Thank heaven for Orcinus

If Orcinus had a syndicated (RSS) feed, I’d put his headlines write on the main Mediajunkie page. By catching up with him today, I learned that someone actually is now transcribing Rush Limbaugh, got frightened by signs of the demonization of dissent, read about a Karl Rove lie on the record, got caught up on the right-wing hate movement’s terroristic strategies as well as a creepy rapprochement with the equally antisemitic Islamist movement, heard about the latest Republican Trent-style bigot eruption.
Best of all was his reply to CPO Sharkey over at Sgt. Stryker (no relation to Jeff Stryker). I gather that reading about this debate must be some sort of political Rorschack test. Neiwert’s analysis and documentation convince me utterly, aside from the occasional rhetorical fillip, while Sharkey’s retorts brings to mind nothing so much as Usenet newsgroups, in which self-congratulatory told-ya’s and asides to an insular supportive audience substitute for reasoned debate. I have no doubt that to regular readers of Stryker’s page, the opposite it is true. Unfortunately, I suspect there’s a “classwarfare” issue at play here. Perhaps Neiwert’s educated prose and logic read as elitist to the more one-of-the-guys Sharkey? (Speaking of class warfare, howzabout we call Bush’s tax plan, “a tax cut for Barbra Streisand”?)
I believe Instapundit has pointed to the exchange, which could even the playing field a bit, implicitly lending credibility to Sharkey’s thin bluster. I noticed that Stryker categorized his triumphant rebuttal under “Anti-idiotarian,” a good way of signalling to his cohorts that Neiwert is one-a them kooky America-hating lefties will probably oppose doing the right thing when push comes to shove. The backslapping comments to the post show the flavor of the discourse among Stryker’s readership.
UPDATE: I shouldn’t have tortured myself, but naturally htere is yet another followup by the main host of the Sgt. Stryker site, but by this time the entire range of discussion has veered off into namecalling and trivia. It’s a pretty funny case of “panties in a bunch,” naturally followed by a chorus of hooting support in the comments. The list of invective (one of the worst pejoratives apparently being “journalist”) amounts to a series of sputters. I don’t imagine any of Stryker’s readers will follow the entire sequence or wonder in fact why only one of Dave’s points was ever addressed before the theatrical washing of hands and “farting in your direction” kicked in.