"Slander" Is Anything Bad Said About Me
Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post
"[p]eople with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children,"
Apparently people responded to the article by saying that Cohen was as a minimum deeply out of touch and perhaps a tad bigoted himself. Of course, since this is the Internet age, some folks said these things in juvenile and deeply unproductive ways.
I am not going to comment much on his original statement. I think the article is far more revealing of Mr. Cohen's mental outlook than that of anyone in Iowa, particularly since he brought no facts to the table, but a lot of people have already pointed that out. I wanted to comment on his follow-up statement
I don’t understand it …. What I was doing was expressing not my own views but those of extreme right-wing Republican tea party people. I don’t have a problem with interracial marriage or same-sex marriage. In fact, I exult in them. It’s a slander…
Seriously? So people's opinions about actual statements made by Richard Cohen in writing are slander, but ugly accusations made about Republicans or Tea Partiers he has not even met are not? At least his critics are working with his actual statements, rather than offering an opinion of a large, inhomogeneous group's state of mind as fact.
He added, “I think it’s reprehensible to say that because you disagree with something that you should fire me. That’s what totalitarians do.”
Yeah, because totalitarians never broad brush vilify whole groups who constitute their political opponents.
This is a great example of how ad hominem argumentation works. The Left has spent a lot of time attempting to vilify the Tea Party as flat-out BAD PEOPLE, in a similar way to how we climate skeptics have been vilified. Once one is successful at this, then all the rules of discourse don't apply. You don't have to engage them or treat them seriously because they are BAD PEOPLE. We good liberal-minded folks would never stereotype large groups, except of course the Tea Party but that is OK because they are BAD PEOPLE. And everyone knows that the rule of law, much less the rules of normal discourse, do not apply to BAD PEOPLE.
