Ticky, Tacky – D’oh!
Via Roy Edroso I see that the Artist Formerly Known As Tacitus is engaging in some projection and dishonest revisionism all in one typically humorless, tumbleweed-bouncing, blowhard-a-thon of a post.
The Marble Douchebag argues that the netroots, by which he means the Left blogosphere, is a mirror-image of the old John Birch Society, the insanely paranoid extremist group whose direct influence on the conservative Right was considerable in the period from the mid-50s to the mid-60s.
Part of the unintended joke here is that Josh Trevino himself would feel right at home at the average Birch chapter meeting of 1963 or so, but we’ll leave that aside, because it gets better. Tacky further argues that the Birchers — particularly JBS leader Robert Welch — were seen by the “decent right” as too pessimistic, and so were read out of the movement by noble and decent rightwingers like William F. Buckley. In contrast, the netroots have no decent Buckley analog; in fact, they are lead by the most craven and despicable personage evar!!! — Kos. (Yes, you knew it’d come to that: Kos is now and always has been the great white whale to Tacitus’s clumsy and cretinous Ahab.) Would that the netroots had a Buckley! But no! Why, the netroots are so evil that they cling to this crazy Kos person at the expense of more sensible alternatives, like those offered in the pages of The New Republic!
Now I aim to show that, as usual, Tacitus’s smear-job is not only presented in bad faith, but predicated on bullshit throughout. Roy offers this link to rebut Tacitus’s assertion that the right was redeemed from its crazies. And in the general sense, it does just that.
But then we know that the Right is full of Birch clones, paranoids who see Mexicimuslimofascists everywhere; we’ve always known, because it’s self-evident, that far from the Right having been purged of Birch-ness, it actually absorbed and internalized most of the JBS’s tendencies.
Hell, it absorbed Robert Welch’s own personal eccentricities. Tacitus, in what he apparently assumes is a magnanimous instance of providing evidence against his own side (thus hoping to restore his status as the Left’s favorite conservative — a bit of poor macro-judgement I’m proud to say I had a small part rectifying) states plaintively:
A sincere love of truth demands that one acknowledge that [Welch’s book] The Politician is, in fact, a stupefyingly insane and nonsensical indictment of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a key agent of the Communist conspiracy in the United States.
I agree. I would hasten to add that Ronald Reagan’s 1976 characterization of Gerald Ford as a communist was also “stupefyingly insane,” if, for Reagan and the movement he led, utterly typical (Reagan later said it was a slip of the tongue; if it was a slip of anything, it was Freudian).
But that’s a cheap gotcha and is small potatoes. What I’d really like to address is Tacitus’s…yes, “stupefyingly insane” argument that William F. Buckley, in Roy’s words, “came out of the wilderness and cleaned all the Welchade off the movement, and American conservatives thereafter proceeded in powdered wigs and tricorners to let freedom ring.”
Buckley did no such thing:
A week later, when news came of the suspension of Major General Edwin Walker for seeking… to indoctrinate his troops with [John Birch Society] propaganda, the National Review leaped to the defense of Walker.
In June, 1961, as the wave of anger about the Birch Society continued, the National Review testily complained of the denunciations: “Why, it’s enough to make one join the John Birch Society.”
By 1962, alarmed that the national outcry against the Birch Society might harm the whole Rightist movement in general must have hit home with Buckley, Ergo, his editorial [“The Question of Robert Welch”]:
“Mr. Welch, for all his good intentions, threatens to divert militant conservative action to irrelevance and ineffectuality. There are, as we say, great things that need doing… John Birch chapters can do much to forward these aims, but only as they dissapate the fog of confusion that issues from Mr. Welch’s smoking typewriter. Mr Welch has revived in many men the spirit of patriotism, and that same spirit calls now for rejecting, out of love of truth and country, his false counsels.”
By 1963, however, when it was clear that the rejection had not taken place, the inevitable zag by the National Review followed the zig. As the so-called “card party” movement — plugged, promoted, and manned by Birchers across the nation — sought to stop the retail sale of goods manufactured behind the Iron Curtain, the National Review had some nice things to say[.]
Two months later… Buckley again took the soft line on Birchism:
“I tend to fear not that the pendulum is going too far in the direction of Mr. Welch, but too far in the direction of total nonchalance about the fact that a) conspiracies exist, and b) that they do accomplish great purposes.”
By November… Buckley found himself called upon to go even further in his “anti-anti-Birch” position[:]
Buckley said that “…certainly it does not follow that Senator Goldwater has any obligation, in morals or in intellect, to repudiate all those who have associated themselves with Mr. Welch to make common cause against communism and socialism.”
