Car Wars: the Phantom Motive

Ace takes the (mind) trick with this one:

It's amazing to me how the media is so confident in the accuracy of their speculations about right-wing motives-- racism, hatred, anger, etc. -- and yet never seems to be able to turn this talent for psychological profiling towards Islamic terrorists.
...
Seriously, it's scary how they so perfectly report to me my motivations and intent for every single thing I say and every single thing I do and even every single thing I merely hope for.

Yup. Last night I was at the rink, hanging in the lobby with a few teammates between games. The TV, for reasons man was not meant to know, had a commentary by professional idiot Bill Maher, saying, in so many words, that the recent Arizona law about illegal immigrants was passed solely to disciminate against "brown people." Since I'd just lost the prior game on two embarassing goals in the final 90 seconds, my temper was not at its best, and I basically cussed out the television. The counter guy - a good guy and all, but a reflexive leftie - snapped back, "Of course it's about race!"

There was no time to talk about it then - I had to go back down and lose the next game on two embarassing goals. (This time at least I spread them out.) But of course - race. All about race. Why shouldn't the Left think it's about race when one of their favoritest groups EVAR is quite literally "The Race"? La Raza is all about the racial grievances and hating Whitey. To a leftie, the natural reaction is simply to hate right back; though of course the leftie would say that it was Whitey who was hating first.

Once I tried to trace this labyrinth of contradictions and dead-ends with a leftie friend. If hate is wrong, I asked, then why is hating back suddenly all right? "It's like fighting back against a bully," he answered. That sounded reasonable to me, so I then asked why in schools, when facing actual bullies, those who fight back are punished equally to their aggressors. "That's different!" he said, shocked and saddened. "Those kids are learning that violence is OK. It is never OK." Again, reasonable, I thought - misguided but at least it sounds plausible. "But then, why are violent groups like La Raza never called to account publicly? Why are ecology protesters noble when they start burning stuff down? Why isn't that not OK?" My friend got exasperated at that point, as well he might in trying to follow that sort of rabbit-hole illogic. He gave up and said that I just didn't understand nuance.

Long ago I decided to simply give up the rabbit-hole. It's helped my sanity a great deal, though as we've seen, not always my temper.  Like in most rabbit holes, I imagine that sooner or later the cards will all come tumbling down, and we can wake up in the sunlight.

(The opening review of this sad tale can be found at the Coalition.)