Novak’s entire career has been a series of position papers in favor of “values”–the “value” of unfettered sexual activity; the “value” of egalitarian democracy; the “value” of free-market capitalism unshackled from the Church’s social teaching.  Pope Benedict, on the other hand, is not concerned with “values” but with the concrete encounter with the Risen Christ… ~Scott Richert

Scott follows up on his excellent three–partseries of articles at Taki’s webzine with this post responding to Novak’s criticism of Pope Benedict’s Urbi et Orbi address, which I also commented on earlier this week.

In spite of his post lambasting me as one full of hate, I remain open to persuasion that I am wrong about Jonah Goldberg.  No, really.  Any day now, someone somewhere will present me with the evidence (of which my posts, I am told, are apparently free).  Though I remain skeptical, I have allowed that Goldberg’s forthcoming book may have something worthwhile to say.  As for “evidence-free table-pounding,” well, this is the Web and evidence often is presented through links, which I provided in the post to which he was responding.  The links and arguments foundinthoseposts would confirm even more strongly what I am saying.  Of course, I would expect Goldberg to challenge my interpretations of the controversies in question, but that would require making an argument rather than engaging in a lot of, well, evidence-free hand-waving and shouting.  

It is curious that someone who claims to know little or nothing about me or my motives would also say that I am “reverting to form,” since that would indicate that he knows what my “form” is.  Certainly when it comes to NR generally, my “form” is one of aggressive criticism and mockery, because most of the contributors there seem to deserve little else.  Those people made it pretty clear some years back that they consider people like me (i.e., conservatives who oppose the war in Iraq and paleoconservatives in particular) to be traitors to our country.  I have no brief for Eric Alterman or most of what he has had to say, but I generally share his low opinion of people who have declared me and mine to be traitors.  If holding something of a grudge for something that happened just four years ago–and for which no one at NR has ever expressed the least regret–is obsessing over “past” battles, I happily plead guilty.   

This post wasn’t especially vitriolic nasty, nor was it long by my standards, it wasn’t even a direct response to anything he had written and half of it wasn’t even about Goldberg.  Nonetheless, that single post is what he chose to respond to, rather than address any of the other posts that I have written in response to precisely the sort of cheap point-scoring tactics that he has used against the “crunchy cons,” Matt Yglesias and Ross and Reihan.  That is to name only those with which I am personally familiar and to which I have some small connection through blog exchanges.  His part-condescension, part-mockery approach to “crunchy conservatism” expressed very well what he thought of traditional conservatives–they probably also do not “deserve” a lot of his time.  He had no interest in people looking backwards when the “backwards”-looking folks were challenging some of the pieties of modern conservatism last year, but he now feigns interest when it suits him.  He seemed perpetually put out that he even had to talk about things as retrograde as farming or localism.  He believed, as he was glad to tell us, in a “partial philosophy of life,” which helped explain where he was coming from a lot better than anything else he said.  If belittling and insulting his interlocutors is Goldberg’s idea of “having fun,” so be it, but he shouldn’t be surprised if the people he insults don’t take it in the good-natured spirit in which it was supposedly offered. 

He went after Yglesias for the same reasons the Smearbund has routinely gone after Pat Buchanan and others critical of U.S. Near East policy, bringing out the big guns with a Lindbergh comparison.  I didn’t know Matt Yglesias, and I have still never met him, but the cheap-shot style of Goldberg’s response reminded me of the “crunchy” debates immediately and I thought it was just as unfair and shabby to employ these methods against a progressive as it was to employ them against other conservatives.  I have recounted often enough his insulting response to Ross and Reihan and why that response was both obnoxious and ignorant.  The last controversy was the one that particularly set me off most recently, not least because of his disrespectful reference to Sam Francis at the end.  Just prior to that, I wrote a critical, skeptical but not entirely hostile post about Goldberg’s book, and his response made me think (for a moment) that there might be something more interesting about this guy than his public displays would lead you to believe, but Goldberg saved me from this bout of goodwill by reverting to his form.  Long before Alterman ever said anything about Goldberg, Yglesias had the goods on him.  I had already been convinced by his treatment of Ross and Reihan that this interpretation was right.  Does it matter that Ross and Reihan have been nothing but cordial and helpful to me?  Probably.  They were being publicly dragged through the mud, however briefly, on account of their supportive comments about me and certain other paleos, which made the insult all the more irritating and personal to me.   

