Ok, so Doughy Pantload writes a column that is insane and stupid even by his own august standards the gist of which is: we poor conservatives are damned if we do and damned if we don’t!
Resentfully recalling that the 9/11 commission condemned Dear Leader’s regime’s “lack of imagination,” Pantload argues that, well even if it had been true, it’s has all been rectified now! By the NSA’s spying and the SWIFT program, etc. And what do liberals do now that Dear Leader has met the demands for imaginative counter-terrorism — even, one could say, magnanimously met the liberals halfway? Whine about civil liberties. Why it just reeks of bad faith. Even worse than the stab in the back by the press, liberals demand that the costs of this war be borne by the rich, and be paid for now. Again, bad faith! The evil liberals have obviously tried to use this war as a means of collectivizing America. Naturally, heroic Dear Leader wisely has thwarted them thus far, holding firm on his tax cuts and so passing the buck for this war, literally, onto the next generation.
All in all this is a perfect Pantload column, with a little of everything. Personally, I like the Bad Faith of Liberals/They Dont Really Care About Civil Liberties/They Just Want To Sabotage The President And The War narrative, an especially glossly addition to the standard stab in the back argument that wingnuts, shamelessly, have run into the ground (Yet it must be said that Jonah isn’t being original here — his exact argument has long been Jeff Goldstein’s cock bread and butter.)
Anyway, so Pantload writes this piece of crap, and one of his clay-eating dullard fans writes back that the message has been received, over:
Hi Jonah,
Love your work, and enjoyed today’s column.
You mention the liberal mantra of ‘sacrifice’ for civilians during a time of war. But it always struck me as odd that when they beat this drum they are almost exclusivley talking about increased taxes as the ‘sacrifice’ we can make. If I didn’t know better about the economic implications of high taxes I would gladly go along.
But the way I see it, there’s other things I can do – like give up some of my civil liberties in the name of national security. Our military is fighting and dying overseas, and we’re so immature and selfish that we won’t allow the government to possibly listen in on a phone call or go though our bank records?? I’ve got nothing to hide, so if that’s what I need to do to help protect the homeland, then so be it. Only terrorists and libs would be against a simple sacrifice like that. It is (literally) the least I could do.
Keep up the good work.
Pantload is sapient enough, barely, to recognize that the perfect distillation of his own fucktardious hunk of shit column “will no doubt bother some folks.”
The email, so servile in tone that it belongs to the literature of cult members, could almost be a parody. The emailer “thinks” in the precise way that Goldberg’s column urges him, which shows that euphemism, weasel-wording, sustained mendacity, and a bit of padding are all that Pantload needs to “sanitize” his columns enough for National Review‘s standards of deceny and intellectual independence — and Pantload grasps this fact enough to add the caveat.
