people who won't clean their own house

Scott Lemieux:

It is true that I think that, in some cases, seeing things in Paul that aren’t there reflects the same kind of contrarianism that compels writers prominent enough to write for Salon to farcically assert that Romney might be more liberal than Obama or that Romney’s judicial appointments might be similar to Dwight Eisenhower’s. There is a certain segment of the nominal hard left that is far more charitable to conservative Republicans than to moderately liberal Democrats, and this segment is the almost exclusive province of the privileged. But there are certainly other reasons for what I consider excessive optimism about the Paul filibuster, and I hope the optimists are right about it!

So first things first, again, you've got this bizarre discussion of the privilege of white dudes by a blog that is chock a block with white dudes. I really just think that these guys have been complaining about other people's lack of diversity in political arguments for so long that they have lost any sense of self-awareness or irony about it all. It also suggests, again, that these are people for whom people of color and women are a political tool, a prop of temporary necessity to be used as a bludgeon as they work tirelessly to exclude and marginalize left-wing political commentary. In any case, I would suggest that a bunch of straight white dudes not tell Glenn Greenwald that he is privileged, considering that he's a gay man who is forced to live abroad thanks to a hideously discriminatory set of laws that prevent him from residing in the United States with the person he loves. But for them to get to that perspective, they'd actually have to engage in self-implicature, which simply does not exist at Lawyers Guns and An Unhealthy Infatuation with Glenn Greenwald.

As for the charge that meanie lefties are mean against the centrist neckbeards of the world, well, there's this.


Were this opinion voiced by a Republican in 2004, even in that context of daily insanity, this would be taken as country-destroying extremism. Given that it violates not only every notion of personal freedom, the basic ideals of democracy, and several millenia of civilization, I think it's fair to call it a more extreme utterance than Glenn Greenwald pointing out that, contra Erik Loomis, it's not true that "only a privileged white male" could refuse to vote for Obama out of concern for civil liberties.

Lemieux here, as is the custom of Lawyers Guns Dungeons and Dragons, claims a commitment to civil liberties he's done absolutely nothing to earn. If he actually cared about civil liberties, he'd surely have been posting about this kind of Democrat insanity, which I assure you is now perfectly common. Where are those posts? Where are LGM bloggers freaking out about this utter rejection of the very idea of military constraint and international law? Well, again: this is a guy from their team, not from the left-wing that they hate so completely, so it's pure silence. Crickets. If there's no angle with which to beat up Greenwald or punch a hippie, they just aren't interested. So I say again: if you're so totally unwilling to make a commitment to civil liberties and the rule of law the primary subject of your work, rather than as a brief aside you employ as a defensive feint, stop claiming the virtue of giving a shit about civil liberties, or international law, or Muslim life. You've got no right to such a claim until you actually fight for those things.