Goldberg probably doesn’t address these other posts because he thinks my objections to his positions in the “crunchy con” debate were simply “whiny,” so presumably he would find most of what I have written in these other posts to be “whiny.”  That might even be true in certain instances–this is blogging we’re talking about, not necessarily the most carefully considered writing on earth–but this point would be made a lot stronger if Goldberg didn’t seem to think everyone who breaks with the movement line as interpreted by Goldberg & Co. was either a whiner, a fool, a closet fascist or a liberal wannabe (or a closet liberal or fascist wannabe). 

For those interested in a couple other examples of things Goldberg doesn’t understand, the good folks at Conservative Times remind me here of another episode in which Goldberg demonstrated just how little he knew about John Lukacs’ understanding of patriotism, which Scott Richert, a great student and interpreter of Lukacs, had some fun with here.  That response reminded me of the post in which I hit Goldberg for his ignorance about the geography of the Habsburg Empire and his offhand reference to Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.  Maybe Goldberg would say, “Well, you can’t know everything.”  That’s true.  But then the wise man would not speak about those things that he doesn’t really understand.  I stand by the content of that Habsburg post, in which I wrote:  

Assuming he was a ghost, Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s spirit would not be talking to Jonah Goldberg under any circumstances, unless it was to scare him out of the National Review offices. It is more likely he is residing in the reflected glory of the Beatific Vision, or so we can hope. Okay, here’s a third point: Kuehnelt-Leddihn would be horrified by the Montenegrin vote because of its democratic and nationalistic character. That is what a real K-L reader would take away from the story immediately. Identitarianism was bad enough for K-L, but identitarianism based on a fairly insubstantial national identity would have to be even worse! The fact that the independence movement is led by a crook and monumental swindler in Djukanovic doesn’t help at all. As a committed Kuehnelt-Leddihnist, I won’t stand for Jonah Goldberg lowering the name of the great man with such preposterous posts.

Given that episode, I am still inclined to remain very skeptical that Goldberg will make good use of the works of K-L in his work on fascism.     

Going over all this, an outside observer might say, “Okay, but so what?  Why does any of this matter?  Why should I care about your paleo polemics?”  In the grand scheme of things, maybe it doesn’t matter that much.  If, on the other hand, one of the editors of the flagship journal of mainstream conservatism is actually not much more than the ideological enforcer that he seems to me to be, that tells us something important (albeit perhaps a little redundant at this point) about the moribund state of much of what passes for conservatism in this country.  A lack of ideas also has consequences for the health and success of a political persuasion and political movement, and if there is indeed such a lack today among some of the more prominent conservatives that is a problem that needs to be diagnosed and remedied.  If these posts have contributed to that in any way, they have not been a complete waste of my time.

By the day, the debate at home about Iraq becomes increasingly disconnected from the realities of the actual war on the ground. The Democrats in Congress are so consumed with negotiating among their factions the most clever linguistic device to legislatively ensure the failure of the administration’s current military strategy—while not appearing to do so—that they speak almost not at all about the first visible results of that strategy. ~Charles Krauthammer

Krauthammer may be right about disconnects between debating points and reality, but he may be slightly off in his aim.  Brushing past the destruction of one of the relative few bridges across the Tigris by a bomb blast and the explosion inside the Green Zone, he had to simply ignore Sadr’s statement ordering the Mahdi Army to target Americans (when it was supposed to be vital to the “surge” to not have to fight the Shi’ite militias yet), the bombing in Tall Afar, that former beacon of the progress we were all supposedly ignoring last year, and the odd chlorine gas attack, among other things.  He does not mention these things probably because they cannot be fitted into the narrative of progress and “cautious” optimism he is presenting to us, because that narrative is just one more version of the same “we’re turning a corner,” “things are getting better” rhetoric that we heard in ’04, ’05 and early ’06.  After all of that talk was shown to be horribly wrong during the rest of ’06, we are being treated to much the same as before.

StarTrek in-jokes notwithstanding, Jonah is [sic] does fairly engage people who disagree with him. ~Koz

Sure he does.  That’s why he very “fairly” intimated that Rod Dreher and Matt Yglesias were respectively quasi-fascistic and anti-Semitic (no mean feat for Yglesias on this latter point) and then sought to tar Ross and Reihan with what he must have thought was the granddaddy of all negative associations by tying them to Sam Francis (thanks to his impressive ignorance of the sharp differences and even some contradictions between Dr. Francis’ theory and Ross and Reihan’s ideas).  That’s why during the entire “crunchy con” debate he pretended that the phenomenon under discussion didn’t exist, there was no such thing as a “mainstream conservative” and all of this was a construct of Rod’s ever-leftward-drifting mind–it’s all because he can fairly and intelligently engage his opponents in serious argument.  Yeah, that’s the mark of a fair and serious mind.  How could I have been so wrong? 

