Stop him before he says something truly despicable.

Lawrence Meyers disagrees with Roger Ebert. All well and good. However, the reason Meyers disagrees with Ebert?

Yet I have to wonder if the physical and mental trauma Roger has endured has taken a toll on his mind …

Is it because the anger he must have concerning his condition is being projected onto the Right? After all, [Ebert's blog at the Sun Times] started after all the physical damage had been done to his appearance …

Okay, so thus far it can be chalked up to the usual debate style of the Left. But here’s what concerns me about his state of mind …

I don’t care what his political beliefs are, ultimately. I care about his mental faculties, and how he is undermining his own legacy as one of cinema’s great champions.

I really wish he would return to the balcony.

This is, I believe, a new conservative tactic: “I disagree with the partisan pollster you agree with, but instead of acknowledging that the obverse is also true, I will assume that during your struggle with thyroid cancer and the seven painful, but ultimately unsuccessful, surgeries to restore the ability to eat, drink and speak that followed—I’ll assume that somewhere in there you lost your mind and I’ll just mourn your death now, so can you please shut the fuck up already?”

Seriously, that last line about “return[ing] the balcony” sounds like nothing so much as a former slave-owner longing for the days before all his former charges had the right to say whatever they damned well pleased. Meyers is annoyed because Ebert’s expressing the opinions he’s always held, but is blaming Ebert for his own inability to separate the body of work from the man who produced it. I wonder how he feels about Faulkner, whose politics he would (I hope) disavow as adamantly as he does Ebert’s?

UPDATE: Crap!  Meyers is absolutely correct, or so I must assume because, like Ebert, I'm in no position to judge.  I apologize in advance for the misunderstanding.

Comments

[Tom Elrod]

Is he suggesting that liberals are liberal because they're somehow disabled (and disabled people are necessarily angry), or that the disabled, being the angry people they are, necessarily become liberals?

Either way it's pretty gross.

Are Breitbart & co. simply incapable of NOT being offensive?

[Ahistoricality]

Seriously, that last line about “return[ing] the balcony” sounds like nothing so much as a former slave-owner longing for the days before all his former charges had the right to say whatever they damned well pleased.

It's a variation on what Stanley Fish, David Horowitz, KC Johnson and others have been saying about the academy for years: "You're paid to do obscure research and teach the taxpaying schnooks of tomorrow to be good sheep. What gives you the right to have opinions that aren't measured in meters per second?"

[John Emerson]

Meyers:

Yet I have to wonder if the physical and mental trauma Roger has endured has taken a toll on his mind

Ebert:
One night, unable to speak, I caught the eye of a nurse through my open door and pointed to the blood leaking from my hospital gown. She pushed a panic button and my bed was surrounded by an emergency team, the duty physician pushing his fingers with great force against my carotid artery to halt the bleeding. I was hoisted on my sheet over to a gurney, and raced to the OR. "Move it, people," he shouted. "We're going to lose this man."

I was calm and completely lucid. I watched like an interested observer. The pain medication probably detached me. My wife hadn't then told me that after a previous rupture, I'd been declared dead on the operating table.

Besides being creepy, Meyers is imbecile.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/08/traveler_to_the_undiscovered_c.html#more

[JohnR]

One of my favorite lines includes this oft-paraphrased bit: "..the usual debate style of the Left." Whenever I see this in any of its forms, I'm always left a little confused as to what particular "style" it's referring to, but I've come to the conclusion that it can be summarized as "refusing to accept the inherent rightness of my position". In other words, questioning, debating, falsifying, or writing a comprehensively-footnoted and exhaustively-researched dissertation disproving beyond a shadow of a doubt, whatever claim has been advanced by someone with a right-wing pov comes under the heading of "the usual debate style of the Left" with its querulous overtone of petulent snittery at the wilful unfairness and dishonesty involved in the Left's aggravating refusal to simply see things from the right point of view.