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A Response to Stephen Green (With Link)

258
mph9/13/2009 6:55:14 am PDT

74.125.93.132

His technique should be obvious by now…

You cannot build a successful political movement by a process of subtraction, and building a winning coalition is impossible if you organize on losing principles. Allowing your opposition to dictate the terms of acceptable discourse is a losing principle, as Jeff Goldstein has striven to explain. Ergo, Johnson manifests a defeatist tendency when he pronounces Geller and Spencer “untouchables” because they attended a European conference whose promoters included some unsavory characters.

Was there any genuine danger that Geller and Spencer would return from Brussels singing the Horst Wessel Lied as they goosestepped down Broadway arm-in-arm with David Duke? Or, as I think far more likely, was Johnston concerned that the presence of a neo-Nazi element at Brussels would be used by liberals to discredit mainstream conservatism?

This is the kind of Republican flinch reflex — “Oh, we can’t say that, it might make the liberals angry!” — that annoys the crap out of me. Look, we’ve all been officially branded “Rightwing Extremists,” so what’s the point of this fearful, defensive, cringing quest for “respectability”?