[pullquote]posts incessantly about politics in Turkey[/pullquote]The problem is a particular editor, and much to her potential horror, I have sprinkled this post “liberally” with some salty vocabulary. She’s an editor, and for all I know, she bankrolled the whole Ricochet.com operation. So maybe it’s hers and the rest of us can just go fuck ourselves. For some reason, she posts incessantly about politics in Turkey where she lives, and wants us all to know that they are not a threat; just misunderstood… by… well us, apparently. I live in Japan, but I don’t think Ricochet.com is where to bang on about it. Now she seems like a nice enough person, but the fight in which we are currently engaged is a battle against nice-enough people whose notion of appropriate control in pursuit of the common good is a bit too much. Think of the nice lunch lady in Tennessee who removed the home-cooked lunch from the four-year-old’s hands and brought over some federally-approved cafeteria chicken chunks instead.
[pullquote]a brilliant opportunity to “Breitbart” them. Instead, we barely hold our ground[/pullquote]So when the Rush Limbaugh “slut” kerfuffle erupted and the lefty media went ape-shit to finish him off over it (ha-ha, how’s that working out for ya?), we had a brilliant opportunity to “Breitbart” them. Instead, we have barely managed to hold our ground on the right, while the left feels vindicated! How did we fumble this so badly?
Rush apologized for the term, which is fine by me. He said he should not have sunk to the level of the left; great. She’s still trying to convince us that students at Georgetown Law are some oppressed sort of Dickensian underclass for want of $1,000 worth of condoms and birth-control pills. We have words for people like that, and Limbaugh used one of them.
So when Rob Long, one of the resident RINOs at Ricochet (just ask him, he’ll tell you) commented about it, this editor took him to task, saying:
Rob, I don’t care if everyone else is talking about it. We simply do not use that word on Ricochet. We propose to pretend this national disgrace isn’t happening.
[pullquote]some on the right want to pretend[/pullquote]A response like that is exactly what the left wants from us, and exactly what they need in order to win. We should have taken this thing flaming to their doorstep. Instead, there are some on the right who want to hurry by and pretend that something didn’t just happen. You know, the way the RINOs always want to let the left off the hook in the interest of some hare-brained vision of cooperation, or moderation, or what-have-you. They win, we lose again, and we’re too prim to even mention it. No, instead, we propose to pretend this national disgrace never happened. No matter what you feel the “national disgrace” actually is, pretending it never happened is the wrong answer. And draining the conservative effort to Breitbart the bastards who are destroying our country WITH OUR HELP is suitable for the ends of the left, not the right.
I quit Ricochet and wrote a brief and curt but not rude (one proposes to believe) post explaining why.
Mollie Hemingway, another editor, now makes this point on the occasion of Bill Maher’s belated and unconvincing stance of supporting Rush’s right to speak freely:
Do we recognize that Maher’s op-ed wouldn’t have appeared in the Cowtown Quarterly, much less the New York Times, if not for the effort by some on the right to enforce a single standard? In other words, is that push for a single standard working to destroy the faux outrage better than the typical conservative response of taking it but not dishing it out?
Right-ho. Ricochet hosts some awesome talent; heavyweight intellectuals and public servants, entertaining and amiable household names, and is usually a great place to hear an enlightening and thoroughly enjoyable conversation via podcast. I highly recommend it.
[pullquote]we are rounding up a posse, and we get detained by our own thought police[/pullquote]So why don’t I simply get comfortable with the fact that some editors lean one way, and others lean another? Because Hemingway is not directing people to pretend the whole thing never happened, or worse yet, to acknowledge that something unmentionable took place, and call it a national disgrace, then resume pretending. At that rate, we’ll be serving drinks to rich communists in exchange for wage coupons. Hemingway’s position does not threaten any user with expulsion for disagreeing with it, while the problematic onedoes–explicitly. This is an issue we can win on, but a single editor there is riding herd on even the paid contributors in their efforts to address it. It is frustrating that when we are in the midst of rounding up a posse to go win an argument, we get detained by our own word and thought police. This is a disease not of the right, but of the left, and it is now present all over on the right. Those among us who are sufficiently indoctrinated in the leftist world of academic titles and publishing parties are Alinskying the rest of us. Why should the left fight us? All they have to do is cause a stir and watch us fight ourselves.
Meanwhile, our former Republic is transformed day by day into a regulatory state. The word “bureaucracy” is far more chilling than its common usage suggests. In Orwell’s 1984, the primary problem was not socialism or any of the particular sins or atrocities–it was that the organization of government itself was in charge, heedless of the direction of any man, any group, or any ideology. It was a government composed entirely of ministries, bureaus, departments. Big Brother was not actually a dictator, and might not even have existed. Ever. And that was why no change was possible–there was nowhere to attack the government because truly, nobody was in charge.
Ricochet.com claims to be a center-right outlet, but the website is firmly in the grip of something which is not so center-right. I don’t know what the breakdown of the readership or even commentariat is, but there is only a handful of starchy conservatives over there from the comments I see. There is, however, an abundant supply of those who claim to be conservative but who are completely unfamiliar with the cultural patterns of conservatism. These are people whose most common speech pattern is “Yes, but…”. Well, either agree or disagree.
I understand the desire for civility and a nice place where you might bring a date, or your grandmother, or something. But today’s politics is not that place, which is the whole fucking point. We are losing the country, and should be mad as Hell. Conservatives are basically on a war footing. We are not crapping on cop cars or shooting each other as our dope runs out, because we are conservatives, not because we are unserious. We are quite serious about what is at stake, and what we will not allow to stand in our way.
Rush Limbaugh is right, and I am sick and God-Damned tired of so-called conservatives who cannot muster the stones to stand apart from their collectivist overlords in the language police. Fuck Sandra Fluke and fuck Nancy Pelosi too for this nasty stunt. Sing it, Cee-Lo. I won’t pretend to be offended that Cee-Lo Green sang his smash hit “Fuck You” at an Obama event. I would too. With feeling.
If America is indeed a “center-right” country, then Ricochet as a “center-right” group of people must be the center, and so (say) half the people there are actually on the left, and it shows. One of them is an editor; the one who keeps telling people that harsh words are unwelcome, and that Turkey is not a problem–they’re just misunderstood by Americans. Who the Hell cares about Turkey, especially on a website which purports to be “center right” while our country is being flushed down the shitter by gleeful sprinting Marxists? Not conservatives. Not now.
As I said at Ricochet (several times) before I left: Please keep in mind the next time some flickering violet overly-sophisticated word warden gets indignant at being compared to pedigreed democrats: you all look the same to us.
So one editor is what’s wrong over there. Not personally–I do not know her. But in discourse. She’s the one the rest of the editors tip-toe around, not wanting to put her out by taking a stand on an issue that she has declared off-limits. Well, she’s getting rolled back on this one, and I hope she leaves. She’s a nice enough person, I believe. But these are not nice times in politics, and Ricochet.com should be less constrained, or it is simply a way to discharge the political tension without the risk of accomplishing anything. Nice and docile–just the way our media and government betters want us.
