Sweet Nothings of Civility at Ordinary Gentlemen

The phrase "effete snobs of the Democratic Party" popped into my head recently when reading Freddie de Boer's rambling twaddle over at the Ordinary Gentlemen. Not that such drivel is unexpected from the denizens of the nihilist left, but with a new chief executive snob in town, there's a special obnoxiousness to Freddie's long-winded puffery. Freddie's the kind of Democrat who takes Obamessianism to a whole new level of intolerant bombast foisted off as intelligently uplifting progressivism.

Anyway, I've previously smacked down Freddie on his ignorant gay marriage absolutism. Today I'm interested in this little tussle between Freddie and Robert Stacy McCain, and the follow-up incoherencies served up by Scott Payne in his extraordinary post.

First note Freddie's update to his post excoriating McCain's alleged fealty to "Bushite dead-enderism" and the sounds of "bat-shit talk radio" conservatism:

Helen Rittelmeyer, I’m sorry to say, chimes in with a “Hear, hear” for McCain in his comments. This, I take it, is a function of Helen’s lamentable opinion that it’s more important to stick up for your side than to value intelligence, principle, democracy, morals or logic. I’m afraid that the McCains of the world are the inconvenient hole in Helen’s philosophy of loyalty; some people, and their opinions, do not deserve your loyalty, no matter how much they tell you they are on your side. That Robert Stacy McCain is a tedious nothing will come as no surprise to those of us with a Web browser and the ability to read. Stranger still, Helen likes precisely the kind of faggy thinkers and writers– you know, those guys who care about, like, good arguments, and stuff – who McCain would consider a part of the damnable pretentious elite. But Helen’s philosophy, I think, doesn’t permit her to give anyone who is ostensibly on her side the heave hoe. Her position on party and loyalty threatens to leave her like the person who, out of loyalty, refuses to take the keys from her drunk friend, right before he drives her off of a cliff.

Folks can see what I mean by obnoxious snobbery, and in fact, I'm not the first to notice. Sonny Bunch takes issue with Freddie's "low-level snark," and then as noted Scott Payne takes to the keyboard to put in his two cents:

... I think that Bunch is absolutely correct about this kind of aggressive and ultimately pointless communication permeating the Internet by my lights. It frankly shocks me how often I run into someone commenting on a post who thinks that the only thing he or she is required to do in order to further a conversation is rhetorically pistol whip whomever they happen to disagree with. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that American culture ... but the sheer lack of civility that informs so much of our online discussion is disheartening for someone who wants to believe that things like blogs and online magazines can act as a means of truly forwarding discourse in meaningful ways. It’s hard to hold out hope for that belief when much of the effort you witness on sites is peoples’ creative means of calling each other fucking morons (pardon the language).

Gosh, that's simply wonderful. I don't know what to say at this lost promise of online sweet nothings, except it's rather interesting that Payne spends more time calling out the rude witless hacks of the blogging chat boards than his own extraordinarily hare-brained co-blogger.

That's not surprising, either, as it turns out, since the whole enterprise so far over at Ordinary Gentlemen is a ramshackle edifice of erstwhile libertarians and neoconservatives who have succumbed to the pull of Obamessianism. (True though, Freddie's apparently a "movement" progressive who's sipped a little too deeply at the well of Democratic victory. Maybe he'll anchor this Edsel's progressive creds, as that's where things there are headed anyway.)

In any case, I've written already about the very issue at base of this whole dust-up, so I'll save the heavy intellectual firepower for later. It's not like I'll be needing to dig too deeply into the stockpiles, in any case, especially given Mark Thompson's intellectual impotence demonstrated during previous go-rounds in a preview outing as one extraordinary cohort of the League.

More later, then ...