I Find "Liberal" Pundits Relentlessly Unimpressive

Poor, poor Jason Linkins at HuffPo is confoozled:

Naturally, I'm not a big fan of Donald Rumsfeld, or the Iraq War strategy, or the foreign policy -- if it can be called that -- that came out of the Bush White House. And, on principle, I'm sort of okay with messing around with the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Nevertheless, I find it hard to divine the value of Code Pink yelling at Rumsfeld in this setting.

I recommend Jason reads Gene Sharp's 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action, especially Methods 31 and 32: haunting and taunting officials. Just a couple of the myriad tactics Code Pink uses regularly.

In the first place, there's the pointlessness: the Beltway press are fully on board with "looking forward, not backward," and preserving comity, and not troubling their pretty little minds with the hurtful thoughts of the people they cover going to jail.

This is precisely why you do such things. Shake up the status quo, interrupt the cognitive dissonance, if only for a moment. Without being challenged, officials and the press who fawn over them will never feel the need to change their minds.

But more to the point, I've watched Code Pink shout at Al Gore, of all people, at Netroots Nation, of all places, as he was explaining his national environmental policy initiative, of all the things to shout down.

No, you actually haven't. Really, you haven't.

When you basically go out and disrupt EVERYTHING, it's hard to know where you stand on ANYTHING.

If only there were some technology wherein "computers" could be "internetworked" and you could check out a "web" of information so as to divine Code Pink's "stances." And if only Code Pink did stuff other than disrupting things.

So, yeah, I find this stuff relentlessly unimpressive, but I've also found that plenty of people object to me saying so. Just like the Tea Parties! I nevertheless believe that just as crisis demands we not abandon our principles, our response to crisis demands we at least attempt to preserve a measure of dignity.

More stupid stunts, eh? Dignity above all is what's important to armchair inactivists who wring their hands when somebody stands up to murderers! It must be frustrating knowing you're so ill-informed and self-righteous when these silly people don't listen to your wisdom and concern...

ntodd