Dan Froomkin — Always Good for a Laugh (at His Expense, of Course)

posted at 12:19 pm on August 26, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
[ Moonbats ]   

The film critic Judith Crist once wrote an article that was kind of a primer on how to use a critic effectively. She wrote, find someone whose opinion you agree with 100 percent of the time or disagree with 100 percent of the time, and you’ll never go wrong.

Sage advice. I’ve followed it religiously over the years — not just to set my watch where movies are concerned but in the area of political commentary as well. That is one reason why I like articles by the ever-ridiculous (if slightly frightening-looking) Dan Froomkin. Whatever he writes is bound to be the opposite of what is true and right by any moral compass — plus he’s always good for a laugh or two (if always at his expense).

Froomkin, in case you’re not familiar with the name, used to write a column for the on-line edition of the Washington Post. When the Post fired him earlier this year, he sunk further leftward and downward, seeking his natural level, eventually bottoming out at the Huffington Post. (Well — at least it has “Post” in its name for the next time he updates his resume.)

Froomkin is a witty fellow — just ask him. When he made an ass out of himself by taking on Charles Krauthammer (who is well out of Froomkin’s intellectual weight class and an easy 100 IQ points his superior), I wrote Froomkin a note detailing problems in his assault. And what his oh-so-clever five-word rejoinder?

“Portnoy’s complaint. I love it!”

Zzzing. High fives to the Big Froomk for coming up with something so razor-sharp, so timely, and so original. You’d think in the 40 years since Philip Roth penned his infamous novel at least one person would have hit upon that barb, but — nope! — Froomkin was the first.

But I digress. Froomkin has a piece in this morning’s Puffington Host on Eric Holder’s misguided decision to investigate so-called abuses of detainees under the Bush administration. What is Froomkin’s opinion of this action, which as I noted in the Green Room this morning is a thinly veiled distraction from the health care fiasco and Obama’s tanking poll numbers? That the announcement is “at best, a baby step.” I guess in the fecund imaginations of chronological-only adults like Froomkin, the image of George Bush and Dick Cheney being frog-marched to the gallows is the only one sufficient to venting the hatred they continue to harbor toward the last administration. “Nothing less than our country’s moral standing is at stake,” Froomkin harrumphs with righteous indignation in his column. He speaks loftily of Nuremberg and “gross violations of human rights.”

This would all be pretty hilarious if it weren’t so desperately pathetic. How anyone who is a citizen of this country who has heard about — much less lived through — 9/11 can be so nonchalant about an eight- year stretch without a repeat attack is beyond reckoning. I can only imagine that people whose heads are (to put it politely) buried so deeply in the sand must fancy that “the terrorists simply haven’t tried again” or that “they struck it lucky once but basically aren’t smart enough to plan another attack.”

This is no way to suggest that there isn’t a valid argument that people who break the law should be made to answer for their crimes. Rather, it’s to say that this isn’t what Froomkin and his ilk are arguing. What leftist loons like these want is blood, plain and simple. They are not content with taking a “baby step toward justice for Bush’s torturers,” as Froomkin so tellingly puts it. They want to see head fly — and they’ll be damned if they’re willing to wait for the war to end before they see it.

There has been much discussion in recent weeks of mobs, all of it aimed at protesters frightened by Obama’s efforts to commandeer the country’s health care system. If you want an actual example of one of the most virulent, angry, torch-carrying mobs since the Ku Klux Klan, look no further than to the pages of the Huffington Post.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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