Just before the furor over Banned Books week ended ...

I got banned from making comments at one of the worst liberal blogs I've ever visited ("Pandagon").
Why was I banned? Good question.
There were many complaints that I was a "troll," or one who tries to disrupt the discussion threads. This despite the fact that I refrained from the type of name-calling that many of the Pandagon regulars chose to use in their responses.
So, what makes Pandagon such a bad blog among so many? Bad arguments. The bloggers there send out a fairly steady stream of bad arguments, and then the average commenter says something bad about Christians, or Republicans, or Bush, or whatever. It's okay to go off-topic if you essentially agree with Pandagonian orthodoxy.

One of my first replies over at Pandagon was in response to the charge (included in the original blog post) that Rush Limbaugh had "encouraged Republican efforts to deliberately disenfranchise voters." The quotation is direct, straight from the original blog post and respects the original context.

Rush, of course, did no such thing. He was making a point about the mentality of Democrats who think that telling Democrats that they are supposed to vote on Wednesday while the Republicans will vote on Tuesday counts as voter disenfranchisement.
If one believes that telling voters that they are supposed to vote in the presidential election on a day other than the one mandated in the Constitution (Tuesday) is a serious threat of voter disenfranchisement, then he is implicitly admitting (proportion to his fear of its effects) that the Democrat constituency is stupid to whatever degree he thinks they will be fooled.
That's Rush's point.
"Amanda Marcotte" thinks that Rush is trying to encourage Republicans to use such techniques as the election approaches, and that is just batty. Most of the Pandagonians who replied seemed equally convinced that Rush advocated techniques to disenranchise voters. One guy, Robert, seemed to understand what Rush was saying.

Here's my reply (posting as "Crow"--I'm not providing URLs since this site is so bad that they deserve no boost to their stats):

Robert gets it, for the most part.
The rest of you just hopped eagerly into the category that Rush marked off for you.

There is no advocacy of the Wednesday voting going on, so that charge is false (great job of superior ethics, folks, for asserting otherwise).
Rush’s point was (obviously) that Democrat concern over the stupidity of their constituency leads to seeing jokes like this (Dems have used the same tactic, as I recall) as a serious attempt at vote suppression.

Now, I suppose I could give you guys the benefit of the doubt and assume that you’re mostly Republicans posting here in order to make Democrats look silly …

http://elderbear.livejournal.com/
(see entry for 10/10/04)

Or how about this one, from later that same year?
“Tomorrow is Election Day, so get out and vote! As part of the election reform passed in the wake of the 2000 election, remember that Democrats, Greens and Independents vote on Tuesday, and Republicans vote on Wednesday. So you Neo-Cons can just safely sit tomorrow out! And America–in fact, the entire world–will thank you for that.”
http://www.thoughtviper.com/new/new54.html

Get a clue, people.
Rush was not advocating this technique. He simply highlighted that [sic] fact that when you complain about it as vote suppression you’re admitting to having stupid voters.
To be fair, I saw a few Republican commentators make complaints about the technique coming from the left. Rush’s words apply to them equally.

The next post was Amanda's reply:

Why do I get all the Klansmen on my blog? Seriously. Crow, Robert—you’re not fooling anyone. I grew up in the South amongst white conservatives. I know what jokes about “stupid” voters are. I know they’re coded racism.

So, first the leap from analysis of Democrat mindset to the supposed advocacy of voter disenfranchisement, and then the leap from Rush meant X, not Y to an accusation of racism.
Unbelievable, I know, but that's exactly the way it happened.

My last post before I got banned, as I recall, was "I just love being around tolerant liberals."

*****

I have in mind an ongoing project where I survey blogs as though I'm compiling a resource journal. Time-consuming? Sure, but the tedium of research can be fun.
Needless to say, "Pandagon" will get panned.