Monday, July 30, 2007

Kryptonite Words   [Jonah Goldberg]

From a reader:

Since your column the other day, I've been quoting you in my .signature,
which as you know is a four-line tag that gets appended to everything I
post in Usenet discussion newsgroups (and would get appended to e-mails I
send, if I wasn't temporarily using gmail).

The quote:
   "Liberals used to be the ones who argued that
    sending U.S. troops abroad was a small price
    to pay to stop genocide; now they argue that
    genocide is a small price to pay to bring U.S.
    troops home."

The reaction has been startling. I have never seen this kind of brouhaha
about any .signature I've ever used (and in posting since 1990, I've used
many). My .signatures are seldom lacking in political statement, but
rarely do they provoke an uproar. Some people, unmoved by my tags in the
past, suddenly complain that my simple quotation is a troll for political
argument. There are at least two newsgroups in which I've been asked to
lose the .signature; I won't self-censor, and so I don't expect to return.

I don't know what the magic is. All I can guess is that your simple
statement of obvious fact is pushing liberals' cognitive dissonance to new
levels, to the point of frightening them. It appears your words are like
kryptonite to liberals.

07/30 04:02 PMShare