The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

I Didn’t Rape Tommy Christopher

Posted on | February 14, 2011 | 38 Comments

You wouldn’t know that, given the way he has obsessively hounded me over a single blog post I wrote in December when Julian Assange was arrested. Recognizing that my attempts to clarify were a violation of the First Law of Holes, I posted my mea culpa, dropped the subject and moved on, but Tommy remains fixated. He even brought his Mediaite camera into the smoking area at CPAC to do an “ambush” interview:

[3:15] “I believe in ‘Thou shalt not’ . . . Wait a minute: I don’t believe in heavy petting before marriage, so how the hell can I be accused of being pro-rape? . . . I was angry at Jill Filpovic for taking the occasion of the accusations against Julian Assange to lecture us, as if we needed to be lectured, about ‘no means no’ and ‘stop means stop.'”

Among the personalities in this video, you’ll notice my filmmaker buddy Ladd Ehlinger Jr., as well as Angel Fleming of Fleming and Hayes, whose colleague Shane Hayes walks into the video toward the end.

I’m reposting this video as evidence that Tommy Christopher is weirdly obsessed with me. Consider the vast and absurd disproportion: I’m a freelance journalist and blogger, whereas Tommy is political editor and White House correspondent for Mediaite. This means that Tommy is being paid a full-time salary to pursue his bizarre Javert-like vendetta against a “popular conservative blogger,” as he describes me.

Frankly, I think it’s the “popular” part that bugs him most, but at any rate, there’s no way on earth I could be viewed as an appropriate subject for the kind of scrutiny involved in this video, or in Tommy’s previous blogging about me. It is not false modesty to say that covering the “Stacy McCain beat” is below Tommy’s pay-grade.

Notice also how Tommy pompously declares at Mediaite, “As you can see from this clip, McCain still holds many opinions that I find objectionable” — which is rather transparently his main point: The unimpeachable righteousness of Tommy Christopher.

Such preening moral narcissism, the pharasaical desire to strut one’s superior virtue like a peacock flaunting his tail, is the inescapable essence of liberalism. But you don’t need me to tell you that, when Thomas Sowell has written an entire book about it: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.

One might describe the liberal’s typical pose as, “I have noble sentiments and virtuous opinions — admire me!” This is why they constantly accuse others of harboring malign motives (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) and why nothing so outrages a liberal as when you deny them the admiration they so desperately crave.

If you’ve ever gotten into an argument with a liberal, you recognize this holier-than-thou game for what it is. One minute you’re arguing about a specific incident (in this case, the charges against Julian Assange) and then next thing you know, the liberal starts lecturing you as if you were a third-grader, demanding that you accede to whatever point he’s pushing. He throws out a hypothetical case or employs some inapt analogy that he thinks will prove him right, and if you call him on that, he’ll take the argument off in some other direction. This is when you realize that the supposed subject of the argument is merely a pretext, and that the real point he’s trying to prove is actually quite simple: “I’m better than you.”

Certainly, no liberal should ever imagine that he’s going to win an argument by trying to make my inferiority the point of contention.

OK, fine: Let us stipulate that you are in some sense a better person than one particular skinny redneck. Exactly what have you proven by that kind of argument, except that you think you can build yourself up by tearing other people down? At the end of the day, the facts of the case are not changed by your mere opinion, and you’re still an obnoxious domineering know-it-all who can’t stand to see other people happy.

Category: Blogging, Ladd Ehlinger, Video

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