Refering to a reported statement by Senator Goldwater that “all the members of the John Birch Society I have met are good people,” Buckley said that “a society is not to be judged by the excesses of individual members of it, any more than it must be judged by the excesses of its leaders.” (Buckley did not tell his readers how a society should be judged, if not by its leaders and members.)
Buckley concluded with the declaration that he stood by his statement of a year previous: “…that I have nothing against, in fact I have considerable admiration for, the majority of those members of the John Birch Society, whom I have met or corresponded with — and I judge them as individuals, not as members of the Society. But irrespective of whether one agrees with the general goals of the Society’s members, as I emphatically do, genocidal assaults upon the membership of the Society and on candidates who refuse to condemn all members of the Society are unreasonable and undiscrimating.”
Buckley has not applied the same nice yardstick to individuals in Leftist or even liberal groups such as the ADA; they are all usually lumped together.
The original Tacitus was an historian; the Marble Douchebag, Trevino, is just another fuck-up of a wingnut. Though in fairness, I will say that he and his hero WFB deserve each other.
Didn’t read the comments in the Edroso post you reference, I see: nor, in fact, the whole of the netroots/Bircher piece itself. I should leave you to puzzle out the missing piece, historically speaking, on your own. For heuristic purposes.
Back to the pillow-biting HATE TACITUS HATE HATE with you, J. Perhaps a hobby would help. No, another hobby.
Josh Trevino’s inner monologue says: “Trackback alert! Trackback alert! Quick….to the Troll Cave and into my cape and magic toga!”
Yes, a hobby! I suggest slavishly poring over referrers and following every link back to its source.
Wow, first comment. Josh, your social life must make Steve den Beste look like Andy Warhol.
It’s true, I keep tabs on the sincere freaks. J. and a very small group of others merit some watching. Unstable personalities with a demonstrable obsession — and most important, a longstanding tendency to conflate public and private perceived characteristics of their hate-objects — should be kept under some observation.
Now, in J.’s defense, I don’t think he has the backbone to actually do anything beyond spew half-baked bile to anyone listening. (You really should check out his 2003 through 2005 work whining about his hatred of Tacitus….on baseball boards. Classic stuff.) But one should never count on the personal consistency of a nut.
Nor his dullish fans.
Poor Tacky.
No, I hadn’t read comments @ Roy’s when I wrote this, but i did read the entirety of your piece (hey, at least someone did) — pity it doesn’t do what you now pretend it does.
But if you want to think that your evidence overrides mine, then go ahead. If you also wants to project your own obsessions at my “expense”, you can do that, too.
Seriously, it’s the only way you can get laughs, so stick with it.
PS – “J.”? Please, don’t bluff. You may be a weasel in the service of TNR, and we both know you take your own Integrity Pledge with the same grain of salt that, say, Jeff Goldstien does, but don’t try to hint that you know more than you do. Especially as a bullshit form of intimidation, shitbird boy.
….but i did read the entirety of your piece….
I admire your willingness to admit something embarrassing. Though I’m not sure you grasp it quite yet. But the clues are there: Re-read, for comprehension this time. Or wade through Edroso’s comments, as you prefer.
You may be a weasel in the service of TNR….
QED, J. Cheers.
Josh’s next article: “Ghengis Khan and his inheritor Markos Moulitsas, Hordemaster of an electronic steppe”.
“A comparison between a certain Markos Moulitsas, formerly of El Salvador, and the Great Khan of the Mongols might make a very strange one. But if one were to delve deeper into the lives of these two seemingly disparate figures, eerie similiarities emerge. For example, did not Ghengis Khan have ten fingers? And does not Moulitsas?”
ZZzzzzzz….
Did he just refer to Tacitus in the third person?
Sane ego te vocavi. Forsitan capedictum tuum desit.
You surpass my expectations. Really, that I didn’t read the comments at Roy’s and see that my own work was quoted against you qualifies as a huge gotcha? Are you really dancing across the room now thinking you have something at my expense? I mean, you have to remember that elsewhere I’ve proven you a liar and a hypocrite and here I’ve proven you a fraud and an idiot — do you really think your “guh didn’t read duh comments!” gotcha equals the score?
Next you’ll call me “bilious” again and your self-satisfaction will be complete.
But then baby steps for us is a great leap forward for Tackies.
Really, that I didn’t read the comments at Roy’s and see that my own work was quoted against you qualifies as a huge gotcha?
No, J. I’m disappointed: your low character is obvious, but I never thought you stupid. Really, I want you to get this. Keep trying. It’s there.
