I have no personal animus toward Markos Zuniga; I don’t know the guy personally, and up until now, my major Post-It abut him was that I thought it was cool that someone was bridging the gap between this amateur political discourse we do in the blogosphere and electoral politics.<\/p>\n
He’s always been a bit strident and chest-beating, but I’ve chalked that up to personal style (or, on my more cynical days, the kind of extreme posturing that gets attention).<\/p>\n
He crossed a line with his now-infamous comment, and that’s changed my view of him.<\/p>\n
Since we don’t know each other, that’s a kind of ‘so what?’ comment. Except for one big and one little thing.
\nThe big thing is simple; in my view, there’s good and bad. Good involves peace, justice, liberty (from exploitation as well as oppression), and the fundamental acceptance of the humanity and value of everyone – and bad involves the opposite. In my view, the constructive dialogs are ones among people who have different views of how to attain Good, and different visions of exactly what it looks like, manifested in the messy world of reality. <\/p>\n
Was invading Iraq the best path from here to there? Were there better alternatives? What are the alternatives today, and how do we decide among them? Those are things that I believe people on the side of Good can discuss – even debate heatedly and struggle over politically.<\/p>\n
But, in my mind, there’s a pretty clear line between Us and Them. Being with Them is about supporting blowing up busses and pizzerias – not as criminal acts, not as errors of negligence or simple chance, but as core acts; acts that define who you are and what you do. Being with Them is about torturing and murdering<\/a> captives, not fattening them up and teaching them to snorkel<\/a> (and yes, I know Guantanamo is worse than that – but it’s better than the fate of the soldiers in the Ramallah police station).<\/p>\n On this blog, one of our co-bloggers crossed that line with a comment extolling the terrorist bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq. Joe, to his credit, asked Trent to step away from the blog for a while because the sentiments he expressed were so deeply against what Joe and this blog (and by extension, I) stand for that no other reaction was possible. Trent was (and is) a valuable member of this community, as much as he and I may disagree, but with that comment…<\/p>\n And similarly, Kos stepped neatly across the line with his comment, and has only walked further away from it with his actions since (redirecting the link to the comment, pulling the post it was attached to off his blog, his non-apology, and his most recent response, in which he says something stupid and the evil minions of the underworld attack him for it). <\/p>\n Does that mean we’re better than he is?<\/p>\n I’ll step up and say yes.<\/p>\n Look, we all say and do stupid things on occasion (some more than others, of course). But what’s missing in Kos is the notion that what happened to him is anything except a political ambush by his enemies.<\/p>\n And that, in turn matters because Kos is plugged deeply into current Democratic electoral politics, as one of Joe Trippi’s advisors in the Dean campaign, in the Clark campaign, in the Joe (“it’s the Jooos”) MBNA Moran campaign.<\/p>\n I’ve said in the past – and been harshly criticized by people who probably agree with most of my policy beliefs (except Iraq, no doubt) – for criticizing the left for ‘not loving America’. I’ve talked about what a left that does love America might look like – or what it’s philosophical roots might be.<\/p>\n And I’m told, over and over again, that I’m setting up straw men.<\/p>\n No, I’m not.<\/p>\n And that matters, both because many of those I oppose are, I believe, on the wrong side of the divide above – but because they have and will take the left down with them. <\/p>\n Reading the comments on the Kerry blog about the delinking of Kos is informative.<\/p>\n If I were a GOP tactician (and I assume they already are, because they do this for a living) I’d be planting the seeds about the cash Kos had bundled for Kerry, and asking ‘will it be returned?’<\/p>\n And if it is, we’re about to see an internecine battle which will guarantee the White House to Bush.<\/p>\n (it’s late, and I’ll add links in this tomorrow morning)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have no personal animus toward Markos Zuniga; I don’t know the guy personally, and up until now, my major Post-It abut him was that I thought it was cool that someone was bridging the gap between this amateur political discourse we do in the blogosphere and electoral politics. He’s always been a bit strident […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}