Those are just the examples that I happen to know about because I have been tangentially involved in the debates in question.  How many more examples are there?  I admit that I don’t know this, but there does seem to be a pretty consistent pattern over at least the last year.  His dense failure to understand a basic element in the thought of Joseph de Maistre (which dates back to 2002) certainly doesn’t recommend him to me as a keen interpreter of intellectual history, that’s for sure.  Personally, I would take the disengagement and indifference of Derbyshire over the fake, condescending attentions of Goldberg any day.  

As for Koz not knowing what “lower-middle reformism” means, it hardly gets Goldberg off the hook, since he clearly did seem to know exactly what Reihan meant at the time and decided to take a cheap shot at Reihan’s smart and basically on-target analysis.  He didn’t really understand what Reihan was saying, of course, since he rushed to conflate Sam Francis and Sam’s Club Republicans in a mishmash that would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetic.  Since Goldberg doesn’t like populism, as he will tell everyone within earshot, and also apparently doesn’t care much for anything that vaguely hints at support for American labourers, he took Reihan’s claim that the GOP needs to address lower middle class interests and concerns in order to win in the next election (which is very probably true) as an occasion to engage in a lot of posing and gesturing about his own superior thoughtfulness.  Arguably, Goldberg has demonstrated some actual thoughtfulness and serious thought somewhere (the odds are in his favour that he must have, at some point in his career, written something slightly insightful), but it isn’t apparent in any of the controversies we are discussing here.  I am open to persuasion that Goldberg is not just an ideological enforcer with a weakness for sci-fi, but so far I don’t see anything that would make me change my judgement about him.

But if this is the choice they make, we’ll know that modern conservatism has ceased to become an ideology based on any kind of principle and has instead morphed, in the age of terrorism, into something not dramatically far removed in spirit from a hero-worshipping cult. ~Michael Tomasky

Tomasky reminds us what every informed person already knew: Giuliani is a horrible person who will do whatever it takes to acquire power.  Sounds like a winner!

Today I retrieved my car from impound, which is so far to the south that it is actually beyond the Southside and in that empty gap past the point where the two highways that previously made up the Dan Ryan split off from each other.  The actual retrieval process was fairly easy, as such things go, though the possibilities for Kafkaesque delay were everywhere.  Strangely, the cop who had issued me the ticket had told me that I needed to present proof of ownership to access my car at the impound, which was rather difficult…since my registration was in the car that had just been towed away.  Fortunately, this guy was either just having me on (thinking that I was some New Mexican tourist because of my license plate) or enjoys misleading people or was himself confused about the procedure, since I needed no such proof, as I learned from the people at the lot when I called.  Anyway, that little episode is over. 

To help unwind at the end of the evening, I therefore offer this combination of Lebanese pop and salsa, which at least Michael should find amusing.

So there was a “secret” attempt to find a war ‘czar’, and it was unsuccessful (it was so secret, it naturally made it into the Post), since when it comes to this war everyone in the military wants to stay a boyar, so to speak.  The notion of executive-appointed ‘czars’ has always intrigued me, since many of the same people who, for example, support the drug war waged by the drug ‘czar’ (perhaps using drug Circassians against the drug cartel equivalent of Shamil) will also complain in other contexts about regulatory bureaucracies and other agencies of which they disapprove sending out ‘ukases’.  For the people saying these things (usually the editors of The Wall Street Journal) the first is very good, while the second is very bad, even though it is presumably ‘czars’, not people at the EPA, who send out ukases.  Needless to say, domestic friends of autocracy have a confused relationship with the lexicon of Russian politics.  

