Rich Lowry's brain

Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
By Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V)

Markos Moulitsas is writing a book, The American Taliban, which compares various aspects of the American Right to radical Islam (e.g., their obsessions with judging and controlling other people's sex lives, their religious fanaticism, their views of gender equality and the like). National Review Editor Rich Lowry finds this very upsetting, and he said the following during a chat yesterday with Ana Marie Cox (who, just by the way, appears to be eagerly auditioning for a role as a Fox News Democrat, as she assured Lowry that Markos is "to the far left of me"; agreed that a recent Daily Kos poll showing the extremism of the GOP rank-and-file was terribly unfair and misleading; and found Moulitsas' thesis to be "incredibly inflammatory and extremist," which prompted the sought-after "reasonable liberal" head-pat from Lowry: "you're on a roll; keep agreeing with me"):

LOWRY: When we're talking about extremism, and you're going to do a survey highlighting the extremism of the other side, when you're working on a book called American Taliban, which - in your own words - catalogs the ways in which modern-day conservatives share the same agenda as radical jihadists in the Islamic world - I mean, who's the extremist here? That is obviously a ridiculous [sic] -- . . . . So you agree Kos is an extremist . . . . In my mind, only an extremist says: the other side in the American political discussion, shares the same agenda as radical jihadidsts.

COX: OK, that's pretty extreme.

Does Rich Lowry know that the most promoted writers at his magazine have published books like these, along with these self-descriptions:

"In this provocative and well-researched book, Goldberg probes modern liberalism's spooky origins in early 20th-century fascist politics. With chapter titles such as 'Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left' and 'Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism' -- Goldberg argues that fascism has always been a phenomenon of the left."

(Original here.)

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