Letter to the Beast about the Beasts

Here is an email that I wrote as if to send it to Andrew Sullivan, the proprietor of what seems to be one of the several forms of what I am guessing is an overall site called "the Daily Beast." But how to send my message wasn't obvious, because I couldn't see where he provided any email links in his pages, though he must get tons of emails from the hoi polloi like me, going by the number of remarks from readers that he publishes daily, pro and con. But then, just hours later, almost as if in reaction to my reservations, I saw that he had started including just such a link, or maybe it's been there all along but I had just never noticed. So now there's no reason to hold off on hitting him in the face with this zinger. Har-har.

Still, I hesitate. ...Posting on someone's comments section is one thing, but sending an e-mail is something else altogether. I see E-mails as being more personal, and I don't want to send anything of that nature, because though Sullivan's site provides a wealth of all kinds of information, it is also badly marred in several respects, especially his way of going into all the aspects of the gay male experience in far too much detail. Also his understanding of the complexities of being a Rainbow (i.e. "black person) strikes me as being on the decidedly weak side. But then quite a large number of Rainbows themselves suffer from that same disability.

Well, we'll see.

Sir, as one of your readers I notice that you are quite fond of defending people who have made careers of spraying verbal poison upon the body politic and the American people in general, exactly like crop dusters raining dioxin, DDT, and every other kind of cancer-inducing toxin, all over the place. Just recently you argued strongly in support of P. Buchanan's right to do so, and then later you bitterly excoriated those who were overjoyed at hearing of the sudden permanent inactivation of that professional hater and con artist, A. Breitbart, and now you duly gallop up to give R. Limbaugh a helping hand during this latest of his self-inflicted times of trouble, the Fluke affair, arguing that nothing should be done to interfere with this man making his living, as if he is barely getting by, though the hate-mongering industry in which he is king is awash in dollars -- one big reason that so many get into it. You use as your excuse libertarian principles and the First Amendment. I assume you share the Maher "fare thee well" rationale that you may not agree with what g these people say but that you will always defend their right to say those things. And undoubtedly you would speak of the others as you did about Buchanan when you lauded him on the grounds that at least he's "honest."

That may be all well and good, but what about the question of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater? And what about how these Satanic mouths are also constantly spitting out seeds that all too easily can sprout and result in vast, twisted forests of misery, death, and destruction?

Stalin was honest. He believed in his murderous crimes. Genghis Khan likewise was honest about his wholesale massacres, and so was Pol Pot. Nixon and GWBush were honest about their genocide-facilitating rapes of Cambodia and Iraq respectively. But that honesty that you value so much in no way excused the enormous harvest of millions of war dead that were the eventual results of the stuff that one Herr Schickelgruber, for instance, so sincerely and honestly spouted in the numerous instances of his indulging in free speech, and I doubt that any Jew naked and shivering in an Auschwitz gas chamber or any Russians that were carried out on the Black Sea during WW2 by German soldiers to be dumped overboard cried out in joy in their last moments, "Thank God for Der Fuhrer's exercise of his verbal rights -- 'Mein Kampf'' was a glorious book and producing it was the right thing for him to do!"

It turns out that what a person says and the amounts of it are even more important than their right to say those things -- a nicety that Libertarians often seem happy to overlook, though that failure is tragic for those who are ultimately affected by the spiels that men as rotten to the core as R. Limbaugh are paid millions to broadcast, and have been doing so for many years. I would argue that no man has the right to poison the American atmosphere with day after day and year after year of vituperation of the worst and most poorly thought-out sort. That way of a man making his living is especially life-threatening to members of visible minorities -- the preferred targets of "good" Americans everywhere.