Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin is the perfect example of what a conservative writer should be (if conservatives were supposed to be liberal).
Rubin is the type of writer who delights in bashing conservatives in the name of saving them, kind of the way progressives bashed the medical field during the Obamacare* debate. The progressives claimed to have the medical people’s best interests at heart as they worked on a piece of legislation that would cause them all to leave the field.
* Please Note: the word Obamacare used in the above paragraph has been declared obscene by Congressional Democrats–if anyone is offended by that harsh word, I sincerely apologize.
“Conservatives” such as Rubin spend more time bashing conservative principles than supporting them. For example Rubin bashes supporters of a balanced budget amendment as extremists; this is from her summary of the debt ceiling deal at the end of July:
The president gets a deal through 2012; the House gets its cuts; and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) gets his commission. And the GOP extremists don’t get their balanced budget amendment passed and sent to the states or the satisfaction of blowing up the deal. As for the country, if it passes, the agreement will take us from the days of automatic debt-ceiling raises to the first, tentative steps toward fiscal sanity.
I supposed it didn’t matter to this “conservative” that a balanced budget amendment is a key policy pushed by most conservatives and it is supported by the majority of voters.
In another post about the debt deal she criticized those who opposed the Boehner plan as:
…hard-core obstructionists who refuse to say yes to anything and were willing to sink their own speaker
Per my friend and Bigs contributor Dan Riehl, Rubin is a Berkley graduate and former labor lawyer who became a Republican because of the Democratic party’s terrorist-appeasement oriented foreign policy. But conservative positions go way beyond supporting a strong military and favoring a strong response to terrorism. There are other positions such as fiscal responsibility that are important also.
Rubin also has a habit of relentlessly bashing conservative candidates. She was downright nasty to Sarah Palin and is even more nasty to Rick Perry. Criticism is fine; in fact, I have criticized each of the leading GOP candidates in separate posts since the campaign season began but always in the back of my mind remembering that any one of them (except Ron Paul) would be better than Barack Obama.
Rubin seems to have made Rick Perry her own personal whipping boy, calling him, among other things, a buffoon. It almost makes me wonder if the Texas Governor used to beat her up and take her lunch money in kindergarten. But I checked and can say for sure they did not grow up together.
All this brings us to Rubin’s battle with Red State’s Erick Erickson, a conservative writer and a commenter on CNN. Yesterday, Erickson wrote a post which called out Rubin for being a foreign policy-only conservative and for being a surreptitious mouthpiece for the Romney campaign. One paragraph in his post started an uproar:
Jenn Rubin, when not pushing out Romney talking points is in favor of freeing traitors, claims to be a conservative covering the conservative movement, though she has nothing in common with conservatives other than hating terrorists. A conservative friend says she’s best understood as ‘Likud’ rather than Republican or conservative. There’s nothing wrong with being Likud, but one ought to be honest about it.
I agreed with that paragraph when I first read it during my morning commute. Erickson was basically saying the same thing as me; being for a strong military and a strong response to terrorism does not necessarily make someone a conservative.
During the commute home, to my surprise, I learned that many people branded Erickson an anti-Semite. Apparently his “Likud” comment was interpreted as a charge of dual loyalty. Not knowing Erick personally (met him a few times) but being a pretty regular Red State reader, I can attest to the fact that nothing in his writings have ever struck me as anti-Semitic.
Erick is not the most subtle person around. If he were to make a charge of dual loyalty, the reader would be hit over the head with it. Kind of the way Media Matters’ Senior Fellow MJ Rosenberg does when he calls Jews who support Israel “Israel-Firsters,” or the way Sirius XM sports jock Chris Russo and his partner at the time, WFAN’s Mike Francesa, did right after 9/11 when they called for Americans of the Jewish faith to take a loyalty oath.
Erickson is not big on subtlety, but he is also not an anti-Semite and his criticism of Jennifer Rubin was 100% on the money.
More despicable than the misinterpretation of Erickson’s comment was Jennifer Rubin’s arrogant response to it, which not only slammed the Red State big shot but the entire blogging profession which pays her salary.
“You want a Washington Post journalist to comment on an anti-Semitic screed by some blogger?” Rubin asked. “My arms are not long enough to punch down that far.”
Even though she ironically just did what she said she was too good to do.
Allow me to remind Rubin what it says right under her name with every post:
Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.
You see Jennifer Rubin is one of those “some blogger” types. And maybe to the readers of the very liberal Washington Post she is a conservative, but to the rest of us conservatives she is nothing more than an arrogant “not conservative blogger” who is not a big fan of either conservatives or bloggers.
Rubin should quit the j0b she disparages, or maybe it’s time for the Washington Post to hire a real conservative to blog from the “right side” of the issues. Dave Weigel is not a conservative and neither is Jennifer Rubin. Why not hire someone like Ed Morrissey of Hot Air or, since he has a mega-sized blog to run, maybe they should pick someone else. I understand that Yid With Lid guy is pretty good.
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