JUST A FEW NOTES...

...on the Jonathan Chait bullshit, because for the most part Pareene has dealt with it ably and I only have this to add:

1. I assume all the very public complaints against "political correctness" raised in Chait's wake were smuggled out of liberal gulags on toilet paper as samizdat, right? No? Then what's the fucking problem?

2. Every single conservative response to Chait I have seen has been too incredibly stupid to take seriously -- and since many of them call Chait a p.c. hypocrite because he said bad things about conservatives (which is the same thing as a fatwa, apparently), I guess that makes me p.c. too. Hmmph! My many services to freedom of speech count for nothing, I see.

3. OK, one example: Here's a key section from Ace of Spades' offering on the subject:

Now, the PC Mob types will reject this distinction because -- and listen closely here-- most of them are Stupid and Inarticulate; most of them are in fact incapable, on a mental or emotional level, of making an academic or at least essay-like case. 

They are in fact low-thinkers. It is no accident that they favor the brutish, the primate-like, the animal-level sorts of "persuasions" of group hooting and feces-throwing. They favor this because this is what they are capable of, and no other. 

Thus, in a very real sense, to insist on the standards of rational discourse with such people does in fact predjudice them; it is the same as insisting a horse walk on two legs to enter a race. It is the same as disqualifying them outright.

Behold the enlightened discourse of which we would be deprived by some leftists on Twitter! I wonder if the editors of Der Stürmer ever thought of complaining that protests against their caricatures (carried out in the early-20th-Century version of social media, which I guess would be graffiti in cabaret bathrooms) were in fact assaults on their free speech. If not, we should congratulate the brethren for advancing the form.

SCRAPING BOTTOM.

At New York, Jonathan Chait offers this assessment of Dick Cheney defending torture on TV:

The host, Bret Baier, asked Cheney about Bush’s reported discomfort when told of a detainee’s having been chained to a dungeon ceiling, clothed only in a diaper, and forced to urinate and defecate on himself. “What are we supposed to do? Kiss him on both cheeks and say ‘Please, please, tell us what you know’?” Cheney said... 

Here, finally, was the brutal moral logic of Cheneyism on bright display. The insistence by his fellow partisans on averting their eyes from the horrible truth at least grows out of a human reaction. Cheney does not even understand why somebody would look away. His soul is a cold, black void.

OK, take a second and try to imagine how the lowest sort of hack might respond to this. You probably envision sputterings about 9/11, and Jonathan S. Tobin of Commentary does supply those. But his real achievement -- one I confess I couldn't have predicted -- is to reduce the issue to one of style, and to claim Cheney's opponents are not disgusted by his defense of practices denounced by civilization for centuries, but by Cheney's balls. Here is a man who, when confronted with shackled, raped, broken-legged innocents, looks them in the eye and says "sucks to be you," and liberals are too lame to appreciate it:

The discussion about torture reminds us of the qualities that always annoyed his opponents most about Cheney. It’s not just that he does things they hate, it’s his air of defiance in which he doesn’t even accept the premise of the questions posed to him that makes them think he is evil... 

Chait’s argument rests on the notion that even if you thought torture might be necessary, the decent thing to do is to act shocked or horrified by the ill treatment of even the bad guys of al-Qaeda. Cheney won’t play that game...

Try to imagine defending a sullen, unrepentant murderer thus: Ooh, you're just mad at Dick because he's not all [high feminine voice] "I'm so sorry I gut-ripped that old man with a letter opener." Well, he won't play that game! The defense rests! 

Whatever they're paying Tobin, it's not enough.