….you have to remember that elsewhere I’ve proven you a liar and a hypocrite and here I’ve proven you a fraud and an idiot….
Robert Jordan, Piers Anthony, JK Rowling: they breathe easy every day you don’t turn your talent for fantasy toward the literary world. Still, I admire the self-esteem implicit in the conflation of the airing of your opinions with “proof.”
You can do this, J. I believe in you. Go!
Oooh! What’s the matter, Josh? Can’t stand people calling on your bluffs?
Great – another self-referential blogospheric storm-in-a-teacup.
If Retardo missed something, why not point out exactly what he missed? Especially if it’s that obvious, like “Hey, dickhead, RIGHT HERE was my point that sailed completely over your penis-shaped noggin”. Why all this shuck-and-jive bullshit?
Well?
floopmeister is correct.
That, plus the inordinate time it’s taking for J.’s measure of perspicacity to kick in makes this exercise one in diminishing returns.
Well, cheers. Better luck next time, J. And remember: you’re curable.
Oh, okay, one quickie:
If Retardo missed something, why not point out exactly what he missed?
Humiliation is so much better when accompanied by an improvement of its object.
I knew it, I knew it.
How kind you are to condescend to speak to us, and to hold such hopes for any of our benighted body. I worry for you, though, that our dullness, in its inestimable prodigiousness, might blunt even your keenness; such concentrated stupid as we exhibit is surely contagious! Save yourself! Slip this surly band!
But Retardo already countered your invisible yet stupefyingly obvious point with one of his own! It’s right there in his post!
… What, you don’t see it? Oh, how humiliating for you. Perhaps Retardo will take pity on you and point it out, in a super-double secret invisible update.
I see you ran away from Roy’s comments once R.Porrofatto handed you your ass. (http://www.haloscan.com/comments/edroso/115151111791063807/#129727)
Josh, I am kind of worried about you. You are…what are the words I am looking for?….such a fucking asshole.
floopmeister is correct.
Oh, thanks so much. Pity then that you, due to your own fragile ego, persist in stirring the cup.
Shuffle along now, Tacitus.
That, plus the inordinate time it’s taking for J.’s measure of perspicacity to kick in makes this exercise one in diminishing returns.
And return your Daddy’s thesaurus while you’re at it.
Oh, help me here. Do you mean this:
Because that’s what you tried to pull before someone threw my post in your face. Then you went on to say:
Oh goody. After all the projection you’ve been engaging in lately, you now, in calling me stupid, have taken the cake:
1. There is no link — nor, even, a quote — only your assertion that Buckley read them out of the movement.
2. Read them out in 1965, when they were no longer useful. What heroism! What you elide here, intentionally, is that even if we are to believe you when you say that Buckley kicked out the JBS (rather than merely Welch himself), this occured in 1965 right after a annihilating defeat for Barry Goldwater, whom both Buckley and the JBS supported (and indeed weren’t they all criminally insane peas in a pod), when the Birchers were a) no longer needed and b) so visibly insane by mainstream standards that they were a liability. Had Buckley been the hero you claim him to be (though we know he’s your hero for other reasons, as per the AmRen link above), he’d have kicked out the whole movement when they actually had power and when it’d have actually meant something to do it. As it was, Buckley, like Goldwater, was perfectly content to use them to try to win an election. What an idealist!
An analogy here would be Elektra records taking credit for dumping the contract of Motley Crue on grounds of aural atrocities not in 1985, when it would have been courageous and done some good, but in 1998 or so, when they’d already broken up and had as many records sales as your blog has hits.
And none of this, even at its most charitable, takes away from your projection smear of Kos=Robert Welch, or your laughable premise that the Right is no longer contaminated with Birchian insanity.
That’s all for now; be back later. Keep up the good work, though, Tacky, but do try to readjust the pole up your ass if only for your own sake.
Josh – a word to the wise: start posting comments of substance, or chose the better part of valor. These “Ha! Ha! Your mother is fat” bleatlings do nothing to enhance your reputation.
That’s a good point RM — The premise of Biggus Dickus’ original smear was that Kos = Welch and that because of honest brokers like Buckley, the Birchers were marched out of the movement, leaving the modern conservative party devoid of the paranoid and anti-intellectual element.
Which isn’t exactly an astute reading of modern conservatism.
What a dick.
So what’s “J.” stand for, Josh? Fess up, now – is you bluffin’ or is you ain’t?
Actually, it’s more like “Ha ha! There’s something unpleasant about your mother hidden somewhere in the Internets, but you are too dull-witted to figure out what or where it is, and I am certainly not going to tell you. Conflation! Perspicacity! Onomatopoeia!”
