Runaway favorite this week is Al Sharpton. According to the Jerusalem Post, Sharpton compared the Florida vote-count to, yes, Hitler’s Final Solution. “The reality is that Hitler in his wickedness and evil burned millions of Jews and the only reason he didn’t burn millions of blacks is because there were no blacks,” in Europe, said Sharpton in a debate with Rabbi Shmuley Boateach. “Conservatives fighting to turn back the clock would do the same thing to us,” he added in a reference to the Florida recount.
IT’S THE COURT, STUPID: Several emailers tell me that the Miami Herald/USA Today recount proves that the real culprits were in the U.S. Supreme Court. By stopping the final recount, they denied Bush a real victory and besmirched themselves. I agree that that ruling was a terrible one. But think about it for a second. This careful media recount took four months. The final, haphazard Florida recount would have had less than four days to come to conclusion. Do you think that any count under those conditions would have resolved every doubt? In some ways, I have come to believe that SCOTUS should be perversely admired for what they did. They did indeed wreck their credibility. But they were all that stood between us and near electoral anarchy. Thanks, Nino.
HATE-MAIL: The Boston gay paper, Bay Windows, has just run a screed on the Dirkhising case. Well, actually, it’s largely a personal screed against me. Here’s a section I reproduce not for masochistic reasons, but simply as an example of the hatred that motivates some on the left, a hatred that leads them to demonize their opponents. Privately, the writer has also emailed me, threatening to expose my sex life, and using four-letter words in every other sentence to express his anger. For the record, I have never ever made fun of Matthew Shepard’s death. I have simply mocked some politicians’ attempts to use it for political gain. And for the record, I took pains to criticize the anti-gay motives behind some of the coverage of the Dirkhising case. Here’s the passage: “Assisting [the religious right] has been the ever helpful gay neo-con Andrew Sullivan, who has now become a parody of himself. (Motto: “I love gay sex, but hate gay people.”) Sullivan, who makes fun of Matthew Shepard’s death, and who uses that death to tout his opposition to hate-crimes laws, points out in The New Republic that, yes indeed, Shepard’s death did garner far more coverage than Dirkhising’s death — as if that alone is proof that the Right’s charges about Dirkhising are true. Give that Brit an “F” in statistical analysis! I will never understand why people still listen to Sullivan. Perhaps it’s the British accent. Perhaps it’s the Harvard and Oxford lineage. But Sullivan’s creepily self-serving Dirkhising piece in TNR alone should be proof enough finally that he’s lost it on gay civil rights issues – and that there is no depth to which he will not sink to prove his I’m-really-one-of-you credentials to the lying, conniving right wing in this country.” Charming, huh? The voice of modern liberalism in all its open-minded glory.
The Dish 