reinventing the spiel

Erik Kain

Erik writes about video games at Forbes and politics at Mother Jones. He's the contributor of The League though he hasn't written much here lately. He can be found occasionally composing 140 character cultural analysis on Twitter.

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10 Responses

  1. Dan Summers says:

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it Muslim teaching that Muhammad was caught up to heaven, and thus did not die? Doesn’t that undermine Gaffney’s point about “no believing Christian” saying what Obama said about Christ?

    I am always struck by the hubris of those who claim to speak with authority about the beliefs of others, or the legitimacy thereof. A parable about motes, beams and eyes springs to mind.Report

  2. ChrisWWW says:

    Wow. Just wow. If anyone took Gaffney seriously before, they shouldn’t now.

    ***

    You’d think if Obama were a friend to Muslims and terrorists he’d have done more than ask Israel to simply freeze the settlements, and pinky promise that he’d end the war in Iraq and close Gitmo. Meanwhile, his biggest foreign policy move, escalating the war in Afghanistan, would presumably not make his terrorist friends happy.Report

  3. Winston says:

    Thanks for a refreshingly sane post. Someone ought to tackle the issue of when and why the right in this country was seized by a particularly intense form of derangement. Gaffney is hardly alone here. I’m over 60, and I can’t think of any other period in my life – and I include the Vietnam era – when the punditry seemed so driven by rage and so totally removed from reality.Report

  4. Patrick Duffy says:

    I guess I’d be more interested in reading your comments if you could leave out the ad hominem attack on Mr. Gaffney. When you start out with “paranoid piece of propagandist drivel,” I am immediately turned off. It is clear that what follows will be the equivalent of talking heads generating more heat than light in order to appeal to their base. I have read other pieces by you that leave out the emotion for a real discussion.Report

  5. mike farmer says:

    I think the problem comes when our criticism is obviously one-sided, although the writer may have criticized the other side’s irrationality before, because some readers have only the one post to judge. It’s probably a good idea to place irrationality in full context, because there is enough to cover all sides in the political realm. When criticism of irrationality and hyperbole are seen as a human defects, then we can spot our own, instead of making them appear the defects of a particular subset.

    However, there is nothing wrong with isolating a certain act of irrationality, as long as it’s clearly objective. I think people who are irrational should be shot.Report

  6. Walker says:

    Hey E.D., I just thought I’d let you know I linked this post over at my blog, and at Heartless and Brainless ( cross-posting ).

    Basically, I think I agree to an extent with your analysis, but I wouldn’t take it quite so far. Mainly because I don’t want to get so caught up in Frank-said-Obama-said, that I miss what it was that Frank himself had to say. And I think there are at least one or two thought-worthy parts in his column, if you look beyond what seems to be his mis-interpretation of what Obama actually said.Report

  7. E.D. Kain says:

    You know, I’m just having fun with this one. So take it with a grain of salt. Every now and then I have to leave the realm of rational and measured and polite and all that and get my hands dirty….Report

  8. Walker says:

    Don’t we all….Report