I always knew that Jennifer Rubin was little more than a first-rate, red-lamp hack for the diseased orthodoxy of the contemporary right, but I never realized, until today, that beneath her exterior of grifter opportunism there beat the black heart of a truly malevolent harpy.
That seems over-the-top, you say? Then you haven't yet read her latest bile--"Newsweek cover is a gift to Romney"--in which she "humorously" assaults the magazine's Andrew Sullivan and Tina Brown for having honored Barack Obama for his presidential, human, and philosophical decency in the matter of same-sex marriage. As a mouthpiece for Mitt Romney, Ms. Rubin is altogether unfamiliar with manly integrity; hence she resorts to schoolyard ridicule when she encounters it among the opposition.
The result? Something so unworthy of the Washington Post, it further makes one realize that mainstream journalism, as infected by the predatory right, hasn't hit bottom yet. Here's a retch-worthy sample, whose entirety she has framed as a letter, from Mitt and Ann, to "Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Brown":
I’m not about to go stoking the flames of anti-gay fervor in my base. That’s not my style, and as I always say to Ann, a moment not talking about Obama’s economic bellyflop is a moment wasted. But you’ve done it for me!...
[T]o define the president by a rhetorical, meaningless gesture is really above and beyond anything we expected. The "recovery" president or the "jobs" president would, well, be silly, I guess. But so long as he’s carving an identity on an issue that ranks somewhere below "high speed trains" among voters’ priorities I’m just tickled to death.
To refute, in any itemized way, the "critiques" of Ms. Rubin's petty sarcasm would be but the proverbial exercise in absolute futility: those who understand what Obama has been up against these last three years don't require an itemized refutation; and those who ideologically revel in the GOP's vicious obstructionism are closed to all reason and empirical data, anyway. But for Rubin to mobocratically ridicule President Obama's attention (as well as Sullivan's and Brown's) to a piercing social issue that has caused immense and indescribable personal pain to millions of victimized Americans is, well, I guess one can say it is nothing but the unfurling of Rubin's truest colors.
When will I learn? When will I learn? For the contemporary right and its hired hacks, harpies, and harridans, there likely is no bottom.
"All things in moderation."
Self-sufficient rugged individualism, in moderation, is a virtue. As it is taken to further extremes, it acrues selfishness, greed, predation, sociopathy and eventually can become psychopathy.
As PM pointed out this weekend, Chistianity is best defined as "Love your neighbor as yourself."
I am not bothered by Ms. Rubin's tone as much as (and PM points this out) her lack of empathy and her indifference to the pain and suffering of others. Worse, she seems to take pleasure in it. How is this substantially different from the adolescent who tortures small animals as a first step to becoming a serial killer? This might sound like hyperoble, but I think not. When the physical and emotional feelings of others count as nothing, they are de-humanized. Once de-humanized and objectified, they can be treated any way one chooses.
Posted by: Robert Lipscomb | May 15, 2012 at 08:11 AM
Robert, you have just described the modern GOP's governing (ha!) philosophy.
Posted by: janicket | May 15, 2012 at 09:40 AM
"so unworthy of the Washington Post"
Oh please, the Post has been Kaplan test-prep fishwrap for years now ever since it bent over for the Bush occupation of Iraq.
Posted by: wetcasements | May 16, 2012 at 11:21 PM