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Against Gilliard II

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Steve is plugging away, this time in comments. Assertions are made, insults are thrown, facts are tossed about without the faintest effort to produce a coherent argument.

Your friend Erik is a coward. And it is shameful for you to support him.

If this war is so important, then he should enlist. He shouldn’t sneer at soldiers and suggest they deserve their fate. Especially when he refuses to share in it.

His arguments are weak, silly and filled with cowardice.

You can bullshit this anyway you want, any how you want. But this war is wrong, supporting it wrong, and supporting it while refusing to serve is pure, unadulterated cowardice.

Again, your friend is a coward and you are shameful for supporting him.

If Erik is a coward for opposing immediate withdrawal while not joining the military, then he has a fair amount of company. I, for example, am also a coward. So is Matt Yglesias. So is Juan Cole. So are the majority of the major bloggers on the left side of the blogosphere, the vast majority of whom have not called for an immediate withdrawal.

Because that’s really what we’re talking about, aren’t we? I won’t get into whether an immediate withdrawal is a good or bad idea. I think it’s bad, but there are good arguments on both sides. That “1700 people are dead,” isn’t one of them. Unless you’re a pacifist, there are always foreign policy goals that are worth the deaths of our soldiers. The justice or injustice of the Iraq War is secondary to question of what we ought to do now, and people can disagree as to whether staying in Iraq serves legitimate policy goals.

Unless, of course, they listen to Steve Gilliard, who believes that virtually all of the elected representatives of the Democratic Party, most of the major bloggers on the left, and a pretty substantial selection of the country as a whole are “shameful cowards.”

After that last comment, I even felt kind of bad about going to Erik’s wedding. I should hardly have supported an operation that might result in the production of additional shameful cowards. Also, that time I managed his fantasy baseball team while he was on vacation was, in retrospect, a terrible mistake.

Gilliard’s language and approach is unbecoming of a major blogger on the left. The left, in my view, ought to honor a certain degree of diversity of opinion, even on questions of foreign policies. Gilliard’s approach is notable in that he launches affective appeals and personal attacks on Erik’s (and my) integrity without actually making an effort to deal with any of the arguments. I think it is quite reasonable to wonder whether an immediate withdrawal from Iraq would result in positive or negative consequences for the country. Moreover, as I pointed out in an earlier post, I think that I’m entirely qualified to consider both sides of the question without commiting myself to join the military if I come down on one side. Rather than dealing with this question or supporting his assertions, Gilliard simply resorts to obfuscating rhetorical bombast.

And let’s make this point a bit more clear. Steve Gilliard is being a colossal fucking asshole. He has impugned the integrity of my friend, myself, and every other person in America who believes that the occupation may be necessary but does not wish to join the military. He has called Erik and, by extension, the rest of us shameful cowards. He has implied that his side of the ideological divide has no room for well-reasoned, well thought-out debate.

In short, he has displayed every quality I associate with the worst of the wingnuts. As I do not typicall regularly read Powerline, Kim Du Toit, or LGF, I don’t think I’ll need to be reading Gilliard in the future.

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