Greetings from Cyberspace's Own Elba

I am always amazed when the people running powerful institutions pull boneheaded stunts and make obviously bad decisions.  Truly, I walk around all day thinking that these people, by virtue of their resume, must be more clever than I am.   Jim Brady is the latest example of a mover and shaker, who I figured must be a strategic mastermind, to reveal himself as just another guy, susceptible to doing very stupid things. 

Jukeboxgrad, writing at dKos, has torn apart Brady's case for suspending comments by not only wading through over two hundred entries in the comment thread that allegedly sent the fragile Mr. Brady's head between his knees but also by working through the timing of the whole incident based on an archive of the thread and Brady's own comments on the issue.   Go read it; it's very good.  But the big news for the purposes of this blog is that one of my comments shows up in the infamous group of 42 deleted comments, which the pro-war WaPo considered too indecent to inflict upon the public.  There's one from NTodd and Hesiod (scroll to the end for all three) as well, so I'm in excellent company.  Is there a list of lefty bloggers out there in pro-war WaPo land?  Here's my profanity which dare not insult the human eye:

Wow, I didn't think there was anything you could do that would be worse than ignoring the lie you printed about Abramoff's dealings but you figured out something worse. You defended the lie and dug yourself deeper into an ethical morass from which you are unlikely to drag yourself out of. Step One: Stop lying. Step Two: I really think you should hire an assistant ombudsman to keep you in line. Anyone who knows the facts and hasn't signed any pledges to be faithful to RNC spin would probably be a good minder for you. There's no doubt that you need the help.

Posted by: eRobin | Jan 19, 2006 12:26:43 PM | Permalink

The worst part about it is that darn "out of" at the end of the second sentence.  Maybe it's bad grammar that Brady so desperately wants to keep from America.   I can support him on that.

It's funny that this one made the cut because I remember when I wrote it how proud I was not to be calling for Howell to be fired, as so many people were.  Not only was I a creative thinker, my suggestion is economy-friendly and, therefore, pro-BushCo.   See what I mean about Brady?   He just doesn't think things through.

Related: While I clearly think that Brady is lying about why he shut down the comments, I'm on record agreeing with noneother than Dan Okrent, the miserable NYT ombudsman, who used this same sort of defense to discredit  reader email and lefty bloggers when he was charged with examining the paper's coverage of the 2004 campaign:

Some women reporters regularly receive sexual insults and threats. As nasty as critics on the right can get (plenty nasty), the left seems to be winning the vileness derby this year. Maybe the bloggers who encourage their readers to send this sort of thing to The Times might want to ask them instead to say it in public. I don't think they'd dare.

I never liked all the kneepad and blowjob talk - to say nothing of the other stuff that Okrent and now Brady are alleging to have received from the left. (It's always the left.)  I don't think they're telling the truth about that, but I think that we open a door for them to lie effectively when we go down that road. 

 

Comments

[DavidByron]

The old defend the little woman ploy huh?

It's a great wheeze and one that is mostly used by feminists to justify censorship, or to intimidate people. In both cases you refer to Robin, the point is that it is WOMEN who are being insulted and of course that cannot stand. Everyone understands that by its very nature a comment made to a woman is 1000 times worse than a similar comment made to a man. Feminists have taught us that for years.

Sexual harassment is an entire legal framework based on the fact that women are far more vulnerable to rude words and jokes than men are. Again that flap the other day about it being illegal to be annoying on-line was part of VAWA. Feminism at work making sure that hurtful words spoken to women are a criminal matter. In sexual harassment cases it's often the case that the man is presumed guilty until they can establish their innocence - a reversal of the usual onus.

My experience on commenting on feminist boards is that it is routine that at some point one of the feminist commentators will accuse the male critic of raping her or stalking her. Regardless of the physical impossibility of this accusation, most of the other feminist commentators will take up the refrain and call the male critic a sex abuser, pervert etc etc and demand that he be banned because it would be unreasonable for his "victim" to have to post at the same board as the pervert who is raping / stalking her.

[KathyF]

I didn't comment; I emailed her instead. Got no reply. So then I sent another, to her and others at the Post including someone in human resources, mainly asking why no reply, not even a auto-response.

Still no reply.