Colmar's Regression

Colmar won't let anyone post comments on his blog anymore. I guess he doesn't want us to interfere with his angry detachment from the so-called "mean green meme" or with anyone else's. Why else would he suddenly delete previous challenges to his posts and disallow any future ones?

It can't be because he was swamped with comments, challenging or otherwise. He barely received any, and most of the few he did receive were mine questioning his exclusive reliance on profoundly conservative sources such as Instapundit, Ann Coulter, and Thomas Sowell for indubitable political, economic, and social "truths," and his caricatures of liberals and Democrats.

For instance, he insists that the Republican Party is the party of truly progressive ideas of people like Newt Gingrich, while the Democratic Party has been "hijacked" by Al Sharpton and Harry Belafonte. My comments questioning these claims are gone. So is my more recent comment taking issue with his likening of protest against the Iraq war and occupation with protesting against policing crimes and fighting fires because they cost too many lives and too much money. Also gone is my comment that challenged his implication that Thomas Sowell and his fellow Republicans are above focusing on the relative trivialities of sex scandals while the Democrats are unable to focus on anything else.

Yes, after a promising debut insightfully discussing spirituality and Ken Wilber, his blog has degenerated into a daily exercise in liberal-bashing employing skewed facts and interpretations drawn exclusively from moderately to radically conservative sources. He implies such things as that Democrats are a bunch of radical Marxist traitors to this country while Republicans are our salvation, that McCarthyism was actually a good thing because there actually was a communist threat, and that the environmental movement is wrong because some of its chief supporters allegedly don't practice what they preach. And so convinced (or insecure) is he of the correctness of his sources, "facts," interpretations, and conclusions that he no longer even sees reason to entertain comments that call any of his dogmatic pronouncements into question.

I empathize with Colmar's professed desire to transcend the "mean green meme" that he angrily says held him in its sway for a long time. But it seems to me that he's regressing to a mean orange meme rather than progressing to the second tier orientation at which he claims to be aiming. As for me, I'm paying attention to many more conservative commentators than I used to and considering their arguments with a far more open heart and mind than I did a short time back. For I believe that truth is to be found in a perspective that honors and integrates both the "left" and "right" bands of the political spectrum. Colmar won't achieve this integration by reading, quoting, and endorsing only the writings of the likes of Instapundit or Ann Coulter.