response to Falwell's fatwa
Cal Thomas' "Liberal Lamentations" arrived in response to the piece on Falwell's fatwa.
My reply follows:
That's typical Cal Thomas, all right: whining about "disparaging labels" (unsourced, of course) and then calling liberals and their writings "condescending," "elitist," "clueless," "insulting," and "insane." (Oh, and "hypocritical," too...but Thomas is more familiar with that word than he realizes.)I don't have enough free time to fact-check everything that Thomas mentions, but I did read the Friedman piece (which didn't mention "strong odors," "coming theocracies," or "beheadings") and the Wills article (whose legitimate question about fundamentalism Thomas completely ignored by quoting an irrelevant biblical verse). He may not be implying that Wills is an atheist (as if that could possibly matter), but this style of argument makes me wonder if there's anything Thomas won't misrepresent in order to score a point.
It's always instructive to examine rhetoric like "an enormous sea of red (Bush counties) with only tiny patches of blue (Kerry counties) in the usual places where elites and other condescending liberals reside" in light of a map like this, weighted by population instead of acreage:
If you study this map, you have to conclude that the "enormous sea" and the "tiny patches" are nearly equal; has it never occurred to Thomas that he might be objectively wrong?
