Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Tomorrow belongs to me

There are several archetypes of punditry. Among them are the Zealot (David Horowitz, Michelle Malkin), the Snot (O'Reilly), the Condescending Prick (Hannity), the Calm And Serious (Buckley), the Ranter (Fred Barnes), the Intellectual (Bill Kristol) and several others.

But the most annoying of all is the Wise Man. Such personalities combine calmness with condecension, and display a smug self assuredness that can only come from years of eating their own poo.

High on this list is Dennis Prager (I'm a Jew except for when I'm a Christian.) I can recall years ago on his local LA radio show when he said he would prefer that if his kids smoked anything, it would be a pipe like Daddy and not the evil herb. Makes sense to me.

Jesse at Pandagon has a truly awe inspiring take down of Prager's recent myopic assesment (read: blow job) of James Dobson, wherein Dobson compares Nazis with stem cell research:

Sez Dobson:

" . . . people talk about the potential for good that can come from destroying these little embryos and how we might be able to solve the problem of juvenile diabetes. . . . But I have to ask this question: In World War II, the Nazis experimented on human beings in horrible ways in the concentration camps, and I imagine, if you wanted to take the time to read about it, there would have been some discoveries there that benefited mankind. You know, if you take a utilitarian approach, that if something results in good, then it is good. But that's obviously not true. We condemn what the Nazis did because there are some things that we always could do but we haven't done, because science always has to be guided by ethics and by morality. And you remove ethics and morality, and you get what happened in Nazi Germany."


Sez Prager:

It should be clear to any honest reader that Dobson was not morally equating embryonic stem cell research to the hideous Nazi medical experiments on human beings (mostly, but not only, Jews). If he did, I would join the chorus of protesters. Only a moral fool would compare what Nazi doctors did -- such as exposing men and women to prolonged radiation of their genitals, slowly freezing naked men and women to death, or putting a person into a decompression chamber to watch his eardrums burst -- to medically experimenting on embryonic cells that have no self-awareness, no feeling, no capacity to suffer, and no loved ones who suffer. As Dobson himself put it to me on my radio show: "In the case of killing embryos there is no suffering, no grieving victims, and so they're not the same, obviously."


Sez Jesse:

People talk about the good that conservative columnists can do. The Nazis had their own propoganda artists who willingly put forth a doctrine of complete evil, who spent all their time repeating the words and slogans of the most evil man on the face of the planet. That's what happens when a movement recruits propogandists to promote its ideas.

What comparison are you talking about? I never made a comparison, shitcan.

Using Nazis as the sole point of comparison. Here's the thing about comparisons - you don't use Nazis unless you mean to make a statement about moral parallels to Nazism.


Read the rest. Concise, and to the point, like, on a skewer.

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