By Dennis Loo
As people who visit World Can’t Wait’s website know, I’ve written a spate of articles here recently about the Town Halls: “Town Hall Fracases and the Fascist Movement,” “Health Care Fracas: What Do Vampires and the GOP Have in Common?, “Mission Impossible: Seeking Common Ground with Fascists,” and “The Swift Boating of Barack Obama.”
In response to one or more of these articles, a bit of a dust up has been going on. One of these disputes has been coming from blogs such as Ruth’s Report and Third Estate that are part of a group of 13-14 blogs that have posted quite a few links to WCW articles in the past (including as recently as August 14), including some of mine, recommending readers to them.
That’s why I’m a little mystified by the following:
In response to the first three of my Town Hall articles, this was posted on August 21, 2009 at Ruth’s Report:
Dennis Loo went off on a tear last week and has continued it twice this week.
We are not interested.
We are not interested in attacking people we disagree with who are fellow citizens. We are not interested in all the insults for American citizens that Dennis Loo can dream up.
We are just not interested.
We like the work World Can’t Wait does. But we were all together last week as well as this week so when the issue was raised we could debate it. The consensus was that while Mr. Loo is screaming and attacking American citizens, we are not interested.
He can go after politicians or the media.
But, after awhile, the person repeatedly screaming "STUPID!" at everyone is generally the one whom most people think is stupid.
I don’t dislike Mr. Loo but I am not interested in his non-stop attacks.
In response to this I sent an email to the person who wrote it. Below is what my email said in its entirety. My email’s subject line read: “Town Halls:”
“Hi, I just caught the fact of your (and the others you mention in your blog) disagreements with my commentaries on the Town Halls. Debate is a good thing and disagreements are inevitable and can provide the opportunity to inform one another of things we didn’t consider ourselves. So I welcome a developed criticism, or even the very brief one you have posted.
“I did, however, want to clarify that my essays aren’t mainly directed at the gullibility of those who are shouting down those whose opinions they don’t like and who are adopting positions based on fallacious information propagated by the right wing. The target of my essays is first and foremost the increasingly fascistic mode of operation of the right wing and secondly, the horrible precedent that these Town Halls are setting. Having said that, I do, secondary to that, not hold back my criticisms of members of the public who are participating in these fracases. Whether someone’s a member of the PEOPLE or not doesn’t immunize them from behaving in a way that assists reactionaries. And that is what many of these people are doing by and large in these Town Halls.
“The general trajectory of events here is in a very, very bad direction. As I stated in my first essay on this, the Town Halls are part of a more general trend that is exceedingly dangerous and ugly.”
I had hoped to initiate a principled and private email exchange or perhaps they’d post my email with their rebuttal. Instead my message triggered the following reaction (along with a few others of the same kind describing my email as “nasty.”) Their comments are quite long so I’m excerpting parts of it:
Shame on Dennis Loo <http://thirdestatesundayreview.blogspot.com/2009/08/shame-on-dennis-loo.html>
…
It’s real cute to watch Dennis Loo call everyone "racist" if they oppose Barack’s big money give-away to Big Pharma and the Insurance Corporations (Crooks), it’s real cute to watch because when he does that and he’s fond of trotting out homophobia.
…
But there’s Loo screaming racist at anyone who disagrees with him, calling everyone opposed to ObamaInsuranceCare stupid, just insulting left and right. Even more so in his e-mail where he uses the word "reactionary" to describe his political opponents but never grasps what a reactionary he himself is.
Most of all, he doesn’t grasp how offensive he’s become.
…
Using a gay sexual practice (tea bagging) as a term to vilify your opponents is no less homophobic because Rachel Maddow used the term…
We’re not highlighting anyone else who uses "tea bagger." At any community site. We’re sick of it. It’s homophobia. And shame on Dennis Loo for encouraging people to laugh at gay men — from the left, of course. Shame on him.
***
When I read this my first response was astonishment. I couldn’t figure out why I was being accused of being homophobic. Then a friend said that they’re saying I used the term “tea bagger” and that this term is a slam on gay men.
There are three problems here.
First, I never used the term “tea bagger” or any variation of that term to refer to protestors in my essays or in my email.
Second, I didn’t even know that the term “tea bagger” was a derogatory reference to gay men. I did use a phrase in reference to Obama that his health care plan was “weak-as-a-third-time-tea-bag,” but there I’m obviously referring to actual tea bags being dipped in water too many times. If the people at Third Estate et al think that this is where I’m referring to the protestors then they are very sloppy readers (or else they’ve never used an actual tea-bag).