Careful, Retardo. Do not anger him, or he may post yet another consonant. Or even . . . a vowel.
I zoned out about half way through because it was so fucking boring, but it just seems like another pants pissing episode about Kos and the left finally getting their shit together and doing something.
Either they’re condescendingly mocking us for being such an rag tag group of liberal “crazies” or they’re clutching the pearls at the very sight of some organization on our side.
Forget him retardo, his snickering about you not getting the point is as transperent as it is false.
As someone with no independent knowledge of the John Birch Society, it’s still pretty clear to me that Retardo is winning the argument on the merits, since… Trevino refuses to engage the merits. A typical performance, full of comments about how appropriate a nick “Retardo” is, and other jibes that surely count as great Internet flames. Still, at the end of the day, you don’t win a historical debate with ad hominems, not to mention veiled threats of outing.
This may be one reason why the SwordsCrossed experiment was doomed from the start. Trevino is clearly smart, and well-lettered. But he shows an alarming disinclination to engage in actual give-and-take regarding his arguments. Instead, he typically states his case in a lengthy and erudite post, and any criticism is met with nothing more than “obviously you need to read closer!” or “you might need to think more closely about what you’ve missed!” or similar one-liners that do nothing to advance the discussion.
It’s not a crime. In my line of work, brief writing and oral argument are two different skills. But if you can’t defend your case against direct challenges by your adversary and questions from the court, you’re not going to win. You don’t get to just state your case, declare yourself the winner, and ride off into the sunset, snidely telling the inquisitive judge that he’d know the answer to his question if he read your papers more closely.
Retardo’s point that it meant relatively little to repudiate the JBS only after Goldwater’s crushing defeat stands unchallenged. There may well be a crushing rejoinder on the merits, but if Trevino isn’t going to offer it, then it may as well not exist.
Wow, it’s like a morality play, our narrator merely mentions the familiar Piewackit and POOF! he appears! shitting flying demons and threatening the kids.
Authentic right down to the lathe sword.
Trevino is clearly smart
Huh? Wha’? Where?
and well-lettered.
One consonant doesn’t count. It’s called “cold reading”.
“I have a J. There is a J somewhere in this room. You sir? Was J your second cousin? or sister or best friend’s grandmother?
“Yes, I do know more, but I’m not telling because I’m the INTEGRITUDIÑOUS Dr. Ño and I nyever give away my secrets! Nya ha ha ha ha!!”
I’d like to point out that one could certainly still read the JBS newsletter when I was in college in the 80’s and that it contained such gems of wisdom as “the jew is not at home in the forest…he is a creature of the slums and crowded cities.” The fixations and the hatreds that the JBS newsletter offered then were simply taken up, and shaken up, and mixed around to fit a new (and very active) group of hysterical haters on the right through talk radio, people like Michael Savage, and Ann Coulter. The enemy may have migrated from jews and commies to gays and liberals, but the rhetoric is exactly the same and the consumers of that rhetoric only a little older (former birchers) or quite a bit younger (young republicans). No one, not even tacitus, who has kept half an eye propped to the political scene in the last 20 years can deny that the JBS society and its rhetoric, far from dissappearing, have simply gone mainstream in the Republican party. In particular the debasement of the entire political system that we see every day when the *actual words* of Tom Delay, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist etc…are reported are examples of this movement of hard right rhetoric to the center.
On a lighter note, someone who posts as pathetically and repeatedly as tacitus appears to on every thread that mentions his name probably shouldn’t claim “not to have read” the threads on which is posting. It makes him sound…oh…how shall I say it? I guess I’ll settle for “really stupid.”
aimai
It definitely sounds like “I have here in my browser a list of 57 comments that refute Retarto.”
I have long since stopped reading Josh and also stopped caring what he writes.
Am I wrong?
Am I wrong?
No, Aaron. But it is fun, in a slighty mean way, to watch the intellectually dishonest smugly protest too much in the firm belief that he’s helping his own cause, when the opposite is unignorably true.
Instead, he typically states his case in a lengthy and erudite post, and any criticism is met with nothing more than “obviously you need to read closer!� or “you might need to think more closely about what you’ve missed!� or similar one-liners that do nothing to advance the discussion.
Isn’t that the conservative blogsphere in a nutshell, though? Try to have a serious argument with Ann Althouse or shudder Pastyboy Goldstein. They will say you are an unserious person, tell you you lack reading comprehension, refer you back to three dozen posts of five page length they wrote (this is a favorite tactic of Goldstein when he’s not spraying sexual obscenities like a fourteen-year-old with tourette’s).
