Naked Savage

True or False question.
The following statements are equivalent:
(a) Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas
(b) You should only get AIDS and die, you pig

If you answered True i.e. that the statements are equivalent, then you are eligible to write for the shock-and-awe zone of incomprehensibility that is OpinionJournal.com. We've posted before about some of the strange rhetoric found on this site: 9-11 as an Epiphany; Michigan affirmative action case proves that Bush wasn't lying about WMDs. Our hunch is that these excursions into lunacy are driven by stress, and after all, the guys over there wrote this one with the Bush Infallibility Doctrine crashing around them with the grudging admission there was rien to that story about Saddam getting uranium from Niger.

So what's their "logic" this time? Well, the Dixie chicks said something people didn't like: (a). Mike Savage said something people didn't like: (b). There was criticism of both. Then in the case of the Dixie Chicks, there was criticism of the criticism. So the same people who criticised the Dixie Chicks critics should now be criticising the Savage critics. They are not. QED.

At the risk of spelling it out, an increasingly necessary risk these days, let's just note the essential difference between the political nature of what the Chicks said, and the maliciously personal nature of what Savage said. Or is criticising Bush maliciously personal? Note also that what disturbed people about the reaction to the Dixie Chicks was the extent to which it was orchestrated by a multi-media conglomerate, Clear Channel. Is Mike Savage's career similarly strangled by the vast marketing and distribution power of er...MSNBC?

But above all, why don't the guys at Opinionjournal just let the market render its verdict on the criticism of the Chicks and Savage? Let's see if Savage is selling books and filling arenas in two months from now in the way that the gals were able to recover from their mauling. Or even if he's posing naked for Entertainment Weekly.