Little Green Footballs Can't Have It Both Ways

Although I do about 99% of my political reading on blogs, and most everything that I pass on here at J.I.P. comes from blogs, I try to make it a point not to actually write about the blogs themselves very often, except to give them credit for finding something really cool.

Today though, I'm going to talk about a blog called Little Green Footballs.

Little Green Footballs fills a valuable niche in the blogging world: They cover the outrageous and incredibly barbaric things that Muslims do sometimes... and they are usually things that the mainstream media is loathe to report on... probably out of fear of seeming like they are "ganging up on" Muslims. Little Green Footballs has no such reservations.

There is another niche that Little Green Footballs also fills: It is one of the few prominent far-right blogs that allows comments to be posted on it. Even though you have to register, and even though the Blogmaster, named Steven Johnson, regularly deletes comments with which he disagrees, it is one of the few places where you can go and read what could best be described as "the Id"... the unfiltered, passionate, and sometimes belligerent soul of the conservative movement.

It is with these blog comments in mind that we move on to today's story.

About 10 days ago, Vice President Cheney was in Afghanistan when a suicide bomber made an attempt to kill him. Over at the Huffington Post, a prominent liberal blog, several commenters leapt to their keyboards, and laughingly expressed dismay over the fact that the attack had failed... essentially wishing death upon the Vice President.

On the Little Green Footballs blog, Steven Johnson and his commenters got quite upset over this display of unfiltered, passionate, belligerent liberal venom directed towards the Vice President. This, of course, gave fuel to a couple of day's worth of debate regarding — on one side — those infamous "hate-filled liberals", and — on the other side — the fairness of using essentially anonymous comments on blogs as evidence of an entire liberal mindset.

Moving on...

Yesterday, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a terrorist in U.S. custody, told about how he had masterminded a plan to assassinate liberal ex-President Jimmy Carter. Upon hearing this news, what happened with Little Green Footballs? Perhaps some comments appeared wishing death upon the ex-President?

Of course they did. Raw emotion (and the need to get a few laughs) trumps consistency of opinion every single time.

Granted, Mr. Johnson at LGF is trying to minimize his own readers' comments (the comments which favorably compare a cockroach to President Carter, and beg the Justice Department to give the terrorist a weekend pass to carry out his plan) by claiming a false equivalency: that the LGF comments don't "rise to the level of hatred" of the comments that the Huffington Post readers put up. That's malarkey, of course. The subject is the mirthful hope of assassination, not how stridently or thuggishly it is called for. Denouncing it one day, and hosting it on your blog the next is hypocrisy.

Personally, I have no problem with dark humor. I'm sure that if terrorists killed either Dick Cheney or Jimmy Carter, everyone — liberal and conservative — would share equal shock, regret, and outrage. Nobody takes sassy rants like these seriously, and they hardly rock the world one way or the other.

However, as always, my job is to point out when people say one thing and do another... or believe one thing and practice another... or commit sins while condemning the same in others. It's all evidence of hypocrisy, and it's what I like to write about.

So anyway, LGF folks... keep writing what you write about. Keep commenting if it's what you like to do. However, when you see people on the other side of the aisle doing something you disagree with, make sure that you are disagreeing with what they do because it is something that you would never do yourself, instead of disagreeing with it because it is simply being done on the other side of the aisle. It's only fair.