My Thoughts on Ace of Spades...

In looking for a blog to analyze I felt it best to look at one that I normally wouldn’t read . Therefore I reviewed some posts on the conservative Ace of Spades blog. I found the perfect post from Ace on February 1, 2009.

Unlikely: Kossacks Seek to Bring Limbaugh Down, by Bringin’ The Funnay, which actually contained a excerpt from Daily Kos and commented on it. I figured this was the perfect article to critique seeing how it was basically a conservative blogs response to a liberal blogs post. In fact the phrase “Kossack” is a term coined in reference, and reverence no doubt, to readers and posters of the Daily Kos blog.

The first section of the blog post addresses a post on the Daily Kos on how to deal with Rush Limbaugh and his perceived attacking of Democrats and President Obama in particular. It basically states that the best way to deal with Limbaugh and his popularity amongst the GOP is to attack him with humor and/or satire. In their eyes the only dip in Limbaugh’s popularity came when Al Franken released his lampooning book, “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot.” The Daily Kos is saying that the only way to do this is to take it mainstream and not just “preach to the choir”, i.e. other liberals who already cannot stand Limbaugh. They use Tina Fey’s portrayal of Sarah Palin as a good example of how a public political figure’s image can be dramatically altered.

Ace responds to this post by simply saying that liberals cannot successfully use this method because that would require self-deprecation, something he thinks they are incapable of. He then goes on to talk about how some liberal comedy writers such as Jon Stewart are capable of pantomiming self-deprecation, but really it’s just a transparent counterfeit in Ace’s views. Ace also points out that “95% of liberals are incapable of the ego deflation necessary for humor, and I’d expand that to 99% of Internet liberals.” He then shows how good Limbaugh is at self-deprecating in comparison to liberals in general.

Although I do not completely agree with the Daily Kos post, I really find flaws in Ace’s argument against their Humor/Satire angle. He basically states no liberal is even capable of satire or even any humor in general because their egos are so large. Stating absolutes and thus polarizing your argument makes no sense to me at all. He furthers this attack by finding a funny liberal, Jon Stewart, then immediately discredits him, all the while building up the initial target of the Daily Kos post about Rush Limbaugh. He also uses an obvious made up statistic to nail the point home claiming “99% of Internet liberals” are incapable of humor. Obviously this post is not aiming to convert anybody over to his viewpoints but to slander and attack the Daily Kos to the delight of the readers and commenter's.

The most disturbing part of the post is that the comments on the site are very attacking and sometimes directly racist with nothing to do with the actual post many times. They vary from “Effective satire is far beyond the reach of these mental dwarfs,” to “BTW, that black lady singing the anthem at the (Super) Bowl should be taken out behind the shed and beaten to death,” which is quite an inappropriate comment about Jennifer Hudson whose mother, sister and nephew were just murdered a few months ago. I read the original Daily Kos post and the Ace of Spades post and found both site’s comments to be heavily biased but the venom on Ace of Spades was alarming to say the least.

However, the fact is that neither comment section on either post really advanced or debated the argument in any sort of rational way. They both ended up resorting to jokes and name calling, which in the end shows both blogs are pandering to a specific readership that is already their audience.