Saturday, July 16, 2005
When the Right Is Right
John Cole of Balloon Juice offers remarkably commonsensical thoughts on how his peers at the right end of the spectrum would react if the Karl Rove shoe were on the other foot:
What's important to bear in mind, whether you're one of Us (whoever that is) or one of Them (ditto): No good to the social order can come from thoughtless adherence to the party line. As I've said before here, we all tend to either liberalism or conservatism; people who conform unrelentingly to one or the other aren't, by any stretch of the term, normal. When an issue comes up, whatever it is, if all you can do is repeat what you've heard or read elsewhere -- especially if "elsewhere" means "from all those sources who think like I do" -- you're not really a citizen in a small-d democratic society. You might as well be a microchip.
What if this had happened during the Clinton administration? What if it was Paul Begala or someone like him who was accused of outing a CIA agent? What would the right be doing?The comments sort of wander off into the middle distance (especially in an argumentative digression into the sins of Sandy Berger vs. those of Karl Rove), but the post itself is bang-on.
If your answer is anything other than what the left is doing, only louder, you are fooling yourselves. Rush Limbaugh would have talked about nothing else for 3 years, and unlike 2004, this WOULD have been the chief issue of the election. G. Gordon Liddy would be having fund-raisers to erect a hangman's scaffold on the White House lawn. The legal 'analysts' at NRO would be claiming that the statutes currently being applied to the case are inadequate, and that we should be looking at charges of treason and the application of the Federal death penalty.
[...]
And the bloggers on the hard right would be with them every step of the way, and would stop printing 'I Love Gitmo' stickers long enough to print some 'Shoot Leakers On Sight' paraphernalia. If anything, they would be demanding that the above actions are not enough, and this would be used as definitive proof that the Democratic party is at its roots evil and should be made outlawed, just like Nazis are in Germany.
What's important to bear in mind, whether you're one of Us (whoever that is) or one of Them (ditto): No good to the social order can come from thoughtless adherence to the party line. As I've said before here, we all tend to either liberalism or conservatism; people who conform unrelentingly to one or the other aren't, by any stretch of the term, normal. When an issue comes up, whatever it is, if all you can do is repeat what you've heard or read elsewhere -- especially if "elsewhere" means "from all those sources who think like I do" -- you're not really a citizen in a small-d democratic society. You might as well be a microchip.
