Saturday August 14, 2010

THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM, PART 526,020. Jennifer Rubin of Commentary is fast becoming the worst hack on the internet -- and believe me, that takes some doing. I've been following her work for a while, and while it's always been noxious, of late she's just been cannonballing into bullshit, and at the deep end of the pool.

There was, for example, her commentary on the Palestinian flotilla incident in June, grandly titled "Does Israel Have a Right to Defend Itself?" in which she explained with a straight face, "when the Israeli commandos were set upon as they were lowered from a helicopter, they acted to defend themselves" -- spinning the IDF forces from invaders to innocent victims of unprovoked attack in one sentence. In July, there was her post associating the raving racist Mel Gibson with... Barack Obama.

But her post today reacting to Obama's support for the New York City mosque takes the cake. In this case she doesn't have to reach for unreason, as she and the whole conservative movement have been obviously bughouse on this subject all along. But the ripeness of her raving is something to behold:

Obama has shown his true sentiments now, after weeks of concealing them, on an issue of deep significance not only to the families and loved ones of 3,000 slaughtered Americans but also to the vast majority of his fellow citizens. He has once again revealed himself to be divorced from the values and concerns of his countrymen. He is entirely – and to many Americans, horridly — a creature of the left, with little ability to make moral distinctions. His sympathies for the Muslim World take precedence over those, such as they are, for his fellow citizens. This is nothing short of an abomination.

First, there's the slovenly writing -- Rubin's supposed to be a professional, yet she artlessly vomits out her catchrages (Obama doesn't understand Americans, he's a "creature of the left," he can't make "moral distinctions," etc) without bothering to use minimal skills to concatenate them as even a grade-school polemicist could manage. As we know she's not talentless, we can assume either that she was too shocked and upset by Obama's statement to perform adequately -- which is a long-shot, as her hatred of Obama is demonstrably so intense that she must have been expecting this all along -- or, more likely, that she simply wanted to get plenty of outrage signifiers out there as quickly as possible so that the yahoos might feed on them, and had no interest in building an argument she neither needed nor could manage.

I mean, she's actually saying out loud -- in a magazine that is not, or was not last time I checked, scrawled in crayon on pieces of scrap cardboard -- that Obama prefers the "Muslim World" to the country he serves as President. This is the sort of thing you expect to hear from Tea Party crackpots, or deranged shut-ins burbling ungrammatically on the internet. Now you see it in the "respectable" magazines of the right.

If I were more serious about this gig, I'd try to get a degree in abnormal psychology, fast.