A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Having written one of the more insulting posts in recent memory, Mark Kleiman now doubles back and tries desperately to cover his tracks (see the original post):

I'm delighted to see that this little jeu d'esprit annoyed some of the people it was intended to annoy.

Well, bully. I'm delighted to see that the capacity of the Reality-Based Community to delude itself into thinking that it has won some kind of psychological victory with the publication of fatuous nonsense outstrips any effort by actual reality to shake the Reality-Based Community out of its delusions.

For the irony-impaired out there: No, I don't really think that there's some sort of halakhic principle requiring Jews to vote Democratic. I was just making fun of the people who rant on about "self-haiting Jews" while hating one of the most typically Jewish characteristics: liberalism despite prosperity.

For the spelling-impaired: I don't know who Kleiman refers to as making fun of "self-haiting Jews." Or even "self-hating Jews." But that's okay; Kleiman does not name names in his condemnation of people who hate "one of the most typically Jewish characteristics: liberalism despite prosperity." It's so much easier to build up and beat down a strawman, after all, when you write a post whose capacity to smear is only matched by its utter and complete incoherence. (For the record, I fully expect Kleiman to go a-Googling and find examples of people being condemned as "self-hating" and then present them triumphantly to the Blogosphere, as though such examples would prove his point and justify his "delight.") And since "hate" is a strong word, and implies some kind of unthinking visceral rage on the part of the hater (or is it "haiter"), Kleiman--ever the polemicist--is willing to use it in place of simply noting the more intellectually respectable fact that there are some Jews who disagree with the philosophy of the Democratic Party, and do so without "hating" anything or anyone. Finally, Kleiman does not appear to be even remotely interested in acknowledging and making the very real distinction between the exercise of personal liberalism (including the exercise of personal generosity and kindness even and especially in times of prosperity) versus the adherence to political liberalism. One can exercise the former without pledging fealty to the latter, though if you only had Kleiman's post to guide you, you wouldn't know it.

For the record, and just to remind ourselves where we stood with Kleiman prior to his purportedly "delighted" update, this is what he said in his post:

Jews, it has been said, combine the incomes of Episcopalians with the voting patterns of Puerto Ricans. The Republicans keep hoping, and I keep worrying, that increasing numbers of Jews will start to vote their fears and their capital gains instead of their morals and their religious tradition.

Now, anyone not smoking crack would read that as Kleiman saying that if you don't vote the way he does, you are not voting in a manner parallel to your "morals" and your "religious tradition." To which I say "Bull*&%$." If the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes, then it is easy to see how Republicans and Democrats can make use of the Holy Text to advance their own ideological and political agendas. No one wins these kinds of arguments and so people like Kleiman, who are smart enough to know better, shouldn't go around lecturing others about how their votes--cast in good conscience and entirely within the mainstream of American political thought--violate their "morals" and their "religious tradition." And if they do, they should at least do us the favor of sticking to their guns instead of scrambling about for some face-saving "I was just kidding! You fell for it!" excuse to extricate themselves out of the mess they have created for themselves. How utterly ridiculous.

But then, how utterly typical for Kleiman to tell people how they should behave. It's not the first time he's engaged in that exercise, after all. I submit that his past history of hectoring the Blogosphere to submit to his demands made it all the more reasonable for me to take him seriously. If Kleiman wishes to inform me that I shouldn't treat such sanctimonious preachifying with the assumption that it is genuinely meant, I am more than happy to oblige him, since life is short and everything.