[lbo-talk] Al Gore's Judas Kiss

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Fri Dec 12 06:56:59 PST 2003


Joanna: regarding the article, i think the author is right on cue.  gore is the kiss of death in my opinion.  a spineless coward and DLC hack who threw the 2000 election then moped about it.  i wished he'd kept his beard and stayed a drop out.  being anywhere near him is like standing knee deep in warm asphalt. 

WS:

IMHO, the argument in the article in question is as valid as, say, discrediting Wagner because the Nazis liked his music, or for that matter discrediting Marx because Stalin paid lip service to his theories. That is an old canard of the knee-jerk right - there is no point in engaging in this rubbish.

A broader point I tried to make is the attacks on liberal or liberal leaning politics from the so-called radical "left," which for the sake of brevity and the "inside joke" effect I refer to as "pulling a Proyect." A typical prose in that genre has the following elements:

(1) moral grandstanding i.e. stipulation that the author is a true and uncompromising "vox populi,"

(2) inquisitorial zeal. i.e. the attribution of seriously ulterior qualifications to actions that on their face seem benign (good literary descriptions of such practices can be found in Umberto Eco, _In the name of the rose_ and Milan Kundera, _The joke_) ,

(3) character assassination i.e. stipulation that the persons targeted by the attack is a traitor, dishonest or otherwise not trustworthy; and

(4) guilt by insinuation, i.e. proving the accusations by a selective assembly of taken out of context or purely semantic "evidence" that shows coincidence between the targeted person and the ulterior qualifications attributed to it (for example a classical "pulling a Proyect" in that respect was the insinuation by the protagonist a few years ago that I am not trustworthy because I work for an institution directed by a former official in the Carter administration).

If I were to speculate about the motives behind such practices, I would conjecture that it is a combination of a delusional sense of grandeur and self-righteousness bordering on a mental disorder and the cynical use of such individuals as "useful idiots" by political manipulators. For example, it would be highly inappropriate if the allegations spelled in the article in question were launched by another contender to Democratic nomination, say Mr. Clark, Mr. Sharpton, Mr. Lieberman, or who knows, may be even the Reichsfuehrer Karl Rove himself. However, having some pseudo-leftish wacko launching these charges undercuts Mr. Dean but leaves those who benefit from it with clean hands.

This, btw, is similar to "pulling a Limbaugh" - or having a wacky right winger spewing our ridiculous charges with the speed of a machine gun. Even if a small fraction of these rambling actually stick - the goal of smearing the liberals has been accomplished without "legitimate" Repugs getting their hands dirty (as they can plausibly distance themselves from Mr. Limbaugh). Of course, "pulling a Limbaugh" has no pull on the left, so to assassinate liberals from the left, one needs to "pull a Proyect."

If this analysis is correct, it shows how sophisticated the right wing/Republican propaganda is. From that standpoint, questionable charges of purported anti-semitism are not only ineffective, but also divert attention from the real damage these poisonous pieces of prose do.

Wojtek



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