It's bad enough that the Daily Kos posts outrageous claims like “the 9/11 attacks were horrific, but they were more about optics than actual harm.” When bizarre sentences like these are exposed, then the exposers are accused of being enemies of “meaningful dialogue.” What is meaningful in telling the families of the victims of 9/11 that their losses were more “optics” than “actual harm”? But that's how the blogger "Something the Dog Said" tried to defend himself against my post on NewsBusters:
Mr. Graham is using the quotes from my posts that are most likely to confirm his readers prejudice against the Left and Daily Kos. By doing so he makes sure there can be no meaningful dialog between the Right and Left.
The Radical Right has been told [told us?] for 9 years that we, their fellow citizens, are the enemy along with Islam. We are somehow less American because we don’t agree with the jingoistic "Clashes of Civilizations" crap. The very crap that Osama Bin Laden has been purveying; they fail to realize that by giving credence to this terrorist asshat’s idea we help him build up his forces and make it more likely that some city, here or in Europe or Asia sees another horrific attack.
It's also puzzling how this Kosmonaut thinks he or she is conducting a “meaningful dialogue” by accusing his critics of purveying the same propaganda lines as Osama bin Laden. It's never a good idea for someone at the Daily Kos to suggest someone else has been more uncivil than they have been. This person says conservatives make the bone-headed error of blurring them together with the terrorists -- and then blurs conservatives together with the terrorists. But there was more attempts at self-defense against right-wing radicals:
Those on the Radical Right are making a big deal about the fact that polls are finding that majorities of Americans are not in favor of the community center being built two blocks from the site of a terrorist attack that was nine years ago. To me that is a sad fact, one which until I saw the polling I would not have believed. Still it does not matter. You do not have rights in this country because the majority says so. You have rights because we all have them and they are written into our Constitution and supported by 200 years of case law.
I expect that I am in for some interesting times. I will not back down from my position that the mosque associated with the community center has ever right to build where they please, just as a Catholic church or a Buddhist temple would. I will also not back down from calling out the hysterical fear the Radical Right is stoking against our fellow citizens who are practitioners of Islam.
In the end I find this really kind of sad. I had a five e-mail back and forth with TJ [a conservative commenter] and we could not find a smidge of common ground. I listened to his points, but they were based on fear and skewed news sources, like National Review Online, Fox and Newsbusters. They were based on false memes that the Radical Right has been pushing all along and the macho attitude that we are going to kick some ass. Now one of the asses they want to kick is mine. I wish I had any confidence that the folks who commented on these posts read all of both of my articles.
There's several mistakes here: first, that anyone would find the Dog-Said articles more persuasive by reading them from beginning to end. Second, that my post in any way encouraged brutality against Dog-Said.
My point in replaying these quotes is the same point we at NewsBusters continue to make when he highlight the Daily Kos. We don't expect them to be anything less than full-throated leftists. But we do think that liberal pundits (like Bill Press) who claim that liberals don't say vicious and hateful things need don't seem to be reading or listening to the arguments of their friends and colleagues.
