Dog Training: Why A Rolled Up Newspaper Is Not A Gun

A few items:
Item One: Klavan

So if leftists really want conservatives to behave like conservatives, they should make sure the networks and the Times and CNN begin to hold everyone to the same standards all the time no matter what's at stake. Otherwise, if the right does become as hollow as the left, leftists will have no one but themselves to blame. In a two-party winner-take-all system, either the rules apply to both sides equally or both sides are bound to start playing without them.

Item Two: Vox

Klavan and other conservative commentators have got to get over their irrepressible desire to fix the Left and understand that they don't get a vote. The point is not to prove to the Left that they are wrong and that they should stop what they are doing and behave more like we do. The point is to defeat them utterly, then eradicate their ideas from Western civilization before they manage to destroy it once and for all.

 

Item Three: Mike @ Cold Fury , who put A and B together.

Batting clean-up: moi.

If Vox thinks Klavan wants to "fix' the Left, he's clueless in a lookout-on-the-Titanic-one-foggy-night sort of way.

Klavan is a rhetorical genius, as any twenty of his videos on YouTube will demonstrate beyond dispute.

The unspoken point of Klavan's admonitions to the Left, is that after showing them how they miss the standard of success, and telling them what they'd need to do to reverse course, lies the salient and silent "But you'll NEVER do that, because you're a bunch of retarded evil people who could no more think intelligently than a dog could perform Shakespeare."

Klavan has made a hobby of skewering the Left on their own petards, and showing it to be every bit as difficult as shooting fish in a barrel - with a howitzer.

To imagine he's seriously expecting that the Left will suddenly break suction, pull their heads out, and start acting like rational human beings is to ignore the body of Klavan's work to date.

His work is masterful black comedy, for its own sake, and his remonstrations to the Left are in the same vein as lecturing a puppy before applying the rolled up newspaper: one doesn't do it because they expect the pooch will suddenly stand upright on its hind legs, hang its head, and profess sorrow, remorse, and an earnest aspiration to behave better, delivered in the Queen's English.

They do it to observe the proprieties before the Sword (or in this example, the Rolled-Up Newspaper) of Justice falls, and delivers the Smackdown of Justified Wrath on the guilty party.

In short, you don't do it for Fido, you do it for you.
This is why you're not just a brutal thug beating a dumb animal, and it's also why you don't shoot the dog.
(Or the Left.)

At least until they graduate from being asses, to being outright terrorists, at which point lopping heads off is all well and good, as Klavan would assent to in a heartbeat.

I wouldn't shoot a dog for peeing on a fire hydrant, and I wouldn't shoot a Leftist for being an ignorant braying jackass. In both cases, it's what they do.

But when either one graduates from transgressing polite behavior, to threatening life and limb, they need to be put down.

Like you do with any rabid dogs you encounter.
Soiling your carpets is trainable with a rolled up newspaper.
Rabies is only corrected with a bullet to the brain.