Sucked Into the Douglas Vortex

My proposed blogging break is turning out to be shorter than I expected, but considering my post last night, maybe I shouldn't have expected it.

Anyway, I think I'm getting a "vortex," like Ann Althouse:

Boy, left-wing bloggers really hate Ann Althouse....

Evidently, there's a pack of bloggers hoping to catch Althouse on any slip-up, particularly when the Times has given her space [here]

Well, boy, left-wing bloggers really hate Donald Douglas as well.

It turns out there's a pack of bloggers (a small, but nevertheless vicious pack, like a wolf pack), who is out to catch me slip up.

The guys (gays?) at LGM have had me in the crosshairs for some time, and TBogg at Firedoglake posts some funny-bone slams on American Power from time to time.

But Dan Nexon's a new member of the pack, seen in his entry this morning, "Donald Douglas Goes Completely Insane:"

In private exchanges with Donald over the years, he's repeatedly discussed his use of "red meat" rhetoric to drive up his readership and implied that one should not take that rhetoric too seriously. He's even, to his credit, blogged about this--which also means I'm not inappropriately revealing the content of private correspondence....

At some level, this is all rather amusing. Donald's been on a self-styled crusade to reveal the pathological hate spewed by the left blogsphere, one in which he repeated proclaims that nothing on the right compares....

But I find it both sad and frightening....

Donald is a trained political scientist and a college teacher (by all accounts, an excellent one). He knows, or at least should know, that a 4% variation in the marginal tax rate for the highest income bracket is not the difference between communism and capitalism (John McCain does, as he said on video before the last days of the 2008 campaign), that both McCain's and Obama's policies "redistribute wealth," and... well, I could go on and on. If he does know, he has an obligation to pass this knowledge along to his credulous readers. If he does not, then there's little left to say.

Let me admit, first, that Nexon's so far the only blogger who's nearly one-upped me in debate, and he's also a respectable scholar to boot. I respect him.

But what's the fuss, really? Over this passage from my post?

Now, let me disabuse my relentless left-wing critics: Barack Obama is not a communist in the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist mold, as seen in the widget above-right.

He is, however - whether folks want to acknowledge it or not - deeply in solidarity with many of the forces arrayed against the U.S. This I believe of Barack Obama: Not imminent physical destruction of our nation (though not completely discounted), but destruction nonetheless. Destruction of the moral light that never lets the malignant growth of evil roll across the land. No, America's enemies will get a respite, where they can regroup and reconsider what they want from America. There will be a reckoning, at some point, of course. Because even those who have been hoodwinked by the hope-i-ness of change will not long tolerate the yoke of Third World despotism and terror over this proud nation. A despotism seeking to behead the American individual, and the culture that bore him - all of this, dearest Americans, faster than you can say Madrid 2004.

It's true, of course: I do indeed throw out the juicy conservative red-meat from time to time, to chum the waters a bit. In fact, that's exactly why a posted the ObamaNation "Yes, We Can" Marxist-Leninist widget to the top-right of the page last night. I'm taking it down now, naturally, because I don't believe Barack Obama's the heir to Joseph Stalin.

I do think Obama's a master at disguising just how radically left he is, and how badly he wants to turn the United States in a European-style social democracy - a "brave new Omerica"- and I take nothing back from my post, especially the conclusion: "Stand with me, my friends! Fight with me! Fight for what's right for our country!"

And that's what I'll continue to do, with the effect, apparently, of building a vortex...