Monday April 13, 2009

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP about the Somali pirate story and its uses by the rightwing blog community. While we are always impressed with the brethren's ability to bellow catch-phrases and do other political goon-squad business, they are also capable of more scholarly approaches, even rabbinical attentiveness to philosophical details.

Thus, where the ordinary reader would be mainly pleased for the captain and proud of the Navy, with Obama very far down the list of people of whom they would even think, rightbloggers sought painstakingly to establish Obama's lack of a role in the victory (or his many malfeasances within that victory) and to build little twisting logic-bridges to lead readers to the conclusion that the success of this mission proved the feebleness of the President's piracy policy, which just this week became one of the nation's many pressing concerns.

One of my favorite bits, for which the column had no room, was Michelle Malkin's terse dispatch, in which she quoted a Vice Admiral to the effect that "Washington had rejected negotiations with the pirates" and followed up, "Would have been nice to hear those words directly from the commander-in-chief." Maybe he says patriotic things his tongue catches fire or something. Of course, if the President went on TV and performed such chest-pounding as Malkin prescribes, we would have heard that he was trying to hog the limelight. It's a deep game and may convince dozens.