s640×480.jpgSince the death of Steve Gilliard some really, really ugly stuff has been published on the right. I won’t give it traffic but it’s not too hard to find and it’s heavily linked in wingnuttia, who seem to think that now is a really good time to go after Steve because, being dead and all, he can’t deliver the righteous ass-whipping he most certainly would have meted out in life. It takes a special kind of courage to wait until your enemies are gone before unloading your ugliest vitriol, the same kind that pimps for wars you expect others to fight on your behalf. It’s a rather consistent character trait in the wrong-o-sphere.

Anyway, the General lays out the history here of a Nashville blogger, Brittany Gilbert, writing on an ABC affiliate blog who excerpted and reprinted one of the worst quotes without comment. The General, being one of Steve’s friends, wrote one of his patented letters to the affiliate brass. When the blogger announced that she had meant it ironically, the General made note of it but having seen the original post and not being blessed with omniscience I have to say I took the same meaning out of it that he did. It happens. Sometimes you don’t express your intent well (and I’ll take her at her word and assume she was being ironic) and if that’s the case it behooves you go to back and clarify. That people would be rightly outraged that a blog of an ABC affiliate was printing such shit where Steve’s family and friends would see, especially without appropriate context, pretty much follows. I don’t know who this surprised.

Now the General is being attacked for being a misogynist. Which, I have to say, is patently absurd. There is a whole world of genuine misogyny out there and every time someone wraps themselves in that mantle without cause and plays the role of victim in defense of something quite indefensible it makes it that much easier for the claim to be dismissed when it’s legitimate.

The General would have done the same thing if it had been a man. I really don’t know who could doubt this. Those lobbing grenades at him over this either don’t want to take responsibility for a really stupid act or just want to wallow in victim-hood and traffic bait (hence the laundered link — not going to cooperate) but it really doesn’t matter which.

I know from personal experience that women bloggers can take some pretty vicious hits from readers both male and female, much worse than their male counterparts, and to the extent that this happened — it shouldn’t have. But that was not the General’s intent in this, and neither should he be held responsible for it. Because to do so would mean that the actions of all women were above criticism for fear of what some belligerent sexist nut might be motivated to do upon reading it, and that’s wrong. That he didn’t go after the original offending (male) blogger who probably gets 25 hits a day does not mean he’s a card-carrying member of the patriarchy, it means he rightly realizes that this stuff does its real damage when it makes its way into the mainstream. This kind of lunacy will always exist at the fringes. What we do every day is fight back the steady slog it tries to make toward legitimacy an normalization as represented by the platform of an ABC affiliate’s blog.

Steve loved the General, the General loved Steve, and Steve hated stupidity. That post was stupid. The General did what the General does. The end.

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