If you want to keep up the equivalency, you can go to Democratic Underground; never been there but I hear it is similar.

Remeber, on the internet, anyone can say anything at any time largely annoynomously, which leads to a lot of people responding while angry with off-the-cuff ad-homs.

As for Bush hate, take on the perspective for a moment. As an example, I believe the evidence indicates that Bush willfully manipulated post-9/11 sentiment and all-but manufactured evidence to launch America into a costly and gratituous war that he then handled with unparalled uncompetance. In 2004, he was re-elected on a platform of homophobia and national defense. I am not a Christian and have homosexual friends and family members, so I consider the former position evil. I never bought the second, and felt sadly vindicated when Katrina showed the administration to have neither foresight nor ability in regards to protecting America. Yet, even though I sometimes deplore our willingness to be duped, I love America–the people, the culture, the land itself. From this perspective, being very, very, very angry at Bush is entirely legitimate. Not to defend your hate mailers–they shouldn’t indulge in writing pointless e-mails while pissed off and they should realize that their rage will never be taken seriously unless it is kept civil and directed to appropriate avenues.

But the rage itself? Entirely justified.

I call them: “Illiberal”. Because, they are not liberal in the true meaning of the word. Except on the issue of Abortion, but even then you have to be for it, or you can’t speak at their conventions. Their responses are illiberal when considering(?) opinions other than their orthodoxy.

Exactly. That’s why the Neiwert guy doesn’t try to claim Republicans are fascists or whatever based on their tangential associations with Duke or whoever else. Duke’s a douche, he latches on to whoever he thinks will get him attention. Neiwert’s point is the same point Umberto Eco makes about the “DaVinci Code” stuff. Before you latch on to some conspiracy theory, be aware of what the political motive for it is, because EVERY conspiracy theory has an ulterior motive.

Is the DaVinci Code guy a Nazi because he propogates the Priory of Sion conspiracy theory, which was created in its current form by a French fascist in the 50s as a tool in his anti-semitic campaign against Jewish real-estate developers? No, he’s just using somebody else’s pre-existing mythological pantheon as a short-cut in his dumb little book.

Same thing with Republicans and “Welfare Queens”. The racists did the work of spreading the legend because it backed up their age-old classic meme of misguided, wimpy white liberals being “used” by devious minorities to hurt the white race. The Republicans noticed that it worked just as well to back up a “big government sucks” meme, so they hijacked it and used it for their own purposes, thus saving them a lot of work. Nothing wrong with that, everybody does it.

Eco and Neiwert’s point is that the road to hell is paved with not-overtly-evil intentions. Just because your desire to shrink government isn’t racist doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to play into some racist’s plan by advocating it in a certain way. Is that your fault? No. Neither is running over some kid who dives into the road in front of your car, but you’re still going to be sorry after it happens. So when operating a dangeous machine like politics or a speeding car, pay attention to what you’re doing.

Michael Moore is actually a good example of operating the machine well. Fahrenheit 9/11 plays with the Fu Manchu meme all over the place, the overall structure of the movie is taken from the anti-semitic/ultra-nationalistic “King of the World” pantheon, there’s a little bit of underhanded misogyny, and he even plays into the “wimpy white liberals are race/class-traitors” meme a few times, but he KNOWS how he’s manipulating political symbolism, so he overeditorializes in such a way to restrict everything he brings up to feed into a relatively benign left-libertarian ideology. If he’d done it badly, like, say, This guy has, he probably could’ve easily funneled a couple thousand hippy college students right into the Militia of Montana.

Now the first part is indeed correct. As for the second part.
“Liberals” are quite clear that they never want to see the Ten Commandments set in stone.

BTW can’t we find another word to use other than “Liberal”, for these psudo-Marxists? As an Englishman, politically on the right, I still think of myself as a liberal.

Let’s look at one of this nitwit’s propositions:

What was most disturbing was, even in 2000, the way the mainstream conservative agenda was beginning to resemble the politics of longtime racists like David Duke and Richard Butler, the Aryan Nations leader: bashing welfare recipients, attacking affirmative action, complaining about “reverse discrimination,” calling for the elimination of immigrants. Since then, this trend has only accelerated, to the point that old-fashioned haters like Duke and the National Alliance are finding their ranks thinned by followers who just become Republicans.

Okay. Well, which side has as its elder statesman a former Grand Beagle or Empirical Wizard or whatever they call those bed sheet fetishists? When David Duke found his Mother Teresa, was it Elizabeth Dole? Nay, he erected his shrine in dedication of Mother Sheehan. She of the “absolute moral authority” who is an anti-American, anti-Semitic worthless mother who traded fame on her son’s grave which she left like potter’s field (while pocketing his $250G life insurance) who is an icon for the Left. Is it the same David Duke that claimed redemption with the publication of that neo-con thinktank piece, “The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy,” penned by two prominent members from the AEI and Heritage? No it was Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer, from those bastions of liberal rectitude known as Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the University of Chicago that published that anti-Semitic screed. See, being anecdotal in your case means asinine, and like, NKorea at night.

So call us bigots, racists, facists, house negroes, neo-cons (wink,wink), knuckle-draggers, what have you. In return, we won’t let you play in the White House or do anything that requires adult supervision. And, we won’t forgive you for taking away the comedians and debasing the worth of documentaries by slavishly classifying Leni Riefenstahl-style propaganda as such and awarding such with your most worthy narcissistic honors.

