My President has had his photo op. An official video is released by the White House press office, documenting the dramatic walk to the front of the church accompanied by melodramatic music. Demonstrators have been forced from the intervening park. A priest has been removed from the church. The President is shown sternly waving the Bible, scowling for the cameras.
The White House is arguing that tear gas was not used to clear lawful protesters out of the way so Donald Trump could stage that dramatic walk to pose in front of the church. The debate spills into the comment section of our own site, where a conservative reader charges “leftists” with creating the tear gas fiction. Those leftists, presumably, include me.
It was actually not tear gas, the argument goes, but rather a combination of smoke canisters and what the Park Police are calling “pepper balls”.
If that seems like a debate over a trivial difference, it is.
Even that triviality seems to go against conservatives in general and the White House specifically. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have long had their own analysis available to the public. The substitute chemicals are, in fact, tear gas.
I am old enough to remember now obscure readings from the dim and distant past. In those youthful days, conservative icon William F. Buckley was in constant rhetorical war with fellow Catholics from the more liberal Jesuit order. He occasionally managed to introduce an acid taunt or two against his favorite adversaries even when debating fellow conservatives.
In the late 1980s, he took on Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia over a nuclear treaty. He managed to slip in a dig.
The Jesuits score off the exaggeration of their critics. Accuse them of killing three men and a dog, they will triumphantly produce the dog alive.
Clever. Shall we apply that here?
Conservatives are arguing, absurdly, that the violence against lawful demonstrators who were peaceably assembled involved pepper balls and smoke bombs rather than actual tear gas.
As if that matters.
Even at that, the exaggeration by “leftists” turns out not to be an exaggeration at all.
The White House, conservatives at large, and our loyal reader have triumphantly produced the dog.
But the dog is dead.
As is their mischievous little hair-splitting.
Requiescat in pace.
Two things “Conservatives” are good at: Obfuscation and Moral/Value Fluidity. See Also: Doomsaying about Debt/Deficit when a (D) is in charge.
“Conservatives” often refer to those they think they have political differences with as “Snowflakes”, but I simply find it remarkable that they have this innate power to always find pearls to clutch over the most inane things when things they would have railed on 4 years ago with a different guy in charge are happening around them.
Without double standards, the Right would have none.
It’s OK If You Are A Republican. (IOKIYAR)
It’s become the “One Rule” of our political system, exemplified by the Tangerine Tyrant and his obedient cult.