(Cont. from Part 1) I got involved in a discussion not long ago at the AOL Journal Think It Over (recently featured on John Scalzi's mothership By The Way Journal) having to do with obscure Web quotes. Rnantz highlighted a few kooky quotes from alleged Democrats.
An otherwise unidentified Netizen with the screen name LiberalLibra is quoted as saying, for instance: "As for when the plane hit the Pentagon and the other plane went down in that field in Penn, I screamed at the TV, 'Get the WH, for God's sake you missed the WH.' "
As I said in the comments section there, I certainly don't know any Democrats who talk like that. And the same goes for the other comments quoted there. So it doesn't mean much to present them as somehow representative of Democratic sentiment.
I mean, it's good clean fun to pick up goofy-sounding comments from very partisan Web sites and cite them to laugh at the supposed extremes of the "other side." Liberal Weblogs do it, too, usually by going to a FreeRepublic.com discussion and finding some choice loopy comments. But lunatic-fringe comments from anonymous Freepers can't be taken to represent the Republican National Committee's positions, either.
And, of course, it's painfully easy to get a Hotmail or Yahoo! e-mail account and go post obnoxious things on the site of the party you don't like, posing as a loony supporter.
But we don't have to go any further than the Web site of Rush Limbaugh, the notorious junkie and racist who President Bush described as a "national treasure" to find goofy Republican comments. And, unfortunately, Rush's pill-popper fantasies are taken seriously by a good portion of the Angry White Guys who makes up much of the Republican Party's base.
(Cont. in Part 3)
2 comments:
Thanks for the link. And thanks for another point of view. I appreciate that even though I sometimes don't agree with it. To your point about not knowing any Democrats who "think like that," neither do I. My Democratic friends and I talk about the issues and we're able to do so without getting crazy. You implied I presented these comments as representative of Democratic sentiment. Nowhere in my post was that implied. They were presented as the worst quotes on the Democratic Underground site.
To Rnantz: Even though the quotes in your post were from anonymous screen names, you DID link to the Web site where you saw them and also to their source Web page, where readers could check out where they came from. Brooks was rightly criticized in his column for not even bothering to cite the Web sites to which he claimed to be referring. It's amazing he even got that piece past the editor. But he did. - Bruce
Post a Comment