Amanda Marcotte, a woman known to be a racist, said something interesting during a fellatious book review of pretentious anti-Semite Matt Taibbi’s The Great Derangement:A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion. On speaking of Taibbi’s “adventures” undercover she makes this statement:

“…and he also spends a lot of time kicking around with 9/11 Truthers, the biggest political embarrassment to the left since the invention of Che Guevara T-shirts.”

Wow. One would think if one of the pillars of the Internet left was so embarrassed by Truthers and Commie-worship she’d tell her friends at DailyKos and Democratic Underground to stop encouraging it. Marcotte herself has been known to dabble in not only conspiracy theories but bizarre demonization fantasies of the right, as she does later in her post when she gets sidetracked trying to convince the world (and herself) how fabulous her life is. So fabulous we’re all just jealous of her:

“I think it’s absolutely true that culture war issues are meat thrown to wingnuts to get them into a frenzy of envy and hatred for the liberals with all the sex we’re having in between interesting parties with good food and conversation.”

My wife and I will be laughing about this one at our anniversary (together 19 years today!) dinner tonight at our favorite Indian restaurant. Though the above really needs no comment I will put forward that most people whose lives are filled with great sex and interesting parties are much more pleasant than Amanda Marcotte. And anyone who has ever felt the need to try to scrub the Internet of things she wrote to advance in her career, because said things went well beyond the bounds of partisan debate, is being hypocritical when they claim to be shame faced by some kid who doesn’t even really know who Che is putting on a t-shirt he got at the mall.

Marcotte’s venomous hatred for anyone with he temerity to disagree with her is typical on the left, and more to the point, a driving force for truthers. Many young truthers grew up being told Bush was evil, Bush lied, Republicans want to enslave them etc. Why would they then draw the line at a 9/11 conspiracy theory?

Taibbi’s book sacrifices truthers to attack Christians. By linking Christians to truthers Taibbi is doing little more than smirking his way through yet another character assassination against one of the only groups miscreants can still safely be publicly bigoted against. The truthers themselves though are a product, not of fringe leftism, but of the Left’s irrational anti-Bush/anti-Republican hatred. At a certain point the left needs to accept that if their strategy is to claim Republicans are capable of anything then there will be people who claim they’ve done anything and it’s a rum do indeed to have groomed them for years, filled out your rallies (and traffic) with them, and then suddenly decide now that you don’t need them and they are too embarrassing to be associated with.

What’s more if the left wants to make class warfare and “imperialism” central to their ideology then they are simply going to have to accept that Communists will fill their ranks. And commies love t-shirts with slogans on them.

Marcotte isn’t embarrassed by the embrace the left gave truthers and the Cult of Che when Republicans were in power, nor did she mind the ideological reach around Democrats, once a party willing to go to war to halt communism, gave to the dozens of front groups for the Worker’s World Party. Certainly Marcotte isn’t embarrassed by truther Cindy Sheehan, Castroite Medea Benjamin or Innsmouth’s own Susan Sarandon when she glares blankly into the camera of whatever B-list event she’s at and croaks “Bush lied-people died. Ia! Ia! Cthulu Ftagn!” so why are the rest of the truthers and commies different?

Perhaps because they don’t attend any fabulous parties?

Trutherism and Che worship were born from the left, not imported into it. Maybe that’s what Amanda Marcotte should be embarrassed about.