TAPped recently printed this excerpt from a dreadful Cal Thomas column:
On the eve of our great national birthday party and in the aftermath of Sept. 11, when millions of us turned to God and prayed for forgiveness of individual and corporate sins and asked for His protection against future attacks, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has inflicted on this nation what many will conclude is a greater injury than that caused by the terrorists.
You read that right: Cal Thomas believes that the recent 9th Circuit Court ruling about the Pledge of Allegiance is a greater injury to America than the 9/11 attacks.
Putting aside the fact that the death toll from this ruling was considerably lower than that of airplanes flying into buildings, Thomas seems to verge awfully close to saying that the attacks were somehow the result of those individual and corporate sins that we were supposed to be asking forgiveness for. Does anyone want to bet that if there is another attack, Thomas will write a column that mentions this ruling as a contributing factor?
I’m not going to waste too much time on this drivel. Cal Thomas is a predictable right-wing shill in the David Horowitz/Ann Coulter mold. He’s a modern day Pharisee who writes tirelessly about the virtues of people like himself. There’s no starting point for engaging in debate.
TAPped says that the blogosphere “ought to get itself whipped into a frenzy about this one.” I agree, but for liberals like me and some of the others who have responded to TAPped’s call, it’s shooting fish in a barrel. Thomas may have grooved one for us here, but let’s face it, we could randomly pick any one of his columns and find something that we consider reprehensible. There’s no challenge to this.
So what I would like to know is where are the denunciations from conservatives? This is easily the equivalent of any stupid thing Noam Chomsky or Ted Rall has said. I know perfectly well that the vast majority of conservatives, even those who I find appalling, would disagree with what Cal Thomas has written. I want to see some examples of conservative pundits and bloggers taking Thomas to task for this. Otherwise, given that more than one conservative writer has attempted to make hay by tarring all liberals with the Chomsky/Rall brush, many of those freestyle Fiskings of the loony Left were really nothing more than scoring points.
Please feel free to use the comments to point me in the right direction. I will happily give credit where it is due.
By the way, Thomas begins the last paragraph of his hit piece as follows: “The overwhelming majority of Americans have been forced to stomach a lot of garbage in recent years”. You can add your column to that garbage heap, pal.