Chris Cilliza is a Hopelessly Partisan Dope

This human punching bag filled with failure and noogie scars (noogies cause only light physical scars, but the psychological scars are deep and eternal) also claimed that he couldn't recall any previous Republican nominees being tagged with the "racist" slur all that much.

Walter Henry at the Federalist reminds him.

He won't retract this obviously false thesis, of course. The good/bad thing about the internet is that it gives people who were previously bullied the chance to bully other people with wild abandon.*

* Yeah guilty as charged myself. But I do try to keep this Revenge of the Nerd syndrome in check. I'm not sure how successful I am. Since I realized the ugly nature of social shaming, I try to reserve my own Altruistic Punishment impulses for other Altruistic Punishment disciples -- I try to be the hockey goon that only goes after the other team's goons, but not the players who aren't gooning it up.

I imagine, however, that 98% of internet bullies likewise conceive of themselves as being Goons Against Injustice!, so I don't know how true this conceit is. I know it's certainly not a novel one -- every misbehaving, insulting partisan imagines he or she is justified because someone else is acting like an asshole and that justifies themselves going into Even Bigger Asshole Mode.

This is how things degenerate, obviously: One tribe claims/perceives ill-treatment by the other tribe, and those of us with more sociopathic tendencies (yes, the urge to harm perfect strangers is a sociopathic tendency, though a widely shared one) now feel empowered to unleash the cruelty inside of us that is just looking for an excuse to come out, and we start gooning it up horribly.

Then the other Tribe takes offense, and their goons start looking for Retribution. Etc.

All that said, Chris Cilliza really is a reflexively partisan, Tribal goonsquad jackass who deserves to be known as such, instead of a guy who the Washington Post permits to pretend is some neutral observer of political give-and-take.

posted by Ace at 12:46 PM

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