PJ Miller more or less sums up my feelings in his opening sentence.
When I saw this story on TV tonight my immediate thought was; “This is why I no longer refer to myself as a conservative”. The term just doesn’t mean what it use to…
The rest of the post is well worth the read, too.
July 14, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Yep, beat up on liberals for portraying Bush as the devil or making jokes about the Bush daughters partying. You can find some pretty hateful things even at the Dailykos comments threads, but it’s hard to top that.
July 14, 2009 at 3:03 pm
I did give up on Kos, too. I tried following it, but the Trig-is-Bristol’s-baby stuff drove me away for good.
Still, most of it is individualized. “Ghetto trash” and the “monkey sounds” joke hearken back to “Amos ‘n’ Andy” humor.
August 20, 2009 at 9:33 am
My experience is that the quality of comments at similar-level liberal/progressive blogs is just as bad and just as bigoted. I don’t see it as a good reason to stop using an informative term to describe your political position just because there are morons with similar policy preferences who have immoral justifications for some of them.
There are three levels of internet commenting in my experience. There are the kind of comments you find on YouTube and on MSM stories that allow comments. Expect to find no decent content, lots of uninformed and unsupportable opinions, and outright bigoted comments about those on the other side, sometimes tide to race, culture, education level, or whatever. Then there are the major high-comment political blogs, where you have some comments like this interspersed with some relevant facts and arguments, often not great arguments but arguments nonetheless. This is the level of talk radio as well. Then there are the sites where people listen to the other side and may have strong views but do their best not to misrepresent the other side and try to take into account all the facts and evidence in framing their arguments. I try to maintain that sort of conversation, as do you.
If all the people who think at this level were to stop accepting informative labels for their views because the people at the lower levels are jerks, it would be a bad thing for society, because it’s the people at the highest level who ought to be setting the tone and providing the best arguments and most careful presentation of the views. If we can no longer be seen to be supporting conservative perspectives (or progressive or liberal for the other end), then I think that has bad consequences for the possibility of debate between the two sides.