Some days, Pandagon provides few examples of the nuttiness they are famous for. And then there are days like today when that site is so chockful of stupid and hypocrisy that I could spend all day dissecting it. But I won't. I have more important things to do. Like taking the kids to the waterpark.
When I first discovered Pandagon, it seemed like a normal moonbat site: lots of George Bush bashing, lots of "Republicans are teh hypocrites!" columns, lots of completely ridiculous and unworkable far left arguments regarding government, international affairs, family, work, and feminism. It wasn't alone in this regard; there are other sites that do much the same thing. But Pandagon is one of the most popular that had a regular stable of commenters. And even though most comments can be summed up as "You suck," they still provided enough gasps and chuckles to be worth blogging about and commenting on.
That was before the election of 2008. These days, Pandagon is locked up tighter than Fort Knox. You have to register to comment (so much for the liberal argument that regulating comment is undemocratic). I got banned (not merely unable to comment; I can't even pull up Pandagon on my home computer, an extremist solution I've never seen on any site) ostensibly for "thread jacking," which means I said something the Pandagonistas (a) hated and (b) couldn't refute effectively. Amanda Marcotte's not terribly tolerant of being bested in an argument, and if you do manage to do it, you're likely to be called all sorts of things, including a "woman hater," an odd term for me, being a woman and all.
But the real kicker these days is the inability of the Pandagon bloggers to criticize their god, Barack Obama. Even when he's saying and doing things that piss them off, even when he's clearly flip-flopped on an issue, even when he blatantly breaks one campaign promise after another, they cannot bring themselves to use any rhetoric stronger than, "I don't like that." In other words, like many, if not most liberal websites, Pandagon is in full hibernation mode now, unwilling to face the reality that the high standards of behavior they required of Republicans isn't being adhered to by their beloved Democrats, either.
That's why you get posts like the post on David Letterman's apology to Sarah Palin (sorry, link isn't working, but you know where to look), where Amanda says bashing young women as slutty is perfectly ok...if she's a Republican. More specifically, if she has a child out of wedlock, then tells everyone that it wasn't a good idea. Because, you know, learning from your mistakes and trying to prevent others from making those same stupid mistakes is hypocritical.
The joke, as crude as it was, was obviously about poking at the gap between the goody two shoes “no sex for us!” image that conservative politicians cultivate and the reality.
But Bristol Palin isn't a politician. She's a young (very young) woman who obviously listened to idiots like Amanda who typically argue that 12-year-olds should be able to have abortions without parental notice but not tattoos. That's why this whole "but she's a slut" defense is so strange. Pandagon also sports this post, bashing crisis pregnancy centers for using images of women looking worried or upset that they're pregnant. If you just read that article, you would assume that being pregnant out of wedlock was a wonderful thing and then Bristol Palin would be a saint (not quite a god like B.O., but nearly as good).
If you view these two stories together--Bristol Palin is a slut that deserves mocking on national TV for having a baby out of wedlock then telling others that's a bad choice, coupled with the having babies out of wedlock is just another lifestyle choice--you can see how schizophrenic Pandagon thinking really is. Amanda tries to say that deriding Bristol Palin is permissible because her mother is a politician. But these are the same sorts of people screaming that we shouldn't make jokes about Amy Carter or Chelsea Clinton. Making nasty jokes about the Bush twins was ok; laughing at Chelsea Clinton was not.
The truth is that either family members who are not politicians themselves (Hillary Clinton during Hillarycare, for example) should be off limits, or making jokes about Michelle Obama's Anchor Arms and Sasha's buck teeth are fair game. You can't argue that having illegitimate children is ok but Republican women who have illegitimate children are sluts. And no amount of "it's not the child, it's the anti-endorsement of illegitimacy that's the problem" will cover that sort of hypocrisy.
Understandably, this is the only way the Pandagonistas can justify continually deriding and mocking Republicans who aren't making any government policy these days, as opposed to deriding and mocking their own party which is pretty much making a hash of everything.
The same breathless hypocrisy is on display in this post, where Amanda argues that not speechifying the events in Iran is the right response for President Obama because it's not our problem. Seriously. That's the argument. I suspect if I were to look up Amanda's opinions on, say, Rwanda, Bosnia, East Timor or the Palestinians, I'd find that she was quite vocal that the U.S. government must do something in those places. Of course, that would have been only when Republicans ran the government.
Thanks to Chuck Serio for sending me one of the Pandagon stories.
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