Thinkin bout Medea Benjamin, Obama's heckler. I'm reminded of comment on a Balloon Juice thread that, over the years, I've found to be wonderfully handy when discussing these kinds of leftier-than-thou people; and so, from commenter, "Joe From Lowell", here is Joe's Protest People Hypothesis:
The most important thing to Protest People is their self-image as Protest People. If they’re the first to denounce something, that gets them mega-points on the Protest People scale. If they’re wrong, whatever loss of credibility they gain in terms of being reality-based is outweighed by the demonstration of what awesome Protest People they are. Heck, it actually helps their credibility among their intended, Protest People audience to be so wrong, because it’s just more evidence of how ideologically hard core they are.
I love the community organizer ju-jitsu.
That’s a great comment from JFL (though the link is currently broken).
Throughout the entire second half of the ’90s, I was a faithful listener to Alternative Radio. That was where I first encountered Medea Benjamin, and so I had an image of her as being well-spoken and intelligent. So I gave her a pass throughout the 2000’s as Code Pink became more and more outlandish.
But this sort of incident is just one more reminder that the voices of dissent I took so much to heart in my 20’s were also voices of unreason. (It’s a direct line from Manufacturing Consent to the Battle of Seattle to Nader 2000.) I still think the radical message needs to be heard, needs to be given more attention than it currently gets. But crimini, people, this is exactly the wrong way to do it.
(link fixed)