McIlheran and other torture advocates get upset when anyone points out that by torturing its detainees the United States is aligning itself with countries like Iraq, Syria, and Egypt of recent years and dictatorial governments of the past from the Soviet Union and Germany. Yet no one’s upset that a mentally ill man was tortured until he provided information about imaginary plots?
Long term, is it Al-Qaeda or people like McIlheran posing a threat to our democracy?
And the Brawler is back in the ring to give old Pat some lessons of his own, both here and there, and my guess is that Brawler is just warming up. Here's a sample to whet your appetite:
As one might expect for an essay that manages to describe both Hitler and Stalin as leftists, there's a great deal of sloppy, reductionist thinking in Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel conservative columnist Patrick McIlheran's recent blog post "Right-wingers, such as Stalin."
Why try teaching Patrick McIlheran lessons? His writings show him to be irredeemable. Un-Catholic and certainly un-Christian, and with the odd, unmodulated education of the autodidact, he writes with a pagan fetishism of War and Retribution. Of course his arguments fail in every case. His allusions and references are wrong, his tone is juvenile and uninteresting and what substance there is reveals a corkscrew, and at heart, whimpering soul. He must have been beaten up or otherwise terrorized as a child because his brand of casual and mocking cruelty doesn't arise out of normal psychology. This seems a bit ad hominem, even when the subject is McIlheran, but he is not an attractive person, judging by his picture. This goes some way to explaining the sneering pleasure he gets when winding up for his backward homiletics. "Why, I'll show you..." A nerd is one thing. An angry nerd unable to adapt into adulthood is quite another.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, his is the judgment of the Pharisee, handed down with the pomposity of someone lacking physical courage or moral character. He, like McBride, delights in the attention paid him and tunes out criticism and yet uses it as a validation of his Rightness. Leave him be, since the real judgment he has earned may change his views on mercy. That is to say, it's going to hurt a bit.
Why try to teach PaddyMac?
ReplyDeleteCall me a hopeless optimist, I guess.