Thoughts from
San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture

 
Althouse is not a wingnut
By Tom Smith

That may not mean much coming from me, but still. You can catch up on the controversy here. I think in order to resolve this productively, we need to come up with a good name for Kevin Drum. Something that would capture his self-congratulatory, middle-brow sniffiness. Kevin might as well be MSM.

Which reminds me, did you catch Bill Moyer's screed about right wing religious nuts in this fair land of ours? As a resident of far East County San Diego, I feel a certain sympathy for those who fear religious nuttery, but here's the thing. Bill Moyers is his own kind of religious nut. The fact that he is more difficult to classify gives him no right to make fun of people who think Jesus is going to beam them up as soon as fifth seal of Babylon or whatever is broken. I'm sorry, I'm a Catholic and haven't read the book of Revelation, or Relevations, as Moyers calls it, in a while, so I find it hard to mock. But Moyers is the poster boy for the kind of gooey New Age naif who never encountered a bizarre pagan practice he did not admire. "And what do you feel when you throw the baby into the lava pit?" you can hear him saying. "We in what we prefer to call the civilized world have much to learn from you and your authentic spirituality," he would simper, right before the next infant fondue. What on earth was that old devil LBJ thinking? Was Moyers some kind of elaborate joke? Maybe he let LBJ pick him up by his ears. The yuckiest thing about his op-ed piece was not his contempt for fundamentalist Christians, some of whom are indeed a few fries short of a happy meal, but his earnest belief that the hackneyed set of liberbal bromides he brought forth for our consideration somehow qualified as insight or wisdom. He has every right to be a dimwit, but posing about as some sort of American sage whilst whining about global warming and his grandchildren, is just rude. You just want to say, oh, Bill, put a plug in it. You just want to lock him and Roger Rosenblatt in a room together and let them bore each other to death.
posted by thomas at 2/02/2005 04:22:00 PM