Silencing dissidents

This is the age of branding.

If you put a label on a bottle of water that says Bling H20, then people will pay $45.00 for it. It's really worth it -- othewise, it wouldn't say "Bling H20," would it?

Sadly, that same mentality infects political discourse. You can parry any argument merely by labeling it as racist. Of course, liberals started this insanity, and Neocons do it, too. But now it's gotten so bad, even the liberals are starting to weary of it. Here's Glenn Greenwald on the risk of criticizing Israel:

All sorts of neoconservatives and their various organs have spent the last year insinuating to American Jews in key voting locales (such as South Florida) that they cannot possibly vote for Barack Obama because he doesn't "support Israel" (by which they mean militaristic Likudnik policies that are actually quite damaging to Israel and which huge numbers of American Jews and even Israelis themselves reject). At the same, in order to prevent this tactic from being challenged or even discussed, they scream "anti-semite!" at anyone who points out a benevolent and painfully obvious fact: that many Americans Jews have loyalties to Israel that influence their voting behavior and political positions -- the very premise on which these smear campaigns are predicated.

Though I am a member of a decidedly non-liberal organization, the League of the South, I can sympathize. Our main goal is to restore the right of self-government for the people of the South, and argue that the policies of the over-centralized, unaccountable regime in DC harms those it claims to protect, both black and white. But by questioning the welfare/warfare state, we are condemned for everything from "racial insensitivity" (?) to outright racism. The facts we bolster our arguments with are simply irrelevant because the doberman pinschers of political correctness at the Southern Poverty Law Center have branded us as a hate group. We're bad people, so crazed with blind hatred for blacks that our denunciations of the harm done by social reengineering are nothing but a cover for our real motives. When we point out that anything resembling actual hate speech never appears in our publications or web site, then that simply shows how devious we are.

You just can't win that kind of game.

When Michael Hill points out the disproportionate number of crimes committed by a "compliant and deadly underclass," that's pounced upon as an expression of "raw anger." But how different was Hill's observation from what liberal Senator Pat Moynihan wrote about black crime? Here are a couple of excerpts from Moynihan's famous report:

In a word, most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped. ...

There is no one Negro problem. There is no one solution. Nonetheless, at the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.

But Moynihan's unflinching examination at the "pathology" of urban blacks took place in a time before name-calling replaced fact-based argument in public discourse. We all know what would be howled at him if he were alive today making the same observations.