WorldNetDaily round-up

Jon Henke sums up the response to his call for a boycott of WorldNetDaily – both Farah’s response, and the enlightening entertaining frightening responses many WND commenters who flooded The Next Right left there.  We had a few stop by here as well, and I have to give them credit – though they were not as cordial or polite as the typical League commenter, they were still nowhere near as bad as the trolls who piled on to Henke’s initial post.  Here’s a comment from Gunnery Sgt D.C. Robertson (edited by Henke, and posted with my apologies):

Jon,I hope you get a triple case of AIDS the next time you take it up the a**, you f*****g homo.  You and your putrid ilk put that Comie n****r in the White House and accidently woke up the silent majority of white, Christain, tax-paying Americans.  No longer will the soul of this great nation be intimidated by political correctness.   You f****d up buddy and now you have a front row seat to see the newly awakened vanquish the cancer of fascism from this land.  Oh, by the by, I do hope to meet you in person some day for a bit of attitude adjustment.Semper Fi, Motherf****r.

So this is the voice of the “silent majority of white, Christian, tax-paying Americans”?

Doesn’t sound particularly silent or particularly Christian to me.  But hey, as long as you’re paying your taxes you can sound as batshit crazy and bigoted as you want – though threats of physical violence are usually frowned upon.

What I really love about all of this is how the commenters themselves illustrate the point so well, and completely unintentionally.  Such anger, such vitriol.  Then again, I’ve been reminded several times that the League is just a “backwater” site full of “pseudo-intellectuals” that nobody reads, so it doesn’t really matter what I think.

I couldn’t agree more.  Being a backwater site has distinct advantages.  An excellent comments section being one of them.

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Mark observes in a pair of emails:

So for all the trolls running around bragging about how WND is some sort of a new media juggernaut, we haven’t even gotten 100 referrals from Nut-in-Chief Farah’s link to E.D.’s post.  I find this….interesting in several ways.

1. It suggests that WND readers, if there really are a lot of them, are not at all interested in verifying the accuracy of what WND writes by clicking on the supporting links.
2. It suggests that WND is not nearly as big a player as WND fans think it is.
3. It suggests that WND is not nearly as big a player in modern conservatism as sane people tend to think, which perhaps makes it better to ignore entirely than to call attention to by either boycotting or going after its extreme idiocy.

This is exactly right – and at the heart of my initial reservation that Henke was on to something, but that a boycott is likely not the best answer.

In the comments, Bob Cheeks chides us for not going after the left enough.  He has a point.  The left is currently in power, regardless of the volume level of the Tea Party vocal opposition, and in possession of most of the strings.  It only makes sense to go after the guys who are pulling the strings.

This is a very common critique of dissident conservatives or even of moderate movement conservatives like David Frum.  “Why do you always attack conservatives?  Why don’t you ever go after liberals?  Why do you always play against your own team?”  (etc.)

My quick answer is that “the team” right now is in disarray and until it’s fixed, until the problems which exist in the movement today and in conservatism in general are dealt with and the ship is righted, then every last critique of liberalism and the current administration will be an exercise in futility.  The opposition as it exists today is winning small battles in the health care debate (the “protect Medicare from the government” debate) but I think they are losing the larger war.  Tactics are replacing strategy, when the two should be working together.  Partisanship is overtaking principle and more importantly, vision.

Even a comeback in 2010 will probably be short-lived if serious reforms don’t take place.  The right needs to regain the high ground or it will continue to sink.  When it regains the high ground we will all be in a better position to once again attack the left and its policies.  We will never regain the high ground without a steady internal critique.  This is not a conflict between “elites” and the “base” either.  There is nothing about socioeconomic class or one’s level of education that dictates how reasonable a person will be.