Two months ago I went to a friend's dinner party. For an uncultured, masturbation machine like myself it was good to mingle amongst people with such varying political opinions, while hypertension inducing delicacies and liver enlarging spirits served as the backdrop. I have to say, as much as I usually take the scorched earth, bring a motherfucking missile launcher to a knife-fight approach to debating republicans - the right leaning guests at my friend's dinner party came equipped with an arsenal of substantive arguments. No birtherism. No 14th Amendment talk. I don't even think the word "socialism" was uttered once. Usually, as a republican is making his/her arguments, I'm openly wondering whether or not slashing my wrists and bleeding out all over the place in an act of utter disgust is theatrical overkill. But that night, refreshingly, I fully embraced those fleeting moments of political civility that are few and far between these days. What really threw me for a loop that night was the heated back and forth that I got into with someone I believed to be my liberal, dope smoking brethren - my friend's older brother, a hippie named Miles. It wasn't as if some of his arguments weren't substantive mind you, the snails pace it is taking to close GITMO and end DADT are legitimate criticisms, it was the unwarranted vitriol towards Obama that they were laced with that gave me such pause. At first the rhetorical sparing we did that night felt like Déjà vu, any honest person with a computer will admit that segments of the liberal blogisphere are littered with garden variety defenses of Obama being carelessly characterized as lockstep sycophancy and accusations that the President is George W. Bush's personal surrogate(a Bruce Willis movie reference) are as plentiful as the bumps on Lawrence Fishburne's daughter's ass. So the ease in which I proverbially parried and counter-punched his firebagging nonsense made me feel like Donnie Yen in "Ip Man". When it came to legislation he felt wasn't strong enough, I smiled and quietly sat through all the incendiary rhetoric about Obama grabbing his ankles around bankers and giving the health insurance companies unprompted reach-arounds - mainly because my patience was rooted in the silence I knew I'd bask in after asking him what he would have legislatively done differently. But things took a turn for the worst as soon an Miles ended his rather arduous "Obama is just like Bush" rant with what I still believe to be a vague assassination fantasy.
Since it was around 2 AM at that point I abandoned the conversation by standing up and telling the debate rubberneckers, "Ok, that is my cue to go", then I proceeded to distribute both pounds and hugs to the extremely interesting folks I had met that night. Of course giving Miles the time honored snub. The next thing I know, while I'm digging in my pockets for my car keys outside, I see Miles running up on me in my periphery - waiving his arms wildly, eventually getting in my face, screaming rather incoherently. Right when I'm about to do a Savion Glover inspired softshoe routine on his motherfucking forehead, my friend runs out the house screaming "Please, don't beat up my brother, he's high!!" I immediately say, "Shit, I'm high too, but marijuana is what kept me from making you an only child!" He then says, "No, he's smoking a lot more than weed these days" - as my friend said that Miles was grabbing my shirt so I immediately quipped "Well, you and your brother must be smoking dust if you think I'm going to let any continued act of aggression go unanswered." And that's when he sucker punched me. *POW* So I proceeded to lace him with a 5 punch combination to the face, a throat chop, a couple of kidney punches, and a kick in the gut for good measure before throwing him head first into a gigantic shrubbery of some sort.
I've been thinking about that incident ever since Robert Gibbs gave his now infamous "Professional Left" interview. As much as I questioned the strategy of him broaching the subject at all, and I did feel the term "Professional Left" would allow too many liberal commentators to conveniently play the victim - I immediately knew what Gibbs was talking about and co-signed his sentiments immediately. Two more things that also instantly came to mind: 1)I knew I'd be one in a small handful of liberals who actually had Gibbs' back on this one. and 2)That you wouldn't be able to throw a rock without hitting some liberal commentator having a rather telegraphed hissyfit over what Gibbs had to say. Even though the unpopularity of my Robert Gibbs co-signing has only shown itself to be anecdotal via twitter, the evidence of all the liberal commentators who got their delicate little feelings hurt in a rather scripted fashion was empirical like a motherfucker. The common denominators in all those videos: The using of Robert Gibbs' interview to re-litigate liberal grievances, and a convenient morphing of the Press Secretary's words into a frontal attack on the liberal base as a whole. I don't have a problem with the former, but the latter is intellectual dishonesty bordering on journalistic malpractice. Even Rachel Maddow, who I thought felt the issue was justifiably silly by her not dedicating a breathy diatribe to it on last Tuesday night's show, a person who strikes me as more of a straight shooter than most - took it upon herself to take an Obama criticism that I feel is above reproach(ending DADT) and clumsily wrapped it in what Robert Gibbs didn't say. I guess she was just following the liberal rulebook: "When it doubt, give Glenn Greenwald masturbatory material."
Robert Gibbs made it clear that he wasn't talking about garden variety liberals, just some of the chattering cable class and other influential progressives who desperately tried to convince me last week that the Press Secretary took a healthy shit in my Cheerios. More pointedly, the incessant liberal nihilism that has been masquerading as constructive criticism for the last 17 months - those are the real folks who I wholeheartedly believe Gibbs was talking about. You know, like the guy whose health care frustration prompted him to very casually float the idea of a Primary challenge to the President. Or his petulantly scripted outrage over President Obama's oil spill speech. Or the chick who thought it was a good idea to blow up a bill that improved on our health care system simply because she didn't get her precious way - then proceeding to clumsily team up with Grover Norquist. And support Erick Erickson. Then there's the guy, when he's not waxing poetic about the President's lack of genitalia and calling him a sell-out - is telling his viewers how he plans to sit on his hands come mid-term election time. Hell, just this past weekend we had certain progressives clumsily tripping over themselves like Barney Fife on mescaline in their rush to blast the President on a supposed walk-back that he never made - thus making Robert Gibbs look like a goddamned prophet.
Look, holding the President accountable is a must, no one is arguing that. But what I haven't seen from influential circles of the left if what Bob Cesca likes to call "smart accountability" - it just seems to be nothing but whining malcontents taking every opportunity imaginable to poo-poo the President's impressive string of accomplishments. They like to lecture all of us on how much of what he's gotten done lacks teeth, but then proceed to tightly cup their ears and scream like petulant 5 year olds whenever you point out what exactly the legislative realities are.(See Cenk Uygur) The funny thing is, these same people will wax poetic about the President's depressed base as if they themselves didn't have something to do with that. The same way the President shouldn't be above reproach, neither should any of his liberal critics. Sorry Keith Olbermann. Sorry Adam Green. People have regrettably noted that what Robert Gibbs participated in last week was something that folks call "Punching Hippies", the art of a Democratic administration attacking its liberal critics. Well, as I found out at the dinner party I attended a couple months back, some hippies deserved to be punched. And just like that night, many need to be drug tested.
