The conservatives’ impotent hysteria, or is it hysterical impotence?

The lead article at Lucianne yesterday is a piece by Roger Simon, with his Hollywood-liberal Indiana Jones hat,

hysterically crying that “‘Benghazigate’ … is worse. Far worse. Incomparably worse” than Watergate. And he goes on in that vein.

This is the best the conservative media has to offer?

The conservative articles about the Benghazi cover-up are full of furious denunciations, but, for the most part, as least as seems to me, strangely void of point and meaning. They fail to show why it matters, why people should care about it. That, combined with the fact that the conservatives are crying into the dark of a country covered as in a blanket by the liberal mainstream media, suggests that they will not accomplish their purpose, which is to hurt Obama’s re-election chances.

- end of initial entry -

Gintas writes:

He’s not wearing a “Hollywood-liberal Indiana Jones hat,” he’s wearing a fedora, albeit badly, wearing it at an angle like that …

If you want to look well-dressed—like any man from the 1930s and 1940s, where everyone went around well-dressed—you can get any number of Fedoras here
.

LA replies:

Yes, it’s a fedora. I was about to call it a fedora when I was drafting the initial entry. But it has such a wide brim and is worn at such an angle that it in effect goes beyond fedora-ness into another category. We could call it a Hollywood-liberal fedora.

A reader writes:

I don’t know about Roger Simon specifically, but one thing I have noticed is that a lot of conservatives who you would likely think of as right-liberals seem to latch on to nonideological stuff like this and proclaim it the Worst Obama Mistake, Ever. What’s makes it weirder is that some of the most intense anti-Obama partisans, if you sat them down, probably would accept plenty of underlying liberal assumptions in their politics. I’ve thought that way about Glenn Beck and the late Andrew Breitbart for a while now, although I’ll admit with Breitbart that may be unfair.

LA replies:

Your insightful comment makes me wonder: Isn’t it the case that people who over-emotionalize their opposition to liberals tend to lack solid non-liberal principles? They’re responding with excessive emotion to something about liberalism that especially bothers them, because they don’t have an intellectual basis for their opposition.

For me, a classic example of this syndrome is the overwrought Islam critics at certain blogs, such as Lucianne.com, who would talk about nuking all Muslims, bombing them back to the stone age, etc. Yet these same ultra-right-wing-sounding types would not even consider the much more moderate step of stopping Muslim immigration. The thought of actually doing such a non-liberal thing had never—and in most cases still has never—occurred to them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 01, 2012 12:11 PM | Send