Right-Wing Cry-Babies

For all of their chest-thumping posturing, you’d think the right-wing bloggers that come out here telling everyone else what to do and think would have thicker skin. Instead, if you try to engage them on their comments or otherwise, many of them run for the hills. They are obviously used to just patting each other on the backs and find themselves in over their heads when challenged on their usually phony facts and arguments.

For instance, everyone’s favorite laughing-stock, Jessica McBride, closed her site to outsiders soon after the spring judicial election, while she was being spanked around the block by IT and others for her amateur and ludicrous analysis of Louis Butler’s record on the Supreme Court. She just took her ball and went home. Who knows what she has been writing since then behind her protective veil – all I know is I am missing out on at least one laugh-out-loud moment a week.

That was quite a move for an attention hound like McBride. I thought the idea was that everyone just had to hear what she had to say about her husband’s latest failed campaign, her continued pain over getting her radio show cancelled by TMJ...whatever. I mean, she always had so much to talk about. Now, you might be able to get a few chuckles from her occasional GMToday/Freeman column, but it’s nothing like when Jess would get into some serious late-night crankin’ and hit the "send" button all by herself.

The latest example of cowardly behavior comes from the current occupant of the McBride chair at TMJ, the equally inadvertently-humorous J.T. Harris. I’ve engaged Harris a bit on his comment threads in the past couple of weeks over some of his more amusing escapades involving Obama and John Edwards. He even called me out by name in one recent post, and we went back and forth on the comment thread for a little bit and, you know, no harm done – not to me anyway.

Then, on Monday, he posted a brief dig at NBC sports guy Chris Collingsworth for daring to ask Kobe Bryant why he felt so patriotic about putting on a USA basketball uniform. Collingsworth’s behavior in the interview "illustrated the soft bigotry of anti-Americanism," scolded Harris. Well, I watched the clip he linked to and discovered no such thing. When Bryant talked touchingly about what it meant for him to represent our country, Collingsworth drew him out with a very mild devil’s advocate routine. "Is that a cool thing to say in this day and age..." he said, smiling in a friendly way.

It was ridiculous for Harris to pretend that Collingsworth was anything but supportive of Bryant’s sentiments. But, as usual, he was following right-wing talking points from somebody else (very little of what Harris "does" is original), designed to further demonize NBC, pretend like there is all this rampant anti-patriotism all over the place, and blah blah blah.

So, anyway, I posted a brief comment about how he was wrong for calling Collingsworth out for something he wasn’t doing – his comments are not moderated, and there it was. Later in the day, I checked back to find that my comment was deleted. Not only that, when I tried to post another one chiding him for deleting the first one, I was notified that I was on his comment-spam list and the site wouldn’t even take it.

You know, it’s his site – he can do what he wants. But, if he’s going to run and hide from every little challenge, his supposed "national conversation" is a bit one-sided.

It is an interesting trend that right-wing bloggers are increasingly walling themselves off from impure thoughts and challenges. For all of their bullshit-and-bluster, their veneers of self-rightousness are paper-thin. The bottom line is, when challenged, they just can't handle it.