I agree with Will that had I worked for Mr. Clinton’s campaign instead of the current Presidents, I would still have been on the receiving end of a lot of nastiness. There is not doubt that conservatives/republicans had no love for the former President, and to this day feel much the same way. I can only speak from personal experience though, and I still believe that the level of visceral hatred from the more extreme left today compares with nothing I have ever seen before.

It has been a great disappointment to go into political forums, armed with third party facts, and be assailed with every four letter word known to man. (and a few that were invented for the occasion).

I still refer to President Clinton as President Clinton. I hear too many people refer to our current President simply as “Bush” While that sounds like a meaningless observation, it still begs the question, “do you respect the office enough to put aside personal hatred for the individual?”

Where I live, it is not unusual to see people who have written hate messages about President Bush on the back windows of cars and SUV’s. That’s in addition to bumper stickers. During the nineties, I don’t recall seeing the equivalent public display of loathing for President Clinton.

With only a few exceptions, my entire family are Democrats. My grandfather was a respected party leader in Denver, and I still have letters from Democratic Senators and Presidents that were once his. My friends are mostly Democrats, ranging from moderate to some on the extreme left. I can’t even engage them in political discussion, because it results in name-calling and expletives.

I know I’m going to tick off a lot of folks reading this, who are of the more Democratic or liberal persuasion, but I can only relate experience.

Here’s an example……recently, I wrote a piece on the awful depictions of Christ that were in the University of Oregon student newspaper. My point was that they were meant to be insulting to Christians, and quite frankly, they were painful to see. I realize that a lot of folks don’t understand this perspective, but it seems like it is open season on Christians with judicial rulings, ACLU actions and the general disregard for how Christian people might be offended. The posting was commented on by a local newspaper in Oregon.

After the piece ran, my e-mail was full of messages of insult, hatred and the most vile put-downs. You would have thought that I had written a pro-Hitler piece or supported the 9/11 terrorists. All I said was that I thought the University’s president, a former Republican politician, should have come out more strongly than he did against the newspaper. I did not call for his firing, as Bill O’Reilly did, but just suggested that the images in the paper were offensive and that the university’s top administrator should have said so. Am I deserving of dozens of pieces of hate mail? Should I have been called every foul word in the book, should my intellect have been called into question? This is the point I am making.

On 9/12/2001, every American, regardless of party affiliation or ideology stood united. That may be the only day that that has happened in the past twenty years. It is unlikely to happen again, unless, God forbid, we are attacked again.

On my blog, I usually send a response e-mail to those who comment thanking them for taking the time to comment. I respect their opinions, even if I disagree with them. This type of civility, that should exist, is mostly gone.

We can zero in on people like Ann Coulter as the extreme example of verbose, condescending hate-speech, but I can only speak from experience, and what I have learned is that there are many on the far left who make her look like June Cleaver.

I am amused by people on the right and the left who say, “My side is saintly and nice and, though, there may be a few of us who step over the line, we are always ready to demand better of them. Your side is not.”

Has anybody ever noticed that people on both sides say this, and say so with equal conviction?

It’s because this is how bigotry works. They turn a deaf ear to the bigotry and hate-mongering of political allies. They don’t hear it. They only hear the bigotry and hate-mongering of political opponents. It is, then, no wonder that the bigotry and hate-mongering of political opponents sounds louder to them.

Ultimately, I hold that the “political partisan” — whether on the left or the right — is one of the lowest forms of creature on the planet and the cause of most of our ills. Anybody who places their identity in either the conservative or the liberal camp will inevitably blind himself to the moral crimes of others in his village, to the detriment of all.

Too long, didn’t read version: intellegent people, of which there are many on both sides, can and do criticise the hateful extremists on their own sides. The “yeah we have bastards but WE police them and THEY don’t” meme is common on both sides of the spectrum, and on both sides it is generally born of ignorance of said self-policing on the other rather than facts. The author’s piece on Coulter quotes here is a great example of the kind of excellent rightist self-policing most leftists will never see (even with the tired old Michael Moore equivalency cliche).

re: richard: You would undoubtably have received exactly the same kind of hateful and juvenile responces if you had been on the left working for Clinton as you did on the right working for Bush/Reagan/whoever; I imagine the the only major difference would be the replacement of arrogance with anti-intellectualism.

The writer of this blog seems unusually reasonable and intellegent for a rightist. Godspeed against all the mouthbreathers on your side–leftists who love this country like myself would much rather have competent opponents than bunch of bumbling and wrongheaded fools like the you-know-who administration. I’ll do my best on ours, although I fear it may be only slightly less impossible to do so…

completely off topic: I use google for spellcheck, and the first hit for “extremists” was a hitlist, with pictures, of anti-scientology activists. I don’t know what people in these parts think of Scientology, but I laughed.

You’ve dismissed Neiwert’s thesis of transmission as absurd, yet Coulter’s new book is full of the sort of claims that have been standard issue for the Religious Right for the last 30 years. That’s not the far right piggy-backing mainstream views. That’s Ann Coulter piggy-backing the Religious Right.

You called her a keen mind. In her new book, she says that biologists aren’t really scientist, and that an evolutionary biologist is about as credible as an ESP biologist. Some mind, there.

I stand by my original point. I’ve engaged in countless discussions where I’ve witnessed someone immediately respond by labeling the opponent (and as I said in my original post, which you glossed over as if the statement wasn’t there, this goes both ways.) I don’t even see how one can deny that the name-calling propaganda tactic, is frequently used by partisans to discount someone’s arguments.

You want examples? I can surf the net and bring example after example after example. I don’t understand what is so controversial about that.