Blog P.I.

So: Deb Frisch, crazy, said bad things about Jeff Goldstein’s child, pilloried, also used as rhetorical weapon by parts of the rightosphere against the leftosphere. I was thinking it would take a week for allegations of hypocrisy to start flying back the other way, but everything happens more quickly in this fast-paced modern world of ours.

Glenn Greenwald is a relatively recent addition to the leftosphere’s A-list, and he got where he is today by writing posts like this reaction to the Deb Frisch/Jeff Goldstein controversy. By way of comparison, he makes an example of this post by the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler’s Misha. It’s not a hard post to make an example of.

Greenwald makes some valid points: the post he cites is appalling, and its author is not a nobody. The author is no more likely to murder five Supreme Court justices than Deb Frisch was to fly to Colorado and abduct Jeff Goldstein’s son, but it’s still some ugly stuff. Meanwhile, the nut of Misha’s response to Greenwald is:

1) Are you familiar with the term hyperbole? If not, look it up.

It seems relatively unlikely that Misha would accept this justification from, say, Deb Frisch. And once the obviously ridiculous death-threat aspect is dismissed, it’s hard to tell what the “hyperbole” defense is supposed to signify. (Perhaps that if the author were not exaggerating for effect, he would have scaled the phrase “koranimal swine” back to the more moderate “koranimals.”)

Greenwald’s main purpose, though, is to accuse his adversaries of enforcing double standards: if Misha — a “prominent blogger,” as he repeatedly points out — is calling for five justices of the SCOTUS to be hanged, where’s the condemnation? Isn’t this a bigger deal than some deranged adjunct saying something tasteless about someone’s family?

There are a few problems here. Firstly, if we’re actually going to take all this nonsense seriously, a death threat from an “obscure person” made in regard to a member of another blogger’s family is actually more likely to be serious than the idea of a furious “prominent blogger” hanging five ninths of the SCOTUS from a tree. Also, accusing righty bloggers of “dig[ging] under rocks” to find Frisch disregards the fact that she came over to Goldstein’s own comment section, unbidden, to have her latest psychotic break. And, with the notable exception of this widely-linked Confederate Yankee post, righty bloggers tended not to require in so many words that their lefty counterparts disassociate themselves from Frisch’s burblings: Greenwald is engaging in his own bit of sneaky guilt-by-association here.

Most important, though, is the argument Greenwald doesn’t make: namely, that the outrage over Frisch’s comments quickly became a cynical thing: another stick with which to whack the other side, and a convenient excuse for people to say whatever they wanted to to Frisch in a spirit of utter moral righteousness. The reason Greenwald can’t realistically advance this argument is that he’s in the same line of work himself:

One need only peruse the routine hate-mongering of the Right’s opinion leaders and their prominent bloggers — the Malkins and the Mishas and the David Horowitzs and the Ann Coulters — and one will find more hateful and deranged rhetoric than one can stomach. And it is almost never condemned, including by those who self-righteously parade themselves around as Defenders of Civility [ed: he's talking about Glenn Reynolds] and have the audacity to demand that others condemn such rhetoric when it comes from far less significant and influential corners.

Right. It’s not clear whether Greenwald genuinely believes his rhetoric, but he can certainly mau-mau with the best of them — and it is, after all, the nature of the game. (Plus, it’s hard not to root for him when he’s going after the “koranimal swine” guy.) Meanwhile, as a bonus for the rest of us, the grudges fomented over the last few days will make things all the more fun the next time a partisan does something stupid.

The Deb Frisch fallout is just the latest bout of a great wrestling match that plays out in comment sections all over the world: holds are tested, leverage is exploited, advantages are pursued, and both sides spend most of their time wearing ridiculous outfits and trying to get different sections of the crowd to go berserk. There’s never been a better time to be watching.