Third, if I was going to complain about the Town Hall atmosphere, I wouldn’t be doing it by making criticisms from the right! What kind of nitwit would I have to be to attack the Town Hall fracas participants by calling them gay?
I have been writing about these Town Halls because I see them as dramatic evidence of a profoundly alarming precedent: a right-wing populist cryto-fascist mobilization to shut down disagreement that is only a short step away from mob violence against those people those on the right don’t like or see as a threat. The political terrain that we are on just got much more perilous and the stakes greatly ratcheted up.
Is there such a thing as right-wing populism? Is it ever possible for people to be duped into doing bad or reactionary things? If people do bad or reactionary things, should this be criticized, or are any criticisms off limits if the people doing these things are “fellow citizens?” Does saying that they’ve been duped mean that you are endlessly insulting them and yelling that they are “STUPID!?” Doesn’t it matter to (at least some of) the Third Estate et al folks that the reason why these Town Hall Hollerers oppose Obama’s health care plan is based on falsehoods told to them by right-wing media and the GOP?
The dispute over how to handle the Town Hall Hollerers is analogous to the “support the troops” slogan: can you support the troops and oppose the war? If you are opposed to the war, then how does telling the soldiers that you support them not also involve supporting what they are doing?
You cannot have it both ways.
Either you are against the war and support the troops who resist that war and you support the truth, or you are going to have to vitiate your opposition to the war and uphold what those troops are doing.
Those soldiers who resisted the Vietnam War and the Iraq War have said that the people who really helped them stand up to imperialist war were the friends, family, and/or citizens who exposed the crimes of those wars and the crimes being committed by soldiers. The people who said how much they supported them as troops did them no good.
This question is also analogous to the question of torture. If you are silent in the face of knowing that your government has been and is still torturing people, then you are complicit in crimes against humanity. Your sin in being silent isn’t at the same level of the sins of those who promulgated the torture policies or those who actually carried out torture, but it is a sin of omission and constitutes complicity nonetheless. Are we wrong if we criticize people for silence in the face of their government’s torture? Or are we right to do so?
Eddie: Rather than show any evidence of your false claims you continue to make assertions and expect people to believe you. Show the evidence. You don’t do this because you don’t have the evidence because it’s a totally false allegation. If you think that I have said homophobic things, then show us some quotes and give us a link to it.
Instead of doing this you continue by making even more false allegations.
As for my email to Ruth being rude, pompous and overbearing, I published what I said to her here in my article in its entirety. People can decide for themselves. Do you think you can continue to make the claims that my email was nasty etc., and no one will bother to look at the email itself? Do you think that by your merely asserting something and if you do it often enough that it will win you the argument?
Claiming that I started something with Ruth and no one will observe for themselves that the sequence started with Ruth saying that she wasn’t interested in what I wrote, etc., and that my email to her was in fact not antagonistic at all and begins by my saying that I invite any criticisms and is throughout in the same spirit?
The response from Ava and CI to me that you cite is laughable. People can determine that themselves. Do you really believe that people are so stupid that they can’t see the truth if they’re continually bludgeoned with blatant falsehoods such as yours?
You are, of course, welcome to post anything you like from now on but I’m not spending another second reading or responding to it. I have more important things to do. You are engaged as I said before in the same egregious tactics that the GOP leadership is: make up lies, say them often enough and loudly enough, and you get some credulous people to believe them.
Dennis Loo, you are such a drama freak and you\\\’re hurting World Can\\\’t Wait.
You write, \\\”I don\\\’t know if you know this, but since you seem to be connected with Third Estate,\\\”
I read Third, don\\\’t let your paranoia get the best of you.
\\\”then you know that the original and false claim was that I had used the term \\\’tea bagging\\\’ in my articles about the Town Halls here at WCW.\\\”
You need to learn to read. They didn\\\’t say that. They never said you did it here. You\\\’re lying in the comments. In your article itself, you claim that a friend told you that\\\’s what they were referring to.
You really need to get a grip and you did leave those comments at the site you comment at with your little photo on it.
Ava and C.I. served you your lunch in \\\”To Dennis With Loo from Ava and C.I.\\\”
http://thecommonills.blogspot.com/2009/08/to-dennis-with-loo-from-ava-and-ci.html
They even have your little photo Dennis Loo and, like here, you can\\\’t stop commenting at that site.
Having read the threads, yeah, you knew what tea bagging was. You\\\’re participating in those conversation.
