Hullabaloo

Saturday, October 03, 2009

 
Liberal Hero of The Week

by digby

... maybe the year.

Brave New Films did a nice tribute to Alan Grayson:




















By the way, I don't really understand why Rachel Maddow became the civility police with Grayson on this. The word "holocaust" is a word that has meaning beyond The Holocaust. There have been many holocausts and it's not demeaning the Holocaust to use the word in other contexts. I grant that you have to be careful, but this context seems entirely reasonable to me.

This one, on the other hand, which is used every single day and nobody says a word, trivializes the Holocaust and the meaning of the word itself:

"This is our first opportunity to successfully connect Obama to the abortion holocaust," explained Mark Harrington, executive director of the California-based Center for Bioethical Reform, one of the pro-life groups that have taken a lead in the Notre Dame protests."This has forced the issue."

Or how about this:

Following are excerpts of remarks delivered today by Congressman Chris Smith (R-Hamilton), Co-Chairman of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, at the 31st annual March for Life:

According to every responsible nationwide poll, the indisputable fact that abortion is violence against children and the ugly fact that abortion methods dismember, mutilate, decapitate, or chemically poison innocent babies is at long last shocking the public out of its slumber.

Like you, Americans want the abortion holocaust to end.

Check out these nutters if you want some real disrespect to the Holocaust. They call themselves "survivors" --- because they were born after 1973 when abortion was legalized.

I don't recall anyone getting up in arms about that, but maybe I missed it.

The Anti-defamation league getting (selectively) upset led to Grayson -- who is Jewish, by the way -- formally apologizing, so the hissy fit was a teeny bit successful after all. One wonders why it is fine and dandy to say that the loss of blastocysts is a holocaust but saying that nearly 50,000 actual humans dying solely due to the fact that the richest country in the world doesn't grant all of its citizens a right to health care is unacceptable. But that's how our politics work when it intersects with religion.

It would be nice if people like Maddow didn't help them, but I guess she was trying to maintain some consistency. Unfortunately, she was being consistently anti-intellectual by proscribing the use of a good, descriptive word, which isn't the most important thing in the world, but not something I would normally think she'd do. It's a lazy way to deal with repugnant ideas.

Anyway, click the thermometer above or here, to show Grayson that you can understand the difference between the word holocaust and Holocaust. I'm sure he has a lot of elderly Jewish constituents, and this seems to be tied to age, so he has to be sensitive. But the rest of us shouldn't succumb to this kind of word policing, particularly since it is not applied fairly.


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digby 10/03/2009 04:00:00 PM |