November 16th, 2012
I’m not familiar with Michael Tracy at the “Friendly Atheist” is, but here he is mounting a broad-based attack against Republicans, conservatism, et al with the following:
There are a number of reasons why U.S. “Conservative Movement” activists are suddenly declaringMitt Romney to be “the worst major-party nominee since World War II.”
The link, of course, is to me here.
“Suddenly declaring”? Honestly. (Don’t pull a muscle going through the full list, MichaelT. I’ll pull a highlight reel for you here and here and here and here and here and here and here. This is, of course, a partial list.)
Maybe Mollie Hemingway over at GetReligion should give the rest of the Patheos crew a talk about the dangers of parachuting in on subjects about which you know very little.
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I would invite Mr. Last to respond to the substance of my post. I realize that he had personally been sounding the alarm about Romney for some time, but many Movement Conservatives were not.
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I’ve caught Tracey’s act before. He makes up for in sanctimony and humorlessness what he lacks in general knowledge and self awareness.
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Mr. Tracey,
Why would any of us bother reading the substance of your post when you can’t get basic facts correct?
I suspect you are like many of the so-called “New Atheists” and I can learn more about religion and atheism from reading one typical Ed Feser blog post than clicking on one of your links.
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Dear Fake Herzog,
I notice you state that I “can’t get any basic facts correct,” without citing any such incorrect facts — which strikes me as an odd argumentative strategy.
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Well, here’s one incorrect fact: Last didn’t “suddenly” declare Romney to be a failure. He’s been declaring that for a year.
That error jumped out at me, since it’s in the first sentence of your post. You might want to work on that.
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Do you consider “movement conservatives” to be Erick Erikson from RedState? He was sounding the alarm in the primaries as loudly as Mr. Last.
If you consider the “Conservative movement” to be nothing more than Rush Limbaugh or talk radio, you might be right. That’s pretty much what the author did, and it shows his colossal ignorance on these matters.
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I’m aware of Erick Erickson’s initial disdain for Romney. But I also noticed that Erickson became just as much of a “team player” as everyone else in the Conservative Movement once Romney wrapped up the nomination. That’s the problem: 2012 was all about beating Obama at any cost, which caused many Movement Conservatives to neglect addressing the fatal flaws in their own house.
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What good would it done to not rally around and support the nominee? Should we just have stayed home? (A lot did ironically, but probably not from the base.) Launched a third party challenge making a loss certain?
Politics in an imperfect world will always be imperfect and involve tradeoffs and consequences. So I guess I don’t see your point. Romney’s nomination at least amongst conservatives was rather divisive. He becomes nominated, out of a desire to beat the incumbent, they do what they can.
Doesn’t make their support fake, or the other options any more appealing.
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If Mr. Tracy really wants to know how wrong he is, he thinks that John fund suddenly started talking about voter fraud once Obama became President.
Funny, because Mr. Fund’s first book is this:
It’s release date? July 21,2008. Obama wasn’t even formally the nominee yet. Perhaps it’s best people don’t actually try to interact with what he says. It would be nothing but empty netters or easy layups.
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John Fund’s analysis of the “Voter Fraud” situation has been debunked by everyone, conservative, liberal and otherwise, who doesn’t dwell in the epistemically-dubious GOP media bubble.
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That isn’t the point. The point is he was doing this well before Obama was elected, contra your initial decision.
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Actually, I have the original edition of that Fund book, which was published in 2004.
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Tracey, your apple-polishing hall-monitor prose stylings just bore me to tears; whether “your” facts are legitimate or relevant is a decidedly secondary consideration.
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Jonathan:
You may have inadvertently given a modicum of additional credibility to Mr. Tracey by even acknowledging his referral to your post. Sometimes it is better to let the village idiot have their say rather than attempting to correct them. What’s that old saying about arguing with a moron – they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience?
SWF
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: )
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OMG…so disparate ideological elements of a national party express their opinions/reservations yet eventually rally around their candidate in the general election? This is absolutely unprecedented!! I seem to recall a bunch of MSM columnists and liberal groups gravely concerned that Clinton sold out on welfare reform and that he might pay for it in 1996…
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He links to an Atlantic Wire story about the unmitigated disaster of Romney’s GOTV failure seemingly not noticing that the key sources linked in the article are all conservative blogs–Ace, PowerLine, and yes Breitbart. He then writes the rest of his paragraph relying on the accurate and credible information from these blogs–which was highly critical of the campaign–before turning his attention to attacking the right wing information bubble as spurious propaganda.
Oops.
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I’m starting a new website: Friendly Atheists For Last.
This is in keeping with the theory that one must always create institutional acronyms that sound like comic book superheros doing things (FAFL).
Joe November 18, 2012 at 3:42 pm
And I think I speak for other readers of this blog when I invite you to admit that the first paragraph of your post was shoddily researched and inaccurate insofar as it clearly implied that Mr Last was representative of those conservatives who had changed their views on Mr Romney.
Journalists call that bit the lead and put disproportionate amounts of effort into it not only because it hooks the reader, but also because obvious errors there suggest nothing good about the remainder of the article. In the good old days of print journalism (read: less options for consumers) some readers could at least be relied on to push through. Nowadays, the same Google search window into which you might have typed “Jonathan V Last Romney criticism” can instead take the reader to the blog of someone who knows what the hell they’re doing.