In any case, ‘czar’ positions are interesting for another reason: their creation presupposes that the normal administrative apparatus of the government, as created by Congress and authorised by the President, is a complete failure and has to be bypassed and also assumes that there is too much ‘gridlock’ or ‘partisanship’ to make it possible to achieve satisfactory ‘results’ in this or that policy.  This appeals to two of the worst instincts in the American body politic: “let’s cut through the red tape” and “let’s put aside partisanship and work together.”  If you don’t want red tape, don’t just cut through it–get rid of it.  If you don’t want partisanship, get rid of parties.  If parties serve a legitimate function, stop whining about partisanship.  The ‘czar’ position is a perfect expression of the American desire to have it both ways, while also reserving the right to get angry when this obviously cockamamie scheme fails. 

In other words, the creation of a ‘czar’ is not just an admission of policy failure, but an admission that the policy could never have succeeded in the first place because it was far beyond the scope of the government as presently constituted to achieve the policy’s goals.  The creation of the ‘czar’ is then very much a symbolic gesture to show that something is being done and expresses our profound “commitment” to the issue, while making no difference whatever to the bottom line.  The reason why we keep having these things, and why the creation of a war ‘czar’ would have been greeted with some enthusiasm by those who think that any change of course is desirable no matter what it is, is that it satisfies the public when they believe that the problem is being addressed in a decisive way.  Nothing says decisiveness like ‘czar’.  

Bizarrely, it was Bush’s “decisiveness” that earned him public goodwill for a long time after he had clearly gone off the policy deep end.  People could say, “He may be stupid, but you can’t say that he’s indecisive!  No Jimmy Carter syndrome here!”  With the disaster of Katrina, people stopped saying that, and suddenly the supposedly well-oiled machine of the administration (which, as it turns out, was always a basketcase bursting at the seams with rivalries) became a creaking, rusty derelict that could hardly do anything in a timely or intelligent fashion.  Once the illusory aura of decisiveness was broken, it started to become clear even to some of the previously mystified that these people really had no idea what they were doing.  Anyway, this groping for someone else to be the decisive leader (some might even call him the Decider) shows just how far the mighty Leader has fallen.  But a few months ago, decisions were his and his alone.  Now they have become simply the latest thing to be outsourced in George Bush’s America. 

I have sometimes wondered why media reports about every governmental “czar” title uses the earlier transliteration ‘czar’ rather than tsar, which more accurately captures the sound of the word.  Anyone wishing to test the proposition, go to a Russian Orthodox church at the start of the (Slavonic) liturgy and listen for, “Blagosloven tsarstvo…” (Blessed is the Kingdom…)  In English translation of the word cesky, we use a ‘cz’ to express what is basically a ‘ch’ sound, which would make czar sound like char, which is Armenian for evil, and that is usually what I think these buck-passing ‘czar’ positions are.

Update: Secretary Gates, no fan of the proposed position, gets it right when he says: “This ‘czar’ term is, I think, kind of silly.”  No kidding!

If the “single least-controversial thing you can say about foreign aid and third-world development” is that they are “really, really helpful for the nation you’re trying to help out to become less corrupt,” which is a claim few opponents of foreign aid would accept as true, what would be the most controversial thing you could say about them?  That they bring back the dead?

The sense among more compromised conservatives that when confronted with the question, “well, what would you have done instead?,” the paleocon answer tends to be “I would have voted for Alf Landon in ’36, you idiot.” ~Ross Douthat

Ross has a point here, though it is perhaps not as good of a point as he might think.  (Note: In what follows, I can really only speak for myself, but I will risk making certain generalisations about paleos that others are free to contradict, mock or ignore.)  Those who have been in the opposition, even when what is supposedly their “side” has been in power, can fall into a purism that verges on a kind of fatalism.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that this is what most, much less all, paleos actually fall into in reality, but the danger is certainly there.  Sure, there’s a tendency among some of us, myself included, to look askance on even those traditional conservatives who continue to treat Lincoln as something other than a tyrant and even less patience for those who may now think that the New Deal was worth the trade-off of killing what little remained of the Constitution (not that these folks would acknowledge that this was the trade-off), but considering what we’re talking about paleos are quite restrained and mild in their annoyance with these folks.  If we engage in a certain amount of Jacobitic refighting of old battles, this is because we are pretty confident that the wrong people won in the past and that the principles upheld by the losers were not rendered irrelevant or untrue by the accidents of contingent history.  For those who have bought into the official history and those who don’t know any, it is important to be reminded that things did not have to be the way they are and that “there is no such thing as a lost cause because there is no such thing as a gained cause.”  If, as Gary Rosen wrote in today’s OpinionJournal, “no one on the right is agitating to abolish the income tax or the Department of Health & Human Services, to repeal the civil-rights laws, or to withdraw the U.S. from NATO and the U.N. (well, maybe the U.N.),” this is something generally to be decried from the rooftops and the cause of lamentation–especially the bit about NATO.  As it happens, there are plenty of people on the right who are agitating for one or more of these things–they just happen to exist outside the world of “the right” as imagined by the editor of Commentary.  Part of the reason why paleos have not been able to “do” anything is that they are usually not in the position to “do” very much, which came about in no small part because paleos were pushed down and out by those who have had the record of making a hash of things and being frequently wrong in their predictions.  The question I would turn around to our mainstream friends is what, after all their compromising and deal-making, exactly have they managed to accomplish that puts them (or their blogger sympathisers) in a position to belittle anyone else’s lack of accomplishment?  Particularly during the decade of ascendancy (1996-2006), what does pragmatic conservatism have to show for all its worldliness and savoir-faire?  The answer would seem to be No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D and Iraq.  I do believe I see the flaw in the pragmatic approach. 

