Link-o-rama

By Heraclitus

Glenn Greenwald has a good post up about "how conventional wisdom is created by journalists and pundits who are either lazy, dishonest, or both." The first half is especially good, where he discusses the now-current claim that the Democrats need to move to the center (which I recently discussed here). Greenwald takes on the even stranger claim that Howard Dean needs to be axed now that the Democrats have just won an historic midterm election.

Greenwald has written a second good post, expressing his hopes that the GOP extremists will be left isolated and powerless. Some of the highlights:

In many respects, we have had a foreign policy over the last five years based on the mentality of the most irrational, insecure 8-year-old playground bully...I think the country now has a real opportunity to re-define what is acceptable political dialogue and to raise the standard -- even if only a little bit -- for what is deemed to be respectable mainstream views and what is deemed to be extremist, moronic bile.

This election constitutes a rather resounding rejection of the mindless militarism, hysterical fear-mongering, un-American embrace of lawlessness, and adolescent hate-mongering which have fueled the Bush movement.

There is a real opportunity to relegate that strain of Bush follower -- to quarantine them -- to the impotent fringes, where they belong. And ironically, they are seeking to isolate themselves, as they insist, with the belief-affirming self-delusion that has come to define everything they do, that the reason they lost the election is because they weren't extreme enough.

They believe Americans wanted them to be more militaristic and more ideologically pure. Let them do that. They will quickly become an even purer and more transparent version of what they have been -- the Party of James Dobson, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney -- combining rabid, fantasy-based warmongering (both domestically and abroad) with religious and moralistic governmental control, all in one toxic, extremist mix.

But the most interesting part of GG's post are the segments from a recent post by Ed Morrissey which he quotes.

Radical Islamists want to divide Americans in order to defeat us. They will play on our differences, stoking the fires of resentment and generating more hatred between us than we have against our enemies. AQ understands that the only way they can possibly beat the US is to get us to grind to a halt with partisan warfare at home, paralyzing our ability to fight them on the battlefield and sapping our will to put them out of business. This video is transparently calculated to give enough ammunition to both sides of the political divide to do that job. Besides, if we take Abu Hamza at his word about the Democrats, then we have to take him at his word about Bush as well, and about our troops.

The partisan sniping has ceased to be germane. We've already had the election, and the Democrats are in charge -- and they will be for two years no matter what. Obviously, we will watch closely to ensure that they do not surrender to terrorism, but I'm not going to take Abu Hamza's word that they will before their majority session even starts. They are Americans, and Americans put them in charge, and they have earned the right to show us how they will face the enemy now that they control the agenda. If they fail, I'll be the first to castigate them for losing ground to the terrorists. However, I'm going to base that on their actions, and not on the word of a murderous thug who couldn't care less whether their American victims are Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, or LaRouchists.

Ah, the LaRouchists...better known as LaRouchebags. Captain Ed expands his comments here.

Meanwhile, Kai Chang has a sober round-up of Veterans' Day links.