They let this run?

Dumb as.......

Ezra Klein explains

Projection?

I was planning to let this pass, but as Lee Siegel digs himself deeper and deeper into some catacomb of self-righteousness over James Kincaid, he's begun flinging his dirt all across the left, a schtick that's grown tiresome. Now, because too few people appear to agree that Kincaid is a child molester, we're all a bunch of "liberal automatons" and "clueless knuckleheads" who "respond like growling Pavlovian dogs to any suggestion that people cannot indulge their every sexual appetite."

So let's talk this one out -- one blogofascist to another. Kincaid is an English professor who studies the sexualization of children in American media. The other day, he wrote a piece for Slate on the reemergence of Jon Benet, arguing "JonBenet would not get all this attention did we not want to bestow it. It's not the media forcing on us something we'd rather not have: We're lining up at the trough to be fed...[it] allows us to fulminate against trivial problems while ignoring huge problems close to home, meanwhile wallowing in self-righteous porn babble: We are able to use the half-clothed bodies of children as centerfolds while professing shock that anyone would so display them. The story is always the same: Somebody else finds the bodies of children irresistible and we want the chance to rail against these monsters, meanwhile relishing the details of the very bodies we claim indifference to. It is a classic example of scapegoating."

Siegel criticizes Kincaid for being a "a very snide and superior writer," which, for obvious reasons, I can't help but point out (Writer, heal thyself!). More alarmingly, in three posts entitled "James Kincaid and Pedophilia," he asserts that Kincaid's belief that we view children sexually and so take a subconscious glee in fulminating endlessly about those who would sexualize them, obviously reveals him as a pedophile. Siegel, floating high above any evidentiary standards or textual support, has now argued this point in three separate posts, the last of which accused the left of being in cahoots with pedophiles. His advice for us, as I understood it, was that we'd begin winning elections when we ceased supporting NAMBLA. Wonder why James Carville never thought of that.

......................................

Here's the post Siegal wrote, and incredibly was allowed to run

JAMES KINCAID AND PEDOPHILIA, PART II:

At the end of yesterday's post, I asked Professor James Kincaid, who writes regularly on the subject of pedophilia, to be candid about whether he thinks sex between adults and children is justified. Today I found this quote from Kincaid on the official website of NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association.

"It is possible that the [boy-lover's] marginal position alerts him not only to self-interest but the pains suffered by all the outcast. This is not a necessary consequence of [loving boys], of course, any more than virtue is of poverty. Still, that passion for helping the child is so strong in relations [between men and boys] that even the police acknowledge it."

"That passion for helping the child," Kincaid says. Yes indeed. (NAMBLA's bracketed phrases replace Kincaid's original terms, "pedophile" and "pedophilia.") So I guess Kincaid has frankly admitted his predilections after all--if you know where to look for them. What a shame that editors still publish his disingenuous screeds against the media's sexualization of children. They really just seem like ways for Kincaid to hide his own appetite for children behind his indictment of all of us hypocritical "voyeurs" out there.

Indeed, if that were the case, Kincaid's lust for children would, in his eyes, be a noble attraction. He's honest about his desire, you see. The rest of us are secretly titillated victims of one panic-inducing hoax after another. Kincaid actually believes, as he writes in his Slate article, that the scandal of Catholic pedophile priests was just another media-contrived "drama." These "dramas," says Kincaid, distract us from cases in which children are horribly beaten. Instead, he writes, "we focus our attention, almost all of it, on stranger-danger: things like abductions..." Stranger-danger. Cute. And again with the weaseling "we." Kincaid should start reading the newspaper. The New York Times, not to mention less encompassing local papers, routinely report heartbreaking cases of child abuse. The names Quachon Browne and Nixmary Brown tragically spring to mind.

I don't think there is anything worse than violence, including sexual violence--children don't "consent" to anything--against children. Call me callow and earnest, but people like Professor James Kincaid and his enraged, whiny supporters should be stigmatized, and they should be proscribed.

Frank,

Who the fuck runs the TNR online?

Lee Siegel, in a barely coherent rant, just accused James Kincaid of being a pedophile with NO evidence. I don't know, that comes real, real close to libel the way I learned it. I mean, he's quoting an edited comment from NAMBLA as evidence.

God, doesn't anyone edit anything over there? Because when you accuse a man of having sex with children, you're defaming his reputation and accusing him of being a criminal. I mean, a smart editor would publish an apology and retraction asap, before the lawyer letter arrives.

TNR seems to be in freefall. Marty's racist rants, not confirming e-mails and then being churlish about it, but this, well, this is bad. Real bad. I mean the man is an expert in pedophila, and for Seigel to slip the surly bonds of common sense and turn him into a child raper, well I think you're going to have another fucked up weekend. In fact, I think Friday is going to suck for you.