Trevino: Find the Near Enemy
By Question: is any major event not fodder for the online right’s complaints about the insufficient patriotism of progressives? They are, to be sure, by and large obsessive cultists in form and effect; but surely reason may kick in at points. One gets the impression of a class of people who wake up, drink their coffee, go to shave, cut themselves, and promptly curse the damn, dirty hippies. The monomania simply does not end — and the execution of Saddam Hussein is no different. I have already expressed my dislike for dictators: but I also retain the bare capacity for rationality that allows me to understand that the process through which Saddam Hussein found his way to the gallows was fundamentally evil.
The rightist “wingnuts”? Not so much.
Standing out among the rightists obsessed with ferreting out traitors on the Left is Josh “Tacitus” Trevino. Guest blogging at Hugh Hewitt’s site, Trevino (apparently without a sufficient sense of the ironic) denounced several left wing bloggers for excessive partisanship and insufficient patriotism in reaction to the execution of Saddam Hussein. Although Trevino agrees that Saddam’s ouster wasn’t worth the bones of a single Prussian [Pomeranian-ed] Grenadier, that the execution will have no effect on the course of events in Iraq, that his trial should have been conducted according to international standard, and that the death penalty is inappropriate, he argues that saying any of these things indicates a lack patriotic feeling or good sense.
But then, Trevino and his ilk don’t think the real enemy is the man who hung yesterday. That is their peculiar madness: an inability to see in anything but the starkest shades, and a terrible fear of complexity. Trevino thinks it a function of his power of perspicacity, but it is nothing more than the very thing that drove the dead man himself: the marriage of persistent paranoia, and enduring hate.