Steve Soto, the guy who runs the Leftist blog The Left Coaster has recently issued a fatwa of sorts, encouraging his readers and fellow-posters to ignore "trolls" at their site. I don't blame him for wanting to control his own blog. After all, even Leftist websites aren't really collectives; someone's gotta pay for the bandwidth and run things.
But the fact is that Soto may have a total of a half-dozen so-called trolls. And only one or two of us are actually annoying (in that they do not make any arguments or add anything to the discussion, but only come to light up the proverbial sack of dogshit on the porch and run). So what's the deal?
Much to his credit, Soto apparently believes in the marketplace of ideas as much as I do. He has never banned me and, in one important instance early on in my visits there, he put his foot down in defending me against some prick who had published some of my personal information. But I can tell that things have begun to turn for all of us who are involved in the upcoming elections and the unbelievable number and importance of ideological questions riddling the world.
So Soto's got his game face on ---and I respect that. And I respect his desire to keep his site kosher. But I think he knows that the extremism of the Left and its hatred of Bush is going to continue to drag his party down in the eyes of the electorate. The Left are becoming as unhinged as Al Gore. They stand to be tainted by association.
But if you are as committed to the anti-war and anti-Bush position as Soto is, the aversion to dissent must be intense. The offense of being challenged must be an unwelcome intrusion. And the desire to see calamities in Iraq and in political events at home as validation of his partisan position must be intoxicating.
Anyway, the following is how I responded to Soto last night over the question of a pre-election al-Qaeda plot on American soil and whether it will give Bush the license to suspend our elections. (Yep, the Left really believes such a thing may happen.)
It may well be the last thing I may be able to say at The Left Coaster.
Steve, to give you an idea of how much an OCD weirdo I am, I was looking at an old videotape the other night from December 1998. It was all news coverage from the Clinton Impeachment vote in the House. But guess what else was going on in those very same hours? Operation Desert Fox. Do you recall thinking at the time that slamming Baghdad with Cruise missiles was a distraction from the impeachment? I know I did. And how convenient it all was for people like Dick Gephardt that our servicemen were exposing themselves to great dangers ---because, as he suggested, the vote to impeach should be delayed any time our men and women were in harm's way. After all, what would Saddam think of us? Were we willing to weaken our President in a time of military crisis?
It is to laugh.
My point is that there is never a "good" time to let loose the dogs of war or the spectres of peril. You say Ridge issued a threat warning "a day after Edwards and Kerry hit the road." What, is there supposed to be some sort of floating, Ramadan-like period of good taste and forbearance around their "road-hitting" for such an announcement? That's a very silly argument.
Okay, and how about the Pakistani thing where Bush is putting pressure on Musharraf? When is Bush not seeking to find and destroy OBL and Zawahiri and Omar? Oh, but the Iraqi excursion has been keeping us from doing what we should there in Afghanistan. Nonsense. None of us is qualified to say that we haven't done all that we might to find those animals. There are too many variables that we aren't privy to. All "we" know is that we don't have them in our hands. Then again, if you listen to Madeleine Albright, maybe we do. Ughhh...
As for the insinuation that Ted Olson and the others are planning on some sort of extra-Constitutional suspension of the elections, let me make a pledge to you right now. (And I hope every eye and ear there may be is on this statement, which I make under my own name and reputation.) If George W. Bush , for any reason, seeks to suspend the right of the American people to vote this November, I will fly out to California (Southwest Airlines is slashing their fares again! Yay!) and I will march and storm the barricades with you and absolutely raise hell like you can't imagine. I will denounce him as a tyrant and traitor until my throat is raw. I will never stand for that sort of usurpation. NEVER.