December 23, 2007, here on slacktivist: NABA NABA hey!
Charen has lowered the bar so far that the bar is no longer even visible, yet she still expects us to be impressed that she made it over. Well, whoop-dee-frickin’-doo.
The bad news for Mona Charen is that life doesn’t work this way. Our success or failure as human beings is not graded on a curve. The existence of people like Timothy McVeigh or Jeffrey Dahmer or Uday Hussein does not give the rest of us a free pass to get away with everything this side of mass murder or cannibalism or serial rape. Countries, cultures and governments aren’t graded on a curve either. It doesn’t matter if your government looks good when compared to Kim Jong Il’s or Turkmenbashi’s — that doesn’t make it a healthy democracy or a free and open society.
The NABA NABA pinheads like Mona Charen aren’t really trying to convince you and I that they’re good people. They’re trying to convince themselves. And they’re failing. They know this is nonsense. They realize that their claim — we’re Not As Bad As the worst people you can think of — is just about the saddest, flimsiest, least-impressive claim one could make.
Settling for second best is unambitious and uninspiring. Settling for second worst — and trying to pretend you’re proud of it — is just pathetic.
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