’s why you’re losing the war for the hearts and minds of Americans, you just aren’t trying hard enough. So call up the two Americans least likely in the world to be receptive to this idea, who just got a telegram from the voters telling them to listen to them, and convince them instead to listen to you. See, because the voters don’t get it. Americans are just too stupid to figure all this out, but you are smarter than they are, and should just press your case.
Great idea. Really, the sheer brilliance of it is what carries the day here. Where were you when we were discussing brain death and Permanent Vegetative States? You appear to have first-hand experience with the condition.
Please pass the pie.
The Other Steve
Maybe you should start winning elections before you start accusing us of “smearing” Glenn by taking quotes out of context.
ThymeZone
If you are really interested in advice to the White House, this from DKos seems to me to be more apt.
Discuss.
John Cole
Sherard, the entire point of Glenn linking to the TCS piece was to advance the meme that the liberals want and will accept defeat. And this is just rich:
Also, it’s useful to note that in Glenn’s link to the piece on why “Intellectuals love defeat”, what he highlights is advice to the Bush White House. Maybe you could address that advice instead of making up a context to suit your virulent case of BDS.
Here is the entire quote:
He doesn’t ‘highlight’ the advice to Bush- that is merely an aside.
You don’t get to just make shit up.