Damn right

The New York Observer has a piece today on similarities between The New York Times and the Democratic Party.

It’s true what the right-wing bloggers and bloviators say: The New York Times does indeed resemble a branch of the Democratic Party.

But the newspaper’s conservative critics are utterly wrong about where the resemblance really lies.

The similarities between the newspaper of record and the opposition party have nothing to do with treason, irresponsibility or blaming America first. The main thing the institutions share is a potentially fatal timidity.

The Times, like the Dems, has yet to absorb the age-old aphorism that the best means of defense is attack.

The Times, like the Dems, clings to an anachronistic belief that it should not engage in debates that it deems coarse, vicious or otherwise beneath it.

And in so doing, The Times, like the Dems, leaves the field open for its opponents to hurl any insult and press home any smear, safe in the knowledge that no serious counterattack will be mounted.

True enough. Certainly in the past, many Democrats thought that the vicious slander hurled by the likes of republican terrorists like Ann Coulter was not something we should respond to; the thinking being that one does not dignify the obviously moronic with a response.

We saw how well that worked with the Smear Boat veterans, didn't we?

It is my considered opinion that Democrats need to be more aggressive in dealing with the political rabies that is the dying conservative movement. Certainly, that movement is a target-rich environment; just today, some wingnut distinguished himself by calling for the lynching of the Supreme Court majority that wrote the Hamdan decision. If we let ourselves be attacked with impunity by the criminal scum that leads and speaks for the right, we deserve to lose. The logic to be applied in this battle is this: far from dignifying some outrage - like Coulter's serial encouragements of right-wing terrorism - we encourage and legitimize them by staying silent.

The right response to rabies is not a pat on the back. Agonizingly enough, this is still a point that needs to be made, it seems.