In Which I Argue Semantics With Confederates

The League of the South is on my case yet again, this time taking issue with the following characterization I made of that pro-Confederacy organization in the course of listing Robert Stacy McCain’s various telling hobbies:

… a radical anti-federal outfit which also has some bad qualities, such as its obvious keenness on a more theocratic sort of constitution.

The League’s response begins thusly:

I’ll let the very capable Mr. McCain handle his own defense. However, I would like to respond to your assertions about the League of the South.

If Mr. McCain was capable of handling his own defense, he would agree to take me up on my thrice-stated offer to discuss the charges in question by way of an e-mail exchange for publication in the chapter that I’m writing about him. This would give him the opportunity to totally discredit me and to do so in such a way that I would be obligated to humiliate myself in my own upcoming book – assuming that the facts are on his side and that he is capable of using them. But McCain has yet to even acknowledge that I have made such an offer, and in fact has continued his policy of writing various silly things about me while denying his readers even basic information about what exactly is going on here. Anyone who reads Little Green Footballs or American Power – two blogs that have made reference to my offer over the past couple of days – is better-informed regarding the situation between McCain and myself than are McCain’s own readers.

The League spokesperson continues:

As to our being a “radical anti-federal outfit,” well, you got us there. But then, what other choice do we have in an age where federal policy, no matter who’s in the Oval Office, is to export jobs, gut the Bill of Rights, and prop up tyrants and puppet states around the world with Cruise missiles and occupation forces? The League of the South believes downsizing DC is the only possible response, other than pretending that elections can some day, some how soften imperial policy. Consider us just a little sceptical at this point.

Are we “radical”? American opinion these days is that it’s patriotic to cheer on death drones even when the heroes operating them from Los Angeles vaporize a few slow-moving Afghan women and children along with evil Islamomeanies. That’s a mainstream opinion we don’t care to embrace, so forgive us if we don’t join in the chants of “USA!”

I believe there may be a miscommunication here; when I wrote that the League is composed of anti-federal radicals and that it “also has some bad qualities,” what I meant to convey was that anti-federal radicalism is not, in my estimation, a bad quality.  I am certainly not a fan of the federal government, for instance.

Not sure what other “bad qualities” we’ve let slip before the public, but I can say we do not advocate theocracy. Last time I checked, our goal was the restoration of a Constitutionally limited republic, not rule by priests.

Theocracy need not be so unsubtle as to entail “rule by priests,” and at any rate I did not assert that the League is out to establish anything dramatically and visibly theocratic such as one finds in, say, Saudi Arabia. Rather, I wrote that they would happily establish “a more theocratic sort of constitution,” by which I mean they would almost certainly attach any such revised constitution to Christianity in some manner, and this is the understanding I have come to based on several things I’ve read on the organization’s website. If this is not the case, I will certainly apologize and make a retraction.

Incidentally, the League spokesman also claims that I “learned a thing or two” and “retreated quickly” after the last time I sparred with that organization. Perhaps he will be magnanimous enough to provide me a chance to save face. Just in case, I have an offer for the spokesman – debate with me via e-mail on the subject of whether or not R.S. McCain is a white supremacist. If you agree to do so, I will print the exchange in its entirety in my book, not matter how crushing my defeat. This would have to be conducted over the next few days, as the chapter must go to press on January 2nd. Shoot me an e-mail if this interests you.