But still a damn good quote.
A couple weeks back, Johan Goldberg wrote the following in a column at NRO:
Liberals used to be the ones who argued that sending U.S. troops abroad was a small price to pay to stop genocide; now they argue that genocide is a small price to pay to bring U.S. troops home.
Last week, a reader wrote to Jonah to tell him how his spreading of the quote was being received:
Since your column the other day, I’ve been quoting you in my .signature, which as you know is a four-line tag that gets appended to everything I post in Usenet discussion newsgroups.
The reaction has been startling. I have never seen this kind of brouhaha about any .signature I’ve ever used (and in posting since 1990, I’ve used many). My .signatures are seldom lacking in political statement, but rarely do they provoke an uproar. Some people, unmoved by my tags in the past, suddenly complain that my simple quotation is a troll for political argument. There are at least two newsgroups in which I’ve been asked to lose the .signature; I won’t self-censor, and so I don’t expect to return.
I don’t know what the magic is. All I can guess is that your simple statement of obvious fact is pushing liberals’ cognitive dissonance to new levels, to the point of frightening them. It appears your words are like kryptonite to liberals.
The liberals see themselves in the quote and want to break the mirror. What they see is so ugly they cannot stand it.
Well, I just … er… “borrowed” it and added it to the random-quote file for the top-right corner of my weblog.
And, to be perfectly honest, it hits the nail right on the head.