Professor Schaff shames me, quite properly, in his recent post. My language in my own post contra CCK's "Mel Gibson" post was perhaps intemperate, as he gently suggests. Moreover, he presents a model of reasonableness with respect to which my passions sometimes fall short. Chad Shulte fabricated a quotation and attached Professor Schaff's name, and that of Northern State University, to the fabrication. It no doubt pleased Chad to see that I was a bit irritated.
Now Chad has explained himself in rather amazing terms.
Schaff asks for a retraction of my previous post about his Mel Gibson comments.
He also suggests we all need to be a little more compassionate toward our political enemies.
I've often thought about that. I'm pretty hard on the wacky right and their elected officials.
And I'm generally a pretty compassionate person.
But for what has gone in U.S. and South Dakota politics over the past couple of decades as the GOP has moved further and further to the right, I think this is a pretty rich suggestion from Schaff.
Democrats have had their values and morality questioned for years on end by Republicans and specifically those in the extreme right of their party. There is no bigger insult than to put into question someone's values or morality.
I, for one, have had enough of it.
Democrats who want to roll over and play nice in response to these charges are doing an extreme disservice to progressive causes.
I've had enough of it.
We either fight these fundamentalists who have grossly misrepresented Christianity or we cease to exist and our state suffers.
I am through playing nice with a group who has been hurling the worst of insults at me and my beliefs for decades.
If I understand this correctly, and granted my view is biased, Chad is saying that because the other side has been "hurling the worst of insults at him", it follows that he need not try to understand what they are saying, that in fact, he need respect no rules of propriety at all in responding to them. Above all, compassion towards one's "enemies" is a sign of weakness, and he will have none of it. It's a rather polemical morality that Chad champions. Is this really what the left has become?
I confess that I do not share Chad's sense of righteousness. I can find lots of examples where the left in general, and Democrats in particular, have questioned the values and morality of everyone on the left. This doesn't stop me from attending a dinner part at Jim Seeber's house, or being friends with my colleague Bill Wieland, with whom I argued about the Iraq war long before it began to look like he might be right. I also don't share Chad's fondness for the notion of collective guilt.
Perhaps I shouldn't have said the following about Chad, after he fabricated a nasty quotation and attributed it to one of us:
I can interpret this only in one of three ways: Chad is too stupid to read; Chad is too lazy to read before shooting his mouth off; Chad is a liar. Just right now I can't tell in which direction charity would point.
I had assumed that Chad did a sloppy job of reading the post, and honestly if careless expressed what he thought Professor Schaff had said. But I can't help noticing that he failed to acknowledge this in the post above. So I might have been a bit rude when I wrote what I wrote. But I wasn't wrong, was I?
Recent Comments