It’s an itch he can’t stop scratching.
In a New York Times op-ed Friday evening titled “World War II and the Elements of Slaughter,” conservative columnist Bret Stephens referenced the bedbugs that a media professor jokingly compared him to in a tweet Tuesday, which ultimately drove Stephens to deactivate his Twitter account later that day.
Will no one speak in defense of the Bedbugs?
August 31, 2019
Children are dying in cages. The Republicans are doing a great job.
I don’t really know what to make of this. Conservatives seem to feel like they are being targeted for extermination and very fearful of it while advocating and outright doing it to others.
Either that, or just opportunism over their favorite era, WWII. Though I am not sure they know whose side they are on.
Mr. Stephens is apparently ok with people of a whole country being called ‘rabbits’. His hero, Churchill, once theorized that “Indians breed like rabbits”.
Oh good God.
Also, if you are capable of writing prose this bad, you don’t deserve to write for the NYT.
The American left has become especially promiscuous when it comes to speaking pejoratively about entire categories of disfavored people.
Finally, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who think that the professor should be given BS’s spot on the op-ed page of the NYT.
Finally finally, I must be insane because I think I just read one of Newt Gingrich’s fellow travelers bemoaning the “conviction that an opponent embodies an irredeemable evil, and that his destruction is therefore an act of indubitable good.”
“Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams to find himself transformed into a large Bret Stephens.”
If there’s any justice, Mr. Stephens will now deactivate his NYT column. He’s just another priggish, self-centered male who’s overly in love with himself. A common species among well-educated conservatives.
He’s really going to take a flip, sort of silly remark about bedbugs and turn it into the Holocaust? Yes, I think he just did.
The whole thing about bedbugs came up in the first place because the NY Times reported that they had to bring in an exterminator after bedbugs were found in their building. So Karpf tweeted a joke that perhaps Stephens was one of the bedbugs they found.
Stephens has definitely over-reacted and needs to have his friends stage an intervention before he completely goes off the deep end (if he hasn’t already - trying to link a dumb joke to the Holocaust?!)
FFS, you crybaby, just stop already. He didn’t compare you to a bedbug because he wants, by his infestational rhetoric, to encourage the dehumanization and eventual genocide of the entire race of Bret Stephenses. He compared you to a bedbug as a joke because there are literal bedbugs infesting the New York Times. He wasn’t given the idea by Nazis or Stalinists. He was given the idea by actual bedbugs. So GROW UP. All the high-end wingnut columnists whine like this, it’s pathetic.
Who would want to be friends with a guy like this?
The intervention that you prescribe is impossible.
Not having read many times op ed pieces since they paywalled the site years ago, anyone know if Stephens had anything to say about Trump’s infestation (vermin) comments? Or did he let those slide, because, well, the cheeto emperor wasn’t talking about him and his kind?
In today’s essay Stephens does a decent job of quickly summarizing the Nazi Regime’s efforts at dehumanization of Jews, et alia, using insect words through radio and other forms of mass propaganda. And he connects it to the current crypto-fascist tendencies of Trump’s GOP and many noisy media minions.
Then he goes typically to excess with this: “The American left has become especially promiscuous when it comes to speaking pejoratively about entire categories of disfavored people.” He gives zero examples, and willfully forgets to acknowledge that Karpf has no political power and that his tweet had 9 viewers before Stephens’ overreaction.
Stephens is the one with the media megaphone here. Would that he uses it wisely for good and not private spats.
To a certain extent, I blame Dean Baquet for some of this. I get the impression that he’s just kind of allowing Bret to drift off into some realm of delusion thinking the craziness of this saga will generate readers in the NYT.
What it’s actually doing is making the Times look like a haven for RW delusional fools who have nothing better to do with their time. Really embarrassing.
OT
Raw Story has what I think is a blockbuster about the Federalist Society.
Turns out, we’ve been the victims of an organized lie campaign starting with Gingrich in the 1980’s. Every single word of the conservative movement has been a lie, every single so-called principle of conservatism has been a lie for decades.
Rather than Limbaugh’s insinuation that the “movement” has been an impromptu, grassroots up-welling via telephone call-ins, it has in fact been a premeditated murder of the United States of America and its Constitution by an organized element of insurrectionists called the Republican Party.
Atrios over at eschaton.com describes the Bret Stephens situation perfectly. It’s all about “violating the rules of the court”:
I diagnose “delusional Bretasitosis.”
