A commentary article which appeared on The Daily Progress’ website today gets gets it completely right:
Goode’s unapologetic comments about cutting off immigration from the Middle East and warning against more Muslims in the Congress capture a spirit of anti-immigrant fervor generally popular among rank-and-file Republicans.
More moderate Republicans from U.S. Sen. John W. Warner, R-Alexandria, to Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, R-Fairfax County, don’t speak for that large segment of the GOP faithful.
Goode is carrying the ball for a lot of people in the economically distressed southern half of his sprawling rural district.
Larger than the state of New Jersey, the 5th District stretches from its Jeffersonian minority in the north with a strong belief in religious freedom and tolerance to its antebellum antithesis in the fallow fields of Henry County along the North Carolina line.
There, some may have tweaked the words of Patrick Henry a bit to read: “Give us liberty and give them death.” This tweaking refers to Muslims, viewed generally as a monolithic body of extremists ready, willing and able to invade this country, take our jobs, subjugate our women and get elected to Congress, roughly in that order. Viewing all Muslims as such tends to ignore the 4 million to 6 million American Muslims who live peacefully and well among us.
The author of this commentary clearly gets what is going on, while the right wing clearly DOESN’T get it. They’ve made it increasingly clearer that they don’t care if they have to burn the Constitution in an effort to defeat what they perceive to be a “threat” (see: freedom of religion/speech/press).
The author of the article also mentions the situation with Waldo Jaquith’s blog aggregator:
Waldo Jaquith, a prolific Charlottesville blogger on the left side of the political spectrum, drew the line at a few graphic images one of the pro-Goode, anti-Muslim bloggers posted depicting the beheading of an American in Iraq by Islamic terrorists. He removed the offending images and the blogger from his well-read political blog aggregator.
Jaquith runs one of the few aggregators that shows every blog entry on about 170 Virginia political blogs - left, right, center or out there - offering a political commons for discussion and well-rounded reading.
Formerly known as the Virginia Political Blogs, Jaquith’s commons now appears as Waldo’s Virginia Political Blogroll, born last week after a 132-part discussion about his decision to delist the blogger who thought photos of a beheaded American added heft to his point of view.
A few right-wing blogs named after donkeys and dogs have taken themselves out of the commons, or have been tossed out, presumably to go where grass is greener and debate is leaner, or more one-sided.
For the rest of Virginia’s thriving collection of political blogs of all stripes, the commons remains a place for all to read and remark in peace and general good will.
The author nails it right on the head, again. However, as many of you may have noticed, when I’ve mentioned the so called “donkeys and dogs” (and SwacGirl), as of late, I’ve refrained from referring to them as bloggers, since their sub par publications which are constantly littered with factual, grammatical, and spelling errors, reflect poorly on the REAL bloggers of the blogosphere.
