Stop Me Before I Vote Again

A recent comment on an earlier post raises some questions that deserve above-the-fold treatment. I had written about the silliness of lefties getting worked up about The National Enquirer throwing muck (think of that!) at Frank Marshall Davis, an early mentor of Obama's. Djur replied, in part:

... The question of whether "the Left" should promote this attack on Frank Marshall Davis is completely distinct from whether Obama deserves to be protected (which he doesn't).

For one thing, regardless of whether the allegations are true, the idea that Obama's youthful association with this man can be used to attack him is odious. I don't consider myself squeamish about politics, but expanding guilt by association to that point has dire consequences....

All right, this is a little frivolous, and Djur is being serious. Let me try a different tack.

The Enquirer is prominent among the ancestral enemies of well-meaning, high-minded, intelligent, educated liberal folks. I have a kind of instinctive reluctance to join in any tut-tutting against these bogeymen. It's too much like joining forces with the liberals -- in defense of standards, or objectivity, or civil society, or good taste, or something else at least as illusory as the space aliens who populate the Enquirer's pages.

One grants too much, I think, to the bien-pensanterie, in deigning even to deplore the Enquirer.

The high-minded need a low-life to despise. But personally, I despise the whole sick symbiotic mutually self-serving charade: faux-populist Bronx cheers from the Enquirer, and expressions of pious horror from folks with more educated tastes. Everybody comes away smiling from these encounters: the Enquirer because it has sold papers, and the noblesse de robe because they have shown what superior souls they are.

Then there's the question of consequences. Djur writes: "expanding guilt by association to that point has dire consequences."

No doubt. But we've been living with these "dire consequences" for generations. Guilt by association is how American politics works. Just a couple of days ago I put up a post about the Obama campaign's guilt-by association approach to Muslim organizations. In this context, the Enquirer's mudslinging looked a lot to me like poetic justice.

And granted that the consequences are "dire" -- granted that we all wish our society ran on a different basis -- what are we Lefties supposed to do about it? Well, we might reason, the Day of Jubilo appears to be some ways off, so perhaps in the meantime we should tidy up our cell and try to step on some of the biggest roaches. Like the National Enquirer.

The problems with this argument, to my mind, are two. First, I don't believe in tidying up the cell. I'm kinda with those IRA lads at Long Kesh who decorated their cells with their feces. (At least in principle -- I'm fairly cleanly in private life.)

Second, though, and perhaps less controversial: who, after all, are the biggest roaches? I would argue that the National Enquirer is a roach so diminutive that you need a microscope to see it -- unless you're on board with the liberals and their dictatorship of standards.

Naah, if you ask me, the New York Times is the biggest roach. That's the one to take a whack at, whenever you get the chance. The Times knows the secret of misinforming and deluding people who think, by virtue of their superior qualities of mind and their expensive first-class educations, that they can't be hoodwinked. Compared to the damage the Times does, the National Enquirer is very small beer indeed.