I have been trying to come to terms with a few things over the past few days. Ann Coulter's "faggot" remark at CPAC is one of them. I was there last year when she made the "raghead" comment, and I remember the outrage of everyone in the room, myself included. But how can I revile her for her cheap shots when I take so many of my own?

Yesterday, the arch-fiend Robert McClelland made a hard-core anti-semetic remark in the comments section of his Blahg:

When the State starts rounding up my Jewish neighbours, I’ll speak up.

Not me. People like Klownsella, Chernyuk and Smeagol the Jew have taught me it's not worth getting involved. When next they come for the Jews I doubt I'll even be able to muster up a "what a shame".

This caused both the left and right of the blogosphere to gasp in collective horror. Cherniak called for McClelland's head on a pike, and it was handed to him by the NDP. As disgusted as I was with Robert, I couldn't help but think of how last summer the Blogging Tories and the Conservative Party could have done the same to me. They didn't, but they could have. My views of Islam may be similar to what others are thinking, but most of them will never say it.

Just the other day I was defending people's rights to say whatever they please in the blogosphere. How could I condemn him? Yet, how could I not? So I emailed Kathy, who would prefer to give McCelland a soapbox to stand on while he proves what a filthy Jew-hater he is. Anti-semitism is rife on the left, and it needs to be exposed - so let Bobby Boy expose himself all over the place. Kathy was finally able to help me put into words the confusion I had been feeling over Coulter and McClelland:

They have a right to say anything they want and so do we. I wish she hadn't
said it at CPAC, but I also think that being sent to rehab for saying
faggot is worse than saying faggot -- and a leftist would think the
opposite of course.

My concern is that Jason the Hall Monitor and Co. on both sides are trying
to clean up the blogosphere and make it into something it isn't. It isn't a
newspaper or tv show. Swearing and nudity or whatever have their place (a
submarine, the walls of an art gallery) but aren't appropriate everywhere
(church, the super bowl half time show). Blogging is its own space where
certain rules don't apply. In my opinion as one of the pioneers who doesn't
like to see blogging being professionalized and sanitized.

So Robert can say what he wants on his blog, but Coulter should have been
more circumspect at CPAC. Then we say so. What I sense is something far
more insidious that anything Robert or Coulter can say and that is the
stuck up little twerps like Jason and Kinsella and their faux outrage over
other people's opinions and the not-far-off call for censorship.

A place for everything and everything in its place. I said something similar last year about Coulter. I thought that what people say in the privacy of their own homes with friends (or on their blogs) is one thing, but what they say to a room full of impressionable university students who will be leading us tomorrow (CPAC) is quite another.

So let McClelland spew his vitriol against the world's most persecuted religion, and let me attack their attackers. In the meantime, let's send Annie to finishing school.

Labels: Anti-Semitism, Blogging