Politics and Culture

I generally admire the Puritans and think they get a bad rap from many modern historians so I'm hesitant to compare their treatment of Puritan social outcasts with what's going on now with Carrie Prejean. The Prejean mob is similar to their Puritan and medieval counterparts in that they've made an independent-minded woman an object of its hatred. It's dissimilar to Puritanism, at least so far, in that the government hasn't been the driving force behind the Carrie Prejean witch hunt. In that sense, Perez Hilton more closely resembles his medieval forefathers, maybe the only way he does.

I've said before here and here and the Brussels Journal here that leftists don't just feel the need to disagree with non-believers, but to destroy them. One of the ways they try to do that is through the hypocrisy charge.

This is a strategy. Rhetorical trick #4 in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is:

RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

I don't consider the picture hypocrisy in any way (if the pictures were very revealing, I wouldn't post them on Asymmetric as per my wife's...errr...I mean, my editorial policy), but the attempt to make it so is part of the playbook.

Other rules, demonstrated in the Perez Hilton and the Olbermann videos linked to above, are numbers 5:

RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. (Pretty crude, rude and mean, huh? They want to create anger and fear.)

and 12:

RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Now, I'm not complaining about this nor do I want sympathy (as in Alinsky's rule number #10). I'm just "raising awareness."