Monday, February 13, 2006

Welcome to My World, Redux: Glenn Greenwald Gets It

In his post yesterday, discussing the ideology of conservatism, Mr. Greenwald begins to sound suspiciously like, well, me:

It used to be the case that in order to be considered a "liberal" or someone "of the Left," one had to actually ascribe to liberal views on the important policy issues of the day – social spending, abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, immigration, "judicial activism," hate speech laws, gay rights, utopian foreign policies, etc. etc. These days, to be a "liberal," such views are no longer necessary.

Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more "liberal" one is. Whether one is a "liberal" -- or, for that matter, a "conservative" -- is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush.

For added irony, in his post today, Mr. Greenwald discusses the reaction he gets from many Bushites:

Most (though not all) of the responses were quite heavy on name-calling and extremely light on substantive replies to the actual points in the post. More notable than the unsurprising fact that the post prompted lots of name-calling is the specific name-calling insults that were chosen. Almost invariably, bloggers told their readers that what I wrote can be disregarded because I’m just a "leftist" and a "lefty" and a "liberal" spewing forth the "KosHuff" party line.
He posts about how people are labelled as "liberal" solely for daring to disagree with Our Leader, and the Bushites immediately label him a liberal for saying so.

Now that's ironic like an Alanis Morrisette song.

1 comment:

Marie said...

I have friends at church who are very conservative but don't like Bush. Mostly because he's not conservative enough. Also his spending habits. Some are isolationists and don't like the war in Iraq; some are libertarian oriented and don't like stuff like the wiretapping.