Michigan madness

What is in the water up that way lately?

Last I knew Dr. Mark Byron was living up there or at least had business there. Anyway, he wrote a scenario in which Democrat Senators in states with Republican Governors were killed by Christian commandos. He did so in the form of a news item, and of course a news item would list the specific Senators by name.

That turned out to be a mistake to say the least. In Dr. Byron's words:

With 58 hours of 20-20 hindsight, the scenario below was too detailed and shouldn't have included names of particular senators....My regulars here generally understood the message I was trying to convey here, that the rhetoric of peaceful civil disobedience can lead to people resorting to violent civil disobedience. However, readers that just read this piece and don't know me as well could wonder whether I'm the next Paul Hill or Tim McVeigh. You would especially wonder that if you read the first half of the piece alone, as many sites did when excerpting it, leaving out the rejection of that straw man.

I agree that nobody who has read Dr. Byron's blog very regularly could have reached the conclusion that he was advocating anything of the kind. But lefties have to have their right-wing bogeymen, and this was the best they could do. Dr. Byron goofed, but IMO the reaction was all out of proportion.

And now we have Dean Esmay objecting to certain Christian fundamentalists and their God.

Fine, that's his prerogative - I can do without some of them too, and if they're right I don't like it one bit.

But then he went too far with gratuitous offensiveness. I won't cite it here, but you can figure it out if you look through the comments to this post far enough. You don't have to be Christian to call that out of line.

Someone suggested, perhaps to give him an out, that he wrote such a thing simply to rattle cages toward the end of increasing traffic. Dean's integrity was affronted - said commenter was asked to leave the blog without letting the door hit them in the ass on the way out. He meant it all right.

The frustrating thing about religious discussion is the faith - you can't prove anything without it. But Dean refuses to acknowledge that for all he knows the fundamentalists are right about God, and he himself might be the one with the flawed morality. (Maybe he'll see it differently in a few weeks - currently he and Rosemary are both quitting smoking, so in the meantime Hell probably doesn't intimidate him).

After all this, it would serve Michigan right if they lost to Ohio State.