Jonah Goldberg exhorts a righteous blast of splenetic energy titled, “Paranoid Style for Thee But Not For Me” (followed by a sequel that’s also worth your time) in which he asks (and this is but an excerpt. RTWT):
I just have a hard time listening to liberals grow suddenly high-brow and Ivy League serious about the paranoid style of the American Right. Where were these people for the last eight years when abject paranoid hysteria consumed the left flank of liberalism and threatened to capsize the entire enterprise? There are certainly elements on the Right that are prone to such things, but there are also elements on the Left that are just as prone to it. I will stack Naomi Wolfe up against any John Bircher. Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, the folks at ANSWER, Ward Churchill, are no less conspiratorial than your typical right-wing conspiracy theorist and some of them are not only worse, but far more accepted by the liberal establishment than their opposite numbers are by the conservative establishment. Why do the Tim McVeigh types count against the Right, but the Black Panthers never against the Left? Why aren’t liberals troubled by Rosie “Steel Never Melted Before Before Bush” O’Donnell but wigged out by Michael Savage? When Spike Lee floated the idea that the Bush administration blew up the levees to flood New Orleans, where was Packer & Co’s hand-wringing then? When Randall Robinson proclaimed at the Huffington Post that blacks — and only blacks — were being forced to eat the flesh of the dead in the wake of Katrina, why did no one dust off their Hofstadter? Where was The New Yorker when a Greek Chorus of dunderheads claimed that a cabal of perfidious bagel-snarfing neocons were, like the Elders of Zion of yore, scheming to undo all that is good in the world? Where were they when Hollywood buffoons were producing Broadway plays depicting the very same neocons shouting “Hail Leo Strauss!”
At Newsbusters, Matthew Vadum spots this selective amnesia at work today: “Podesta Plant at White House Presser — Brace Yourself for MSM Non-Outrage”:
So, a partisan, ideologically-driven individual from an organization that is aggressively promoting the Obama agenda was granted media credentials for the White House.
Will there be [Jeff] Gannon-era howls of outrage from the left over this?
Don’t count on it.
No, of course not.
Related: “Where Does It End?”
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