Reply #39: Guilt by association, Hack. Not fair. But what's worse, not wise.

[Bryan Sacks]

If one will not take the time to see who keeps company with who, one risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

What is poorly understood here at DU, and which goes largely unexamined by many posters here (because they are infected by it), is the psychology of the cleansing impulse that seeks to generate distance between the respectable and the irrational. Why must the left be purified? Are we candidates for sainthood or something? Why can't people say hateful or stupid things - and then have them discussed?

I'm as repelled as anyone by the rot I hear coming from anti-semites, but I don't feel the need to be scrubbed clean after coming into contact with it. Those people with the evil ideas - have you ever try to understand why they resort to such rank bullshit nonsense?

Probably not. Easier to hate them, I suppose.

Hack, I have to say: liberals, despite their basic decency and well-intentioned rhetoric, are in denial about the failure of their political enterprise. It has been sold out and hollowed out, and the shell that is left is called the Democratic party.

It makes me ill to hear people champion Hillary Clinton for 2008 as if she represents something that could seriously return government to something that performs public service, instead of service to corporate domination. There is no denying it. Every Democrat that has a serious chance at the White House is either flaccid or bought and paid for. That's the prerequisite these days. No liberal dare try to defeat the institutionalized criminality of the corporate lobby (even if he or she wanted to). Thus they (liberals) actually pose more of a danger than Republicans, since Republicans tend to show their true colors more readily.

That fact - that irrefutable, bottom, cement-in-stone certainty is far more troubling to me than the ramblings of a fringe idiot. Ignore the idiocy.