That brings us next to the question of practicality.  Of course, abolishing the income tax, for example, would be highly impractical…if you think that the federal government should be doing all of the things that it currently does.  It would be very hard to fund things without such a tax or some equivalent revenue-extractor, but then the whole point of wanting to eliminate the tax is to stop that extraction and destroy the basis of the government’s power over myriad things in our lives.  But eliminating all of those functions and “services” is deemed to also be impractical because there are strong vested interests defending them.  Of course, this actually only means that eliminating these functions is very difficult and impractical in the short term, not necessarily undesirable nor impracticable.  Those who will point out the impracticality of a thing are usually those who already oppose it absolutely, but who want to frame their strong opposition in terms of pragmatism.  To speak of practicality begs the question, “What is to be done?”  Before praxis, there has to be some goal.  What most people call impractical is really just something that they don’t want to try to do in the first place. 

Of course, it may be that certain things are impossible.  Trying to test the states’ right of secession today would bring disaster upon your people, for instance, because the central state would annihilate you, no questions asked.  In the back of every reactionary’s mind is the knowledge that the attempts to openly resist the central state (i.e., “doing” something) have resulted in the obliteration or ruin of whole peoples and regions.  That doesn’t mean that we think the Jacobites or the Confederacy were wrong, but it means that the value of “doing” something has been qualified significantly.  Further, since it is not possible to save the whole, it becomes imperative to preserve what you can of your way of life in your own backyard.  Thus comes the annoying criticism that we do not “do” anything, since many of us came to the conclusion (it seems difficult to say that it is the wrong one) that our ailments are spiritual and cultural and cannot be solved through the sort of political “doing” and “action” that would satisfy our critics anyway. 

This doesn’t mean that we don’t engage in the political realm to some extent, inasmuch as we still believe it is part of our responsibility to remain informed and aware of what goes on in the centers of power, but there is an awareness that the sources of our ills are elsewhere and cannot in any case be addressed by becoming a retainer to princes.  Like Kekaumenos, we keep a close eye on the intrigues of the capital, insofar as it might affect us and ours, but we do everything we can to avoid it as much as possible.  For those who have spent (or wasted, depending on your perspective) their lives in the capital fighting political turf wars, while the culture rots all around them and few political victories are won, this is certainly an infuriating attitude, but what can I say? 

Nonetheless, paleos seem to have a weird way of being pretty well-attuned to the political realities of the day better than, say, most Republicans who think that something called “Islamofascism” exists apart from Islam (that old “religion of peace”), the “surge” is working, megacorporations are the friend of the small town and the American middle class and all forms of populism are a dead end.  Some of our libertarian friends take issue with our proclivity towards what they mistake for “nostalgia” and our sense of what has been lost in the onward rush of so-called progress, going so far as to mock our simultaneous desires to revive agrarianism as the most desirable arrangement and also to protect domestic manufacturing for the present as the lesser of two evils.  They meanwhile shout hosannas to the Wal-Mart god and sit idly by, mute, as American labour is devalued and cheap foreign labour is imported–be silent, ye people, for The Market is at work!  Pardon me if I say that the charge of paleo lack of realism doesn’t seem as well-placed as some might think. 

