That's the Pot Calling a Spoon a Cookware Container

So Gabe mentioned recently that he's reading a John Scalzi book, so I decided to check Scalzi out. And I came across his essay "I Hate Your Politics", and it's hilarious...unintentionally. Remember that Chesterton quote about how you can tell someone's a Buddhist by his way of telling you he's not a Buddhist? Remember how the anarchist poet in Man Who Was Thursday keeps getting caught because his cover roles are always ridiculous stereotypes from anarchist pamphlets? Well Scalzi pretends he's lambasting liberals, conservatives, and libertarians equally, but—while quite correct about libertarians—he essentially says that liberals are bad because they aren't more unified, don't press their advantages, and don't have any fun with their obvious moral and intellectual superiority. And then he says conservatives are all lockstep conformist bigots whose ideology is based on hate.

Look, Johnnykins, if you claim you're going to lambaste all three Mediterranean monotheist religions, but then say the problem with Muslims is they're too lenient with the infidel, while the problem with Jews is their greed, cowardice, and penchant for the blood of Christian children, you aren't fooling anyone.

The actual problem with conservatives—other than the problems common to all forms of liberal politics, like ideologically-entrenched historical illiteracy—is just the opposite, and you'd know that if you knew anything about them. The conservative movement has suffered hugely from its embrace, nay fetishization, of the "Big Tent"; that's why they haven't been able to get rid of batshit vermin like Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, and you can hear otherwise sane people pretending Ayn Rand was a human being.

But it's funny that Scalzi, who is a liberal however much he might deny it, thinks the conservative movement is the one motivated by hate. I invite him to check out Michelle Malkin's mailbag, and then tell me one liberal who gets that many racial slurs and rape-threats—what, pray, has any right-wing pundit done remotely comparable to Keith Olbermann calling her "a big mashed up bag of meat with lipstick" on national (ish) television? Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton schill for Planned Parenthood's open genocide of their people, and defend black rapists, murderers, cop-killers, and drug-dealers who prey on blacks: but it's Herman Cain and Allen West who get called Uncle Toms (to be fair, the correct term for Jackson and Sharpton is kapo, but no right-winger would dare say that, either). It's not conservatives who ignore the judicial rape practiced in Iran and Saddam's Iraq, while equating Israel to Nazi Germany. Nor is it conservatives who Oscar-nominated The Reader—a movie about an ephebophile death camp guard being harassed by nasty Holocaust survivors.

It's not conservatives who lionize Che Guevara, who, remember, never actually fought anybody who had a chance to hurt him—his last words, spoken after throwing down a fully-loaded rifle, were "Don't shoot, I'm Che Guevara, I'm worth more to you alive than dead!" Big man though he was while murdering bound teenage boys and old men, he couldn't keep quiet about his low opinion of black people:

The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent... We're going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the Cuban revolution. By which I mean: nothing!

He also said Mexicans were "a rabble of illiterate Indians". Lest we forget, Batista was black, Che and Castro were white. No, I know, noted documentary "The Godfather II" cast a blond guy for Batista. Funny how that works.

Look, as far as I'm concerned the Constitution has the same authority as the warranty on your fridge^[1], the founding fathers were a bunch of wooden-toothed slave-owning Freemasons who called Hanoverian puppet-rulers tyrants with a straight face, and capitalism is "the least shitty and lame-brained of the shitty lame-brained economic systems currently on offer". But the American right, stupid and illiterate though it may be, did not schill for Communism and does not ignore the grotesque abuses in the Arab world, vilify Jews, and cover up for vicious, brutal criminals based on their skin's melanin content (and vilify all with that same melanin content who don't march in ideological lockstep), while masturbatorily congratulating itself on its moral superiority.