Saturday, November 22, 2008

Jamie Kirchick Poops His Panties Because He Wants Attention

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A few days ago I was out doing chores when I jumped back into my car and the NPR station came on. The first thing I heard was the host talking with my friend Jane Hamsher about the Senate Democrats actions in the Lieberman matter. I assume he was attracted by this post she had written earlier. It's always nice to hear Jane on the radio since there aren't a lot of voices in the public forum that speak so clearly and eloquently for the interests of working families and the great moral imperatives that make up "liberalism," from equality and human dignity to empathy and honesty. The guest who followed her sure had nothing to do with any of those imperatives. I didn't know who he was when he was introduced but it didn't take more than a few seconds before his stunted anger and contemptuous and nasty right-wing verbiage made me realize the host had decided to balance The Good with The Bad and that we were now being subjected to The Bad. But The Bad was so bad that the host almost immediately had to reprimand him for his vicious personal attack on Jane by saying that Jane wasn't on the air to defend herself from his scurrilous charges so why not just try to stick to his unique version of the facts?

I soon found out that The Bad is a pissant little NeoCon asslick named James Kirchick, one of those miserable malcontents striving to be accepted by the ruling class by savaging "his own kind." He'd be a classic Uncle Tom is he was African-American. Instead he's a very unhappy gay wingnut, a sad species indeed, forever obsessed with trying to justify his pitiful existence. Predictably, he works as a propagandist for one of the most pathetic and laughable pieces of the NeoCon smear machine, The New Republic. Today, however he's attempting to thrust himself into the spotlight again with what I now recognize as one of his gratuitously divisive hissy fits, this one directed not just against Jane-- apparently one of his obsessions-- but against progressive bloggers like David Sirota and Markos Moulitsos.

The 25 year old self-loather has been all over the map politically, from supporting Ralph Nader and attacking Pat Buchanan to claiming to be a libertarian while smearing Ron Paul as racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and a militia conspiracist. This year he's a garden variety NeoCon kook. But when you look closely at his childish writing what you find is someone always kissing up to The Man, filled with righteous indignation towards "uppity" women and working people-- who he holds in the utmost contempt. He seems to be driven with anger and vitriol because progressive men don't want to date him.

Last Sunday Glenn Greenwald opened the wounds and Kirchick has been furiously and blindly striking out at all the perceived enemies of his little cocoon-like fantasy world.
It is Jamie Kirchick -- who spent the whole year embodying the most ludicrous extremes of neoconservatism, venerating John McCain and demonizing Barack Obama as a weak radical-- who, along with Kirchick's ideological comrade, Joe Lieberman, is the symbol for the "moderate majority of the American electorate."  Therefore, any opposition to the Kirchicks and Liebermans will doom the Democratic Party.

...There is and always has been a Beltway cottage industry of trite, platitude-spouting establishment-defenders whose only "argument" consists of issuing grave warnings that Democrats will suffer if they don't ignore and scorn "the Left" (defined as any Democrat dissimilar to Joe Lieberman).  They invariably purport to speak on behalf of unseen majorities and they are invariably painfully wrong, though with no effect on future behavior.  As but one example, writing last March in The Politico, Kirchick-- then speaking on behalf of "most general election voters"-- issued this dire warning about Obama's chances in the general election:

[Obama] wants us to think that in all of his heart-to-heart conversations with [Jeremiah Wright], he never saw the angry, conspiratorial and America-hating minister now topping the charts on YouTube. Many of Obama’s supporters-- given the messianic milieu of his campaign-- are credulous enough to believe these evasions. But most general election voters will not.

I guess they were-- and now Kirchick has moved on to represent all the mainstream center-right Obama voters who elected him president. His main point being that the netroots doesn't matter. In his hysterical Daily News screed he seems to have left out the word "pajamas" but otherwise tars bloggers with all the trite, ad hominem slurs people like him use day in and day out to discredit people they disagree with: "Enraged, Impotent, Band of angry bloggers, Fumed, Huffed and puffed, Seethed, Blogger rage, Petty, vindictive and small." Like Bush, he went to Yale.

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7 Comments:

At 10:10 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nice piece. :) Glad to see I'm not the only one aware of this particular pimple on the behind of the body politic. Kirchick is one of those ilk whose words I occasionally read when I need a good laugh--because he's a Very Serious Person who knows what Most Americans think. The fact that he has yet to be right on any issue makes him, in my view, a sort of lightweight, cracked Kristol.

 
At 1:18 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tsk stk, Jamie lad. He violated the GOP/Media Complex's Prime Directive: Never acknowledge the existence of American lefties, much less mention them by name. Now his readers will be Googling "Jane Hamsher" and "Markos Moulitsas" to see what the fuss is all about.

 
At 2:15 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great post....Thanks!

 
At 2:37 PM, Blogger Distributorcap said...

i guess they start them young in wingnut land......

 
At 4:21 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't what good it does to frame Yale but it certainly is good to know . My Papa went to school there with another icon of the like right . This creature which Kirchick wishes to become is quite a load . Patriot scold and social distortion what a bargain .

 
At 6:18 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Howie, one point. Ron Paul himself may or may not be racist etc. amd Kirchick may or may not have smeared him (I haven't read Kirchick). However, Dave Neiwert and Sara Robinson, some of the best analysts of the right, have documented some disturbing things about Ron Paul. See here and here.

Also, I watched the 2008 Ron Paul gathering in the Twin Cities, and was disturbed to see that the special guest was a senior leader of the John Birch Society. The Republican Party once condemned the JBS as extreme. The JBS has not become any less paranoid over the years.

Just as a matter of rhetorical art, flagging Kirchick because he attacked Ron Paul may not be particularly persuasive.

--Charles of MercuryRising
www.phoenixwoman.wordpress.com

 
At 8:37 PM, Blogger DownWithTyranny said...

I agree with everything Dave wrote about Ron Paul, even if Kirchick stumbled across the truth on that. The point I was making-- unsuccessfully, I think-- is that Kirchick jumps from political flavor to flavor the way other people change their underwear. One day he's for Nader and in the blink of an eye he's a far right lunatic arguing to pre-packaged Republican Party talking points. He went from Libertarian to Paul-basher.

 

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