Granted, I doubt the comments at Kos or Atrios are much better, but it really galls to see someone so in love with himself and his gigantic intellect as Trevino play these chickenshit drive-by insult games.
It’s not a crime. In my line of work, brief writing and oral argument are two different skills. But if you can’t defend your case against direct challenges by your adversary and questions from the court, you’re not going to win. You don’t get to just state your case, declare yourself the winner, and ride off into the sunset, snidely telling the inquisitive judge that he’d know the answer to his question if he read your papers more closely.
After reading and posting in discussions where Tacky pops his cyber head in occasionally (on Kos before 2003 and at Tacitus and Red State), this the most accurate description of Tacitus, evah.
I remember calling him a Bircher on his site years ago after witnessing his uncanny ability to link everything wrong in the world to communism … he, of course, denied it while calling me a leftocommunomexislamofascist.
Aaron, no, you’re not wrong, and you’re not alone either. Basically Tacitus Blowhardius made an assertion and Retardo demonstrated that he was in error.
When I was in college in the late 1980s, the Birch Society magazine was stocked in our library and when they weren’t warning us all that Gorbachev was a fraud and perestroika a clever scheme to lull the west into complacency, once ran an article on the scourge of communism in the universities. The cover image was this photo of a hot blonde cheerleader with a hammer and sickle stitched onto her uniform. It was probably the sexiest thing I had ever seen, which probably wasn’t the magazine’s intention.
“Waiting for Tacitus” would have been a very short play.
Isn’t that the conservative blogsphere in a nutshell, though? Try to have a serious argument with Ann Althouse or shudder Pastyboy Goldstein.
First of all, Ann Althouse is unfailingly nonpartisan. I don’t see how you could have failed to realize that, since she reminds us in every other paragraph.
In seriousness, I don’t know that it’s necessarily a conservative tendency, although you’ve certainly described Goldstein to a T. I think part of it comes from the nature of owning a blog, having absolute control over whether you choose to respond or simply shut down the discussion, and having a fan base who will cheer you on no matter what you decide.
But certainly, I can think of plenty of lefty blogs where the proprietor gets into comments and mixes it up with those who disagree. I’ve had some give and take with Kos in the comments even though he rarely comments at all. And certainly, this very thread is a demonstration that if you have a coherent position, it’s just not that hard to defend it. The only hard part is sticking to the merits and not getting distracted by trollish commentors that just want to sling ad hominems.
don’t get to just state your case, declare yourself the winner, and ride off into the sunset, snidely telling the inquisitive judge that he’d know the answer to his question if he read your papers more closely.
that is awesome!
Trevino is clearly smart, and well-lettered.
No. That’s not clear at all. He clearly has a lemon on a stick wedged up his butt.
[…] While I’m waiting waiting waiting for Trevino’s reply (which I’m sure, if his character — and hypocritical stance on Online Integrity — holds true, will come, if at all, with heavy insinuations about my identity), I thought I’d take the opportunity in the next few days to explore the various utterings and writings of William F. Buckley, Tacky’s ideal of decent rightism, whom Tacky regards as a hero and whose measured and nuanced and anti-paranoid stances Tacky implores the netroots to emulate on the ideological flipside. […]
wait, where did tacitus go? his tendentious substance-free condescension seems to have dried up and withered away
[…] Third and finally: By pull out of the OI pledge, he must mean officially, for in practice he violated it at leisure as soon as (and ever after) he signed the damn thing. Basically, he’s repeating himself: he said the same thing about not respecting privacy when he ‘outed’ Thers. The liberals made him do it! But I get the hint, as do, I’m sure, his commenters who will now commence their research. Perhaps Tacky, who violated the terms of OI with the same relish he displayed in inventing and publicising the stupid thing in the first place, can help. […]
[…] (Objectively, to ideologically “balance” Limbaugh, Coulter, Hewitt, LGF, Goldstein, Instayokel, you’d have to dig up someone from the WSWS. To ideologically balance George Will, you’d have get somone like Ted Kennedy. To ideologically balance Max Boot or David Frum you’d have to get Chomsky or Vidal. But no — for wingnuts, the grudgingly-acceptable-in-theory-for-now Left is personified by people like Kevin Drum or George Stephanopolous, while Kos is for them an intolerable far-Left zany person and paranoid conspiracy-theorist, and Al Gore is seen as the return of Vlad Lenin.) […]
[…] “I am delving for bombs — techniques of the fascist right which I simultaneously subscribe to and project upon the bilious Left, like Kos! It is part of my ploy suchtofore to present Phalangist Reaction as Centrism, and Outright Fascism as Acceptable Conservatism.” […]
Seek professional help.