Back Towards The Locus

A long and tedious one, folks, so grab a cup of coffee and don’t come back.

Glowering over the world once more, Nick Cohen castigates the Democrats that criticise Palin:

“For once, the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at university are a help to the rest of us.”

Yes, it’s those liberal elitists again. What a contrast with “our” Nick, who was slumming it in a PPE course in Oxford. Note, again, the catch-all “postmodern” ad hominem, and the suggestion that Democrats deal in abstracting theorising while Nick engages with concrete realities.

“As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was ‘the other’ – the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against.”

It’s shocking, isn’t it? Liberals opposing Conservatives. You’d find it tricky to create a fictional scenario around it. Incidentally, a Christian with a son in Iraq? Where have I heard that one before…

“But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk…”

I’ll hand this one over to Jon Stewart…

“Palin was meant to be pretending that a handicapped baby girl was her child when really it was her wanton teenage daughter’s.”

That’s what comes from limiting one’s research to a diarist at the Daily Kos. If I was to pluck an anonymous commentator from the ‘net to represent popular opinion, I could argue that Republicans consider Obama to be the Antichrist. Or that they’re lizards.

“When that turned out to be a lie, the media replaced it with prurient coverage of her teenage daughter, who was, after all, pregnant, even though her mother was not going to do a quick handover at the maternity ward and act as if the child was hers.”

Yes, some commentators used Bristol Palin’s pregnancy to highlight the futility of the ridiculous Palin-promoted abstinence-only education. It wasn’t very clever and is the only example of “hatred” that Nick can find.

“Hatred is the most powerful emotion in politics. At present, American liberals are not fighting for an Obama presidency. I suspect that most have only the haziest idea of what it would mean for their country. The slogans that move their hearts and stir their souls are directed against their enemies: Bush, the neo-cons, the religious right.”

So, Nick asserts that something is true, admits that it is only his suspicion and then asserts that it is, after all, true.

“In this, American liberals are no different from the politically committed the world over…Hate can sell better than hope.”

Nick, you ninnyhammer, it’s the break from Bush that inspires hope. Democrats hope that that’s what Obama’s policies will “mean for the country” and that’s why he talks about change. You know – withdrawal from Iraq, closing Guantanamo Bay. That kind of stuff.

“As it was, her family appeared on stage without a goitre or a club foot between them.”

Yes, it’s terrible that people scrutinise the family that she…brings out onto the stage.

“Palin made a fighting speech that appealed over the heads of reporters to the public we claim to represent. ‘I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion,’ she said as she deftly detached journalists from their readers and viewers. ‘I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.’”

That’s all that it takes to impress you, Nick? What did you expect her to say, “I accept this for the money and the perks”?

“English leftists made the same mistake of allowing their hatred to override their judgment after the Iraq war. If they had confined themselves to charging Tony Blair with failing to find the weapons of mass destruction he promised were in Iraq, and sending British troops into a quagmire, they might have forced him out. They were so consumed by loathing, however, they insisted that he had lied, which he clearly had not.”

Of course, the very promise was dishonest. In his foreword to the Iraq dossier, Blair claimed that it had been established “beyond doubt” that Saddam had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons and was attempting to develop nuclear weapons. The following events proved it to be self-evident that there was doubt, and it was also an exaggeration of the claims in the report.

Jonathan Powell had warned that the dossier “does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam“, and yet Blair wrote that “I have no doubt that the threat is serious and current, that he has made progress on WMD and that he has to be stopped“. Other lies have been identified by Chris Ames at his Iraq Dossier website.

Assertions, bluster and fact-free rhetoric: Nick has gone down through the barrel and into the ground.