Bryan Preston, “Hot Airian” extraordinaire, offered up a poorly written rant last night in an attempt to point out some of the mainstream press’s misplaced priorities. I’ll go through the post itself with commentary. Don’t think of this as a “fisking,” but as a focused exposition of why The Prestigious Internet, especially the blogosphere, has been testing my imperturbability lately.

Today’s news featured anti-semites on rampages. Every day since 9-11 seems to have featured anti-semites on rampages somewhere in the world, but two of today’s stories happened right here in the US of A.

The phrase “anti-semites on rampages” is very queer. It’s not usual to use the word rampage when referring to a single person. So after reading the first sentence a couple times, then the second sentence a few times, it was still unclear if Bryan means to say that different groups of anti-semites are going on wholly different rampages (like in the case of the Danish Muhammed cartoons) or if individual anti-semites are going on their own mini-rampages? And how the hell does a day feature anything, much less an anti-semite?

Hezbollah fired over 200 rockets into Israel today, at least one of which got all the way to West Bank. That must have been their new Khaibar-1, a rocket made by Iran and named after some Islamic grievance that probably goes back 500 years.

Just a smidgen of semantics here: Hezbollah’s firing of rockets at Israeli cities does not constitute a “rampage.” When pretending to be a writer, it’s always a good idea to know what words mean. And I take the “Islamic grievance” comment as an attempt at humor. Because Bryan is commenting on this whole affair, I am going to assume that he is knowledgeable on the topic of the Battle of Khaybar, as it is the event that crystalized the concept of dhimmitude in Islamic law.

Hezbollah’s and Iran’s causus belli is Israel’s existence. Israel’s a Jewish state. So Hezbollah is an anti-semitic army, beholden to an anti-semitic country that sits on an ocean of oil and is developing nuclear weapons.

Spell check fails Bryan. It’s “casus”, not “causus”. And based on accepted stylistic conventions of the English language, the second and third sentences should be joined, as follows: “Israel’s a Jewish state, so Hezbollah is an anti-semitic army, beholden to an anti-semitic country that sits on an ocean of oil and is developing nuclear weapons.”

The “…so Hezbollah is an anti-semitic army…” is an exemplar of both the non sequitur and the ad hominem. Opposing the existence of Israel does not necessarily make one anti-semitic, just as being a proponent of its existence does not necessarily make one pro-semitic. But none of this even matters.

Preston is relying solely on the “conventional wisdom” or “common knowledge” of his audience. This is the laziness that has crept into the political blogosphere, and the Hot Airians, with ‘Chelle at the helm, are the blind officers.

Labeling everyone who questions the existence of Israel an anti-semite is no more valid than me labeling everyone who supports the continued occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan a white supremacist. Whether I believe it to be true is immaterial, as I have failed to explain why I believe it to be true.

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Wow. I only got through two paragraphs. Cont’d tomorrow. (Update: [8/3, evening] Or the next day…)

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Final thought: What if Bryan had been Patrick Henry’s speechwriter?

If given the choices between liberty, on the one hand, and death on the other, I would like to take the former over the latter.