As I mentioned in my first diary here, I used to spend a lot of time at LGF, a war-blog for people who believe that all liberals are plotting to destroy America in league with radical "Islamofascists" who are the #1 threat facing the planet today.
I decided to visit LGF last night with half a mind to "stir up the hornet's nest" and perhaps defend dKos from the charge that we're all America-hating traitors. This story had just been posted:
The Protocols of the Daily Kos
One of the more malevolent “diary” posts at Daily Kos that I have seen: Daily Kos: Iran Has A Right To Attack Israel. (Hat tip: marsl.)
Yes, that’s right. A long diatribe/pseudo-logical “thought exercise” that makes the case for Iran to launch a preemptive attack on both Israel and the United States, out of “respect for the basic moral principle of universality.”
Concluding with a quote from Noam Chomsky.
The rest of this diary will consist of blockquotes from last night's thread, as I promised I'd post a diary here this morning to show that dKos actually respects debate and isn't a loony liberal echo chamber as they charge. First, before my post:
Twisted minds at KOS.. but no different then many in congress on their side..
Can we launch a nuke attack against Daily Kos yet?
/kidding
Well, we here at LGF say:
Israel has a right to attack Iran!
And I don't need the professional 'tard Noam Chomsky's blessing, either.
JAFLW
Sometimes I wonder if Kos himself is not some disinformation agent designed to discredit the Democratic political party.
Then again Occam's Razor tells me they are just crazy.
The kosmonaut, heathlander, should offer his brain to science. They could do a comparative study between the structure of jello and the brain cells in his head. What a vacuous waste.
The Koslings must believe that drivel such as this will cause them to be granted immunity from beheading.
I do not quite understand these KOS types. The US and Israel says all options for dealing with Iran are possible.........Iran definitely says Israel will burn along with the US and now we are the agressive ones? LOL! I just don't get it.
We are going to take out Iran's nuclear facilities from the air and on the ground.
There's really no other option.
Iran's nukes are a threat to the entire civilized world... but the Israelis, out of all the rest of the so-called "enlightened west", are the main target for the Islamists' and the time left before the Islamists' attack is fast dwindling to zero.
One or two tactical nukes and Israel ceases to exist.
One or two cities slaughtered in any other nation on the jihadis' list and the jihadis become air pollution... but Israel?
Feh. "Those pesky Jews" will be a common refrain (in private, of course) and the cowards running the Left side of civilization will get about the business of "healing" instead of justice.
Good thing that Israel has nukes. They won't go silently into that good night. They'll attack first, with nukes, because it's the only option they have.
But we'll act first. Partly because Bush is enough of a statesman to recognize that forcing the onus of dealing with Iran onto Israel has been a cowardly act by the international community, chiefly because Bush is enough of an American to do the right thing when faced with implaccable evil. And we've got the tools to do the job without going nuclear, where Israel simply does not.
Nope. We're going to Iran, boys and girls. Sooner rather than later.
Take that as Tmj's 2007 prediction.
Untill those libs at KOS are standing with their toes hanging over the edge of a mass grave (their soon to be grave or anothers), they won't understand the what evil is, what it wants, and what part they get to play with that evil, either being its victim or more likely for KOS, its helper
And of course their understanding of Freedom of Speech:
There has to be some way to shut down dKos. Legal or otherwise.
Crap like that gets our servicemen and women killed...
And this appraisal of Nancy Pelosi:
The speaker of The House of Representatives is an ignorant dimwit of diminishing mental acuteness. These are the types that make up the left. The right appears to be mad up of wishful fools that think the left really loves this country. Neither have survival instincts. They are politicians. No one would entrust real work to these people.
From a poster charmingly nicknamed "hous bin pharteen":
No need to post links to Kos.
No need to even read anything over there.
I can sum up the entire website in 3 words.
"We hate America"
Thats all ya got to know folks.
So I wrote:
Okay, guys, here's the deal. I'm probably one of the few people who used to be an LGF addict and now is a full-on "moderate Democrat" addicted to dKos. Now I hardly visit here at all b/c I find scare-mongering and "5 Minutes of Hate" and "Final Solution to the Moooslim Problem" talk counterproductive. Why did I "go over to the dark side"? Well, you might be surprised if you've only read the crazy LLL diaries that Charles cherry-picks, but the front-pagers and the diaries that get consistently recommended are not wild-eyed Marxist/Chomskian dogma but rather within the mainstream-to-left of the Democratic party. You may disagree with that philosophy but it's not all hating on the Jews/Zionists.
The thing I enjoy the most about dKos is that there is a broad spectrum of different beliefs and attitudes and constructive criticism and not this rah-rah Go America, Israel, and Bush combined with hate the evil Muslims-and-liberals. Sure, there's a lot of hating on Bush, and I'd argue with good reason. He's betrayed pretty much everyone's interests except his buddies and a few big corporations and of course Israel for religious reasons and I'm now embarrassed to admit (living in S.F. now) that I voted for the idiot.. twice.. due mostly to LGF. I won't make that mistake again.
Debating political issues and disagreeing with the President and/or America's official policies and actions and/or Israel's policies and actions does not make us any less patriotic than you, and it certainly doesn't get servicemen killed (at least not any more nor less than are getting killed every day as it is). Look, if you want to blame someone for how badly things are going in Iraq, blame Bush and Rumsfeld's incompetence in managing the post-war security and in firing all the Ba'athists and the entire army. But it's too late to fix that mistake so what do we do now? Now that we know there were no WMD's and Chalabi was playing the neocons for fools with his fake WMD testimony and bad advice?
Of course, the terr'ists aren't reading dKos anyway, and they're certainly not reading LGF so why not play thought experiments and exercise the right to dissent and play devil's advocate? Debate the issues, not the alleged motives of the individual's involved.
What's funny is how unrepresentative the particular story you linked to is of the kind of diaries that get front-paged or recommended by many. My interpretation of what the author is trying to say is that neither Iran's hypothetical attack on Israel nor Israel and/or America's hypothetical preemptive attack on Iran, would be justified under any sort of sane international law. Of course America has so many resources and guns (and the U.N. is after all on our soil and we have a permanent veto in the sec. council) so we don't have to play by any rules, apparently. Just don't expect the world not to start treating us like the "rogue regime" we've become since 9/11.
It may be a shock to some people here, but I believe that America is not a country specially anointed by God nor is the Israeli government. Disagreeing with America's policies doesn't make us traitors; if you seriously believe that is the case, you might want to get your head examined, or at least go out for a walk and try to get some perspective. I think that the point of the particular dKos diary you linked to is that all of the hypotheticals discussed would be unquestionably bad news for all parties. Israel and even America can't risk attacking Iran without some extremely good evidence that it would really be preemptive. Iran can't afford to nuke or attack Israel under any circumstances, really: their economy is not that good and despite the kooky Holocaust-denying and Zionist-conspiracy beliefs of Ahmadinejad & co., they're not suicidal, and they're not trying to bring about the apocalypse (unlike some wingnut Christians).
Sorry for the length. I'll try to reply to anyone who wants to debate me at a level other than juvenile personal attacks or angry irrational rants.
I'll save the bandwidth and let you visit LGF to read the responses and my replies. I have to go to work now but I'll post a link to this diary from the LGF diary as I promised last night. Probably not many there have accounts here, and likewise few here have ever created an account on LGF (since the proprietor only opens registration for like an hour every blue moon, to keep out all but the most hard-core wingnuts from disturbing the peace). So here's your chance to see how LGFers respond to rational (IMHO) argument.