You\\\’re being less than honest and what really ticks me off is Ruth is an elderly woman. And you\\\’ve gone after her with your pissy and prissy e-mail. You started it. Go to those WCW articles and unless you\\\’ve deleted the comments, you\\\’ll see people were calling you out. For good reason. Ruth called you out and instead of addressing it, instead of grasping how many people you turn off (notice, only your little sock puppets defending you here), you just start attacking her.
Your e-mail to her was rude. You were pompous and overbearing.
She\\\’s a widow and a grandmother and that\\\’s way you speak to her?
You have serious problems. And World Can\\\’t Wait needs to cut this nonsense out. I\\\’m not going to participate with this group if they continue this garbage. C.I.\\\’s really the only one online who consistently promotes World Can\\\’t Wait and I see this as a slap at all that she\\\’s done for you to attack her or anyone within her community.
You brought it all on yourself and want to blame others. You need to do some growing up.
Oh, and by the way, since you claim that I have distorted the debate here, I invite anyone who wants to do so to follow the links that I used in my article here to the originals and anyone who wants to to go to Third Estate and Ruth’s Report themselves and read everything that you all have written there about me. Decide for yourself who is distorting what.
Ask yourself how come none of those blogs have actually printed my email or have cited and quoted the actual passages that you claim that I said. You can’t because doing so would show what a set of lies you are trying to pass by claiming that my email to Ruth was “nasty.”
These are exactly the same kind of tactics being employed by the GOP in the health care debate: wild claims that bear no relationship to reality.
And as for the ongoing claim that I’m homophobic, I’m going to cite part of the original Call from the World Can’t Wait.
I’m on the National Steering Committee of WCW. Ask yourself if it makes any kind of sense if an SC member were engaging in homophobic behavior why 1) that person wouldn’t be immediately kicked off the SC, and 2) why the WCW website would allow homophobic comments from one of its leaders to be published on its website or for that person to be propagating that kind of bigotry elsewhere?
An excerpt from the CALL follows:
YOUR GOVERNMENT is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule.
YOUR GOVERNMENT suppresses the science that doesn’t fit its religious, political and economic agenda, forcing present and future generations to pay a terrible price.
YOUR GOVERNMENT is moving to deny women here, and all over the world, the right to birth control and abortion.
YOUR GOVERNMENT enforces a culture of greed, bigotry, intolerance and ignorance.
People look at all this and think of Hitler – and they are right to do so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come. We must act now; the future is in the balance.
Millions and millions are deeply disturbed and outraged by this. They recognize the need for a vehicle to express this outrage, yet they cannot find it; politics as usual cannot meet the enormity of the challenge, and people sense this.
There is not going to be some magical “pendulum swing.” People who steal elections and believe they’re on a “mission from God” will not go without a fight.
There is not going to be some savior from the Democratic Party. This whole idea of putting our hopes and energies into “leaders” who tell us to seek common ground with fascists and religious fanatics is proving every day to be a disaster, and actually serves to demobilize people.
But silence and paralysis are NOT acceptable. That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn – or be forced – to accept. There is no escaping it: the whole disastrous course of this Bush regime must be STOPPED. And we must take the responsibility to do it.”
Eddie: I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and offer the hypothesis here that you mean some other Dennis Loo and are mistaking him for me. There are some other people with my name. What websites are you referring to? Cite your evidence.
I don’t know if you know this, but since you seem to be connected with Third Estate, then you know that the original and false claim was that I had used the term “tea bagging” in my articles about the Town Halls here at WCW. Now, because you can’t maintain that claim because there’s no evidence for it, you are shifting it and now claiming that I have participated in some unnamed websites discussing teabagging and that I have used (sic) homophobia.
Show us this evidence or apologize for spreading false rumors.
It’s been cited and Dennis Loo knows it. He’s participated at websites in tea bagger discussions and thinks no one knows that. He deliberately distorts the argument made by The Third Estate Sunday Review. And Loo’s been called out here on these pieces as he should have been. Ava and C.I. served Loo his lunch and then some. Hard to know when he distorts the debate here and claims he never knew about tea baggers.
Third Estate Sunday Review rules. Dennis Loo’s become an embarassment and, yes, I think he’s used homophobia.
Thank you b. e johnson. Those who are claiming that I’ve said things are relying on people not actually reading my articles. If they read my articles they’d see immediately that there’s no basis for the charges of homophobia. The charge itself is absurd. And if they’d print my email anyone can see that the email’s the opposite of “nasty.”
It would be so much better if we could have an open debate about disagreements instead of these awful distortions and fabrications. I hope that we can still do that.
To those who fling broad and uneducated critique at Dennis Loo, for your allegations I ask “Where is your evidence.” Site your resources or quiet down until you can. This is an argument you cant win with sloppy research.