06 22 05

Of the Strib's defense of Sen. Durbin I have nothing to say. Any editorial that describes Gitmo as a “hellhole” has no words left for any other actual holes o’hell, unless we’re going to layer hell like Dante, with different tiers for different states. I will note that more elderly people died of the Paris heat than appear to have perished from Gitmo conditions, but of course that doesn’t reflect on Paris, Parisiens, or the ability of the French to make air conditioners cheap and readily available. No, it’s this:

"By caving in, Durbin did just what the orchestrated right-wing smear effort required to succeed:"

Orchestrated? You really have to believe in all sorts of deep dark conspiratorial drivel to think that there was a coordinated effort. Apparently they believe that there’s a vast, well-oiled propaganda distribution machine with a big red handle in Karl Rove’s office; he throws the switch, and the information courses out to the talk shows and the blogs. You can think this if you wish, but you look foolish before anyone who has any experience in, oh, talk radio and blogs. It doesn’t have to be coordinated, because – and here’s the key point the editorial writer might want to consider in a calm moment – some people are actually honestly irritated by Durbin’s comments, and came to the conclusion on their own, without having their puppet strings yanked. True. And those people, thus irked, set about to communicated their irkedness to others, sometimes by the use of a voice-amplifying device called “a microphone,” or by the keyboard-input devices attached to their personal computers. Often time one would refer to the other – not because the tickertape in the corner clattered out a command to add another link to the right-wing daisy-chain noise-machine, but because a new point had been made, a telling quote unearthed, a common suspicion eloquently phrased.

It looks orchestrated from the outside, but if you knew nothing of humans, sports, or basketball, you might well assume it was not a competition but a rather energetic form of cooperative dance.

But even if it was orchestrated: so? If the White House has taken the quote, sent a tape to every news station in the country, ran it in a commercial, emailed everyone one Glenn Reynolds’ bloglist: so? That’s politics: the other side says something that fires up your base and botherates the middle, so you use it to your advantage. If coordination is somehow a sin, then we can only assume that the fight to keep John Bolton’s moustache from frightening the horses is a random, ad hoc, catch-as-catch-can thing.

Anyway, Durbin has boo-hooed and clutched the uncomplaining corpse of Lincoln to his breast, and that’s that. I do wonder if staffers showed him how the remarks were played on Al-Jazeera, and informed him that those Christer nutjobs in the heartland – you know, that vast swath south of Chicago known as Most of Illinois – did not regard Al-Jazeera as a voice that held America’s best interests in heart, and Durbin was suddenly struck by the thought that DC and the WaPo edit page is not, perhaps, the entirety of the world after all.

I know, I know. But it’s possible.

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