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Monday, March 9, 2009
HotAir posts Jeff Goldstein's take on Rush Limbaugh's "I Hope He Fails."
Posted by kotang at 6:44 PMHere's a post wherein you can sink your teeth. A Classical Liberal's take on the Left's intentional misuse of Rush's now-famous four words - those four words that our whimsical President found annoying (words that presented just another opportunity-knocking challenge for Rham Emmanuel; an opportunity to vaporize the GOP's fragile structure: let the infighting begin!). An opportunity to create a distraction: while Obama gropes for a solution to an economic crisis he's incapable of understanding (please, just let the little guy finish his waffle! don't you know there's stem cells what needs killing? this economic stuff is far beyond his pay grade!) much less managing, his brain-trust siezed on Rush's four words to ignite the always-whining Democrat base, and flushed out some not-so conservative 'conservatives', and bloggers who've proceeded to feast on each other's tails.
Quite a feat, based on four words.
Jeff Goldstein forces those four words back into their contextual continuity. Something the media should've been able to do without a second thought; if they were, you know, unbiased. Instead, media and written opinion writers fanned the flames. Flames that enveloped the right side of the blogosphere: Patterico, Ace, HotAir's Allah, and others on one side; Jeff Goldstein &c. who correctly believe that we can 'give no quarter to those who would hijack our language!' on the other.
A quick snippet..
Read the post, please. We must not allow those who would hijack our words from context and twist their meaning, to succeed. Even the modern far-left-liberals should have some problems with that, if they have any intellectual honesty left whatsoever.
Oh, and...OUTLAW!
Quite a feat, based on four words.
Jeff Goldstein forces those four words back into their contextual continuity. Something the media should've been able to do without a second thought; if they were, you know, unbiased. Instead, media and written opinion writers fanned the flames. Flames that enveloped the right side of the blogosphere: Patterico, Ace, HotAir's Allah, and others on one side; Jeff Goldstein &c. who correctly believe that we can 'give no quarter to those who would hijack our language!' on the other.
A quick snippet..
Leaving aside for the moment the impossibly high standard that comes with demanding that a man who speaks mostly extemporaneously for fifteen hours a week need be so careful with his phrasings that they cannot be removed from their context and made to mean what they clearly weren’t intended to mean, except by great effort on the part of those whose aim it is to misrepresent intent, the subtext of such an argument is twofold: 1) by being more judicious with our words, we are providing those who are out to misrepresent us with a smaller target; and 2) that something less provocative will not alienate us with those we are hoping to win over to conservatism by appearing to them ugly or hostile — that as a strategy, being more solicitous about how we phrase things will help make conservatism more appealing, or at least, less revolting to those who remain undecided about their political allegiances.Which is right where Big Government proponents want us to be.
...
All of which brings us back to those conservative political realists and pragmatists now criticizing Rush over his impolitic (or unclear) remarks: their desire for Limbaugh to be more careful with his phrasings as a way to avoid being misrepresented in a soundbite culture is, frankly, a fool’s game — and, even more frankly, it is indicative of a political strategy that amounts to conceding loss, with the concomitant hope that perhaps we’ll lose more slowly.
...
To put it more forcefully, it is a fact of language that once you surrender the grounds for meaning to those who would presume to determine your meaning for you, you are at their mercy.
Read the post, please. We must not allow those who would hijack our words from context and twist their meaning, to succeed. Even the modern far-left-liberals should have some problems with that, if they have any intellectual honesty left whatsoever.
Oh, and...OUTLAW!
Labels: Identity Politics, Jeff Goldstein, Politics, Rush Limbaugh
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