Then there is the problem that the cranks–then and now–are usually right and are often more prescient than their more accommodating neighbours.  The combined realities of being vindicated as right with surprising frequency and watching others take the country over a cliff will make anybody a little cranky.  Of course, the real Old Right answer to what we might call the FDR Problem would have been to impeach and remove FDR for gross and repeated violations of the Constitution and his oath of office, followed by giving support to the new President, John Nance Garner.  It also happens that this would have been the right thing to do. 

I would sooner live and approach the world with my eye on doing the right thing rather than, say, settling for the thing that was “doable.”

The strategy of deploying charged and hyper-aggressive language is now evident: First intimidate one’s targets, then coerce them–into conformity or silence. And do it always under the banner of free speech and democracy. ~Daniel Henninger

Quite unintentionally, Mr. Henninger has just described the editorial policy of The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard and National Review.  It is amazing to me that someone at a newspaper whose editors and contributors have engaged in plenty of destructive and often false commentary about their political enemies would have the gall to lecture bloggers on intimidation, coercion and the silencing of opponents.  Sometimes I think that half the reason the WSJ op-ed page exists is to try to intimidate and silence opponents, particularly those on the right with whom they disagree; the same goes for the others, only more so.  Bloggers may speak harshly to their interlocutors and targets and call it democratic activism, but at least we do not launch invasions and cheer on organised slaughter in the name of freedom and democracy–that dubious honour belongs to Mr. Henninger and his ilk.

Speaking of “doublespeak” and general two-facedness, nothing captures it better than a columnist at an establishment rag such as the Journal pretending that bloggers have the monopoly on aggressive hostility towards political opponents.  If I write in a bitter, withering tone in many posts, I learned it from reading the Journal’s editorials as a boy–these were always laced with irony and also quite frequently with contempt for their subjects.  Yes, the blogosphere is far less restrained, and particularly in comment sections this becomes quite dreadful at some sites, and I am certainly strongly in favour of restraint, but any attempt to dictate a “code” to bloggers is an attempt to control them and limit their influence.  That would almost have to be the point of inventing such a thing, and the only beneficiaries of limiting their influence are the establishment media, the political class and the administration.  Looking at it that way, it seems to be a very bad idea.

Bloggers are notoriously combative and often seem unusually “angry” to the refined, calm columnists and media watchers, because many of us, unlike them, actually have opinions that do not resemble weak tea.  Having gagged on years and years of their spoon-fed pablum, we spit it back in their face and they discover that they don’t like it at all.  Sometimes we’re angry, and sometimes we’re simply calling establishment pundits and media outlets on their flaws in a particularly pointed and critical way that these people can only interpret as a “screed” or an expression of crazed rage.  What I despise is the pretense put forward by establishment figures and institutions that they hold the keys to the definitions of moderation and reasonableness.  Their insipid policy views are half the reason so many of us are so agitated about the state of affairs today.

I run what I am proud to say is a pretty clean and respectful house here at Eunomia, so I know it is possible to create a healthy atmosphere of combative back and forth that does not have to degenerate into mudslinging and insults.  If other bloggers fail to do that, that is their mistake, but I find the idea of a general code for bloggers (especially one sanctioned by the king of verbal abuse and intimidation, O’Reilly) to be ridiculous.  There is a lot of invective and criticism and obvious hostility to various hacks, villains and tyrants who deserve that hostility here at my blog.  If I were to subscribe to this bizarre code, I would basically have to stop writing 85% of what I write because of rule #2 alone:

We won’t say anything online that we wouldn’t say in person.

I find such a restriction completely unrealistic and inappropriate.  In person, I actually try to be diplomatic and seek to avoid harsh exchanges of words or even intense disagreements.  I do this for the sake of civility, and because I am not inclined as a matter of temperament to getting into shouting matches with people face to face.  FoxNews, which has perfected the medium of the shout-fest that is supposedly a “news” or “opinion” show, would not want to have someone like me on.

I have read that Jefferson was much the same way: he could write vituperative polemics against his political foes, but would be the image of civility in person.  As it should be.  The early satirists of the Opposition wrote things about Walpole and the Robinarchy, albeit they often had to write about them indirectly, that they would probably never have said in person to Walpole and his fellows.  Written invective will be the outlet for a society choking under the imposed constraints of political correctness and thought crimes.  The more consolidated major corporate media become, and the more autocratic the government becomes, the greater the demand will be for increasingly unfettered expression to rebel against these things.  To take away that outlet, or to try to say that there is something deeply wrong with that written invective will be to ensure that there are explosions of outrage elsewhere in society.