Round Umpteen
Unless you happen to live on another planet (such as north Dallas), you are already aware of the political brawl happening over plans for an inland port in south Dallas. Predictions are that such a project could attract billions of dollars in rail, truck and air freight to a region sorely in need of an economic engine.
The Dallas Observer's Jim Schutze has been digging into County Commissioner John Wiley Price's role in getting a share of those development spoils distributed to the African-American community.
A journalist knows he's on to something when his reporting itself becomes part of the story. Price has gone to court to extract information out of U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson and County Judge Jim Foster about what they told Jim Schutze.
What's all this got to do with Steve Blow of The Dallas Morning News? Not so much, as it turns out. Don't turn to Blow's column on Sunday looking for details about the inland port, the politics, or the merits of any position. Blow, you see, doesn't care much for either Price or Schutze and uses his utterly inconsequential column to, as he himself puts it, watch two guys fight:
"And, yeah, I'll confess to some guilty pleasure in watching this unfold -- like the guy who stands on the sideline and says, 'Let's you and him fight.'"Naturally, you'd expect Schutze to respond. But how, given the lack of substance in Blow's column? Schutze latches on to the one good line in Blow's column, where he calls Schutze the "brooding Eeyore of Dallas journalism". Schutze returns the favor, calling Blow "the Goofy of Dallas journalism." That's it.
It's what Schutze does *not* say that so effectively eviscerates Steve Blow. Schutze doesn't even mention the inland port project in his putdown of Blow. The pointless banality of the response is a perfect counterpoint to Blow's banality in his opening essay in this exchange.
Ironically, Steve Blow's column was headlined: "You, residents of Dallas, could be the loser in this brawl." As if Steve Blow trash-talking from the sidelines is going to do anything good for the residents of Dallas.
Dreher Links Obama to Nazis
President Obama, in today's remarks as he signed executive orders overturning the Bush administration ban on federal funding of new lines of embryonic stem cells:
"Promoting science isn't just about providing resources, it is also about protecting free and open inquiry. It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it's inconvenient, especially when it's inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology."Rod Dreher, in his response on The Dallas Morning News Opinion blog:
"Those who believe that politics, morality and religion should never interfere with what scientists want to do had better be prepared to pay their respects to Dr. Mengele."
It's unusual when Godwin's Law is demonstrated right in the original poster's own blog and not deep into a resulting comment flame war, but if any The Dallas Morning News writer can do it, it's Rod Dreher. Dreher claims he's simply making the point that there's no morally neutral position on science, but he didn't have to tar Obama with the Nazi brush to make that point. Dreher is too skilled a writer not to know that. Too bad Dreher didn't think of Joseph Goebbels before deciding to engage in rhetorical overkill.
Rod Dreher conveniently overlooks comments by President Obama that indicates that he, too, understands that there is no morally neutral position on science. President Obama said:
"Many thoughtful and decent people are conflicted about, or strongly oppose, this research. We will never undertake this research lightly. We will support it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted."But that doesn't serve Dreher's purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between President Obama's position and the Nazi position. So Dreher conveniently omits it. Just like Goebbels might have.
4 comments:
Dreher's decline into irrelevant lunacy accelerates with this idiotic rant.
Rod Dreher makes himself irrelevant by taking an uncompromising, absolutist position. When you demand all or nothing, you often find yourself on the sideline with nothing.
William Saleton, in a Slate essay, poses the dilemma in a manner designed for more productive discussion:
"The stem-cell fight wasn't a fight between ideology and science. It was a fight between 5-day-olds and 50-year-olds. The 50-year-olds won. The question now is what to do with our 5-day-olds, our 5-week-olds, and our increasingly useful parts."
Rod-Boy has truly arrived. Atrios has named him "Wanker of the Day for Monday.
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2009/03/wanker-of-day_09.html
For the record, Dreher got the shout-out not for his opinion on embryonic stem cell research, but for his Beliefnet essay on a grisly murder in east Texas, in which Dreher says, "the killings aren't what shocked me about this story. What got me was this: This is a tiny East Texas town -- and there's a bisexual culture in one of them, among the teenagers? WTF?"
Rod Dreher ... master of self parody.
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