Conservative journalists often find themselves in something of a tight spot. On the one hand, they want to forcefully argue their opinions. On the other, they want to be taken seriously and have their ideas taken seriously by a media dominated by liberals. Liberal journos, of course, operate under no such constraints. Their ideas are accepted as gospel and they feel free to deploy ad hominem attacks and burn straw men at will. Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner, is the nastiest man in the media, and the rest of the establishment press happily follows his lead. Why debate those whom you can just drag through the muck?
Keeping all that in mind, I found the Twitter fight this morning between Politico’s Glenn Thrush and the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack to be pretty interesting. McCormack has been forcefully (and accurately) pushing back against the idea that Rep. Trent Franks made some sort of Todd Akin-style gaffe by pointing out that the percentage of abortions performed to end a rape-caused pregnancy is, thankfully, relatively low. As John put it:
Simply stating that the number of abortions in the case of rape is low (in relation to the total number of abortions) is not the same thing as Todd Akin's crazy, unscientific claim that women can't get pregnant from "legitimate rape" because their bodies have a way to "shut that whole thing down."
The left and the media, of course, are very upset by this obviously factual statement because, hey, demonizing Republicans is fun. After McCormack explained the facts to Thrush, the Politico scribe responded with a condescending "Check, please!" McCormack, rightfully a bit annoyed by the high-handed response and mocking tone, pointed out that Thrush has "never cared much for facts." He linked to Thrush calling Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe a "global warming denier" and a CNN article pointing out that there’s absolutely no evidence that global warming caused the May tornadoes in Oklahoma.
At this, Thrush got very huffy. "Didn't think you were that kind of guy. I'd never question your integrity or motives just because I disagreed. Mock on..." he tweeted. Never mind the fact that Thrush, not McCormack, first employed a snide tone in their conversation. Having been "othered"* by Thrush—Oh, you’re one of those conservative, I see. No need to take your prattlings seriously any longer—McCormack quickly apologized. In the modern media landscape, the conservative must apologize after being insulted by the liberal.
A liberal who, we should note, is comfortable deploying the language of the Holocaust to advance his agenda. It’s pretty horrific to even implicitly compare people who deny the deaths of 6 million Jews to people who suggest that maybe we don’t have a total understanding of climate science and probably shouldn’t wreck the economy based on models that shift all the time.
But hey, no one Thrush respects is going to call him out on it. So why should he care? What does he have to lose by using such loaded, absurd language?
*To use a term the left will understand.
Update: As if on cue, Rod Dreher makes a similar point on an entirely different topic:
I agree that it’s always good to try to understand the perspective of others. But: every conservative has heard liberals say incredibly ignorant, stupid, untrue things about conservatives, but one rarely hears liberals worry about their own epistemic closure resulting from their monocultural liberalism.
This is exactly my point. This is why I sound so frustrated. Every conservative I know treads carefully around a giant minefield of topics, for fear of being labeled some -ist or another. Liberals, not so much. That's why they can get away with labeling people who disagree with them as no better than Holocaust deniers and get angry when someone points out the inherent unreasonableness of such a comparison. What do they have to worry about?