Justus For All

The American Spectator has a good synopsis of the Randi Rhodes ‘mugging’.  I didn’t hear about this until after it had already been debunked, but the story is fascinating.

I think that this quote from C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity sums up the whole thing very well:

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

This is not of course a problem only on ‘the left,’ although I do see it more often, and more developed there.  That may be as much a problem of my own blindness though.  Certainly I have been guilty of times in searching out how ‘bad’ those I disagree with are.  In some ways, this story itself is an aspect of that, obviously those on the left went wild at the notion at how ‘evil’ the right was, and some seem to be clinging to the story, clearly more ‘wish’ it were true after a fashion.  At the same time though, the right has jumped on the idea that the left is paranoid with as much gusto as the left did the idea that the right was violent.