Who Is Promoting Violence?

It was interesting that in the same week that The New York Times announced it would begin publishing notices of gay unions on its wedding pages, the bestselling conservative shock-diva Ann Coulter was quoted saying this to The New York Observer: "My only regret with [Oklahoma City bomber] Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building." In the same week, too, a Times editor tragically fell to his death from the 16th floor of the Times building in an apparent suicide. Soon enough, on the conservative website FreeRepublic.com, where Coulter's minions congregate, the right-wing armies were cranking out all manner of bile about the editor's death, stoking misogyny and homophobia, putting forth comments in line with Coulter's terrorism-laden death wish.

One writer imagined the next day's headlines: "NEW YORK TIMES SUICIDE; LONGTIME REPORTER/EDITOR JUMPS TO HIS DEATH FROM 43rd [sic] FLOOR. Women, Minorities and Gays Hardest Hit."

Another announced that "The only good liberal is a dead liberal!" while another let us know that he/she was "Weeping on floor with inappropriate laughter!!"

Still another opined that "joking about it isn't appropriate. Especially since nobody here can recall reading anything he wrote. Now, had this been Paul Krugman?"(a reference of course to the Times' razor-sharp op-ed columnist, a major George W. Bush critic). The ugly comments went on and on. The website eventually pulled the message thread.

Normally I'd pay no attention to (if not exactly dismiss) the crude banter of often anonymous people on websites?the kind of vile stuff present on political sites of all kinds (left, right and center) where people are pretty much allowed to post whatever they like. There are plenty of wackos on the Web, as we all know, and ignoring them is probably the best course in most cases. Ditto for Ann Coulter (also a wacko and someone I try to ignore).

But the comments are relevant in light of some recent blather from Slate pundit Mickey Kaus, who went on a tear last month about what he termed a "danger of political violence coming from the angry anti-Bush left." A onetime thoughtful essayist and editor for The New Republic, Kaus is now a "weblogger" who writes mostly nasty one-liners about people, as well as occasional longer screeds that are rarely of any particular merit these days, but are always full of exclamation points. And, as seems to be a prerequisite for anyone online who wants high traffic from loyal right-winger readers, Kaus engages in lots of New York Times-bashing, attacking the paper and its writers for all kinds of alleged misdeeds, major and minor, seemingly almost every day.

Now, honestly, some of my best friends are "bloggers," as they're called, so this is not any sort of anti-blogger commentary; I'll probably be blogging one day myself. (And in fact, before I go on I must thank for their insights and observations the must-read webloggers Eschaton?www.atrios. blogspot.com?and Max Sawicky?www. max speak.org?two among the many smart left-leaning bloggers now emerging and exposing Kaus' and others' shenanigans.) Kaus' downward progression, however, should be a lesson to all bloggers. He is an example of the lazy, self-indulgent and arrogant whirl that bloggers can spin themselves into over time, pressured to continually pump out quick, cuter-than-cute and/or inflammatory copy, in the hopes that something, anything will stick in a Web world in which what you wrote yesterday?or a few hours ago?is already at the bottom of the page or maybe even archived in the bowels of the site.

A case in point was his pathetic example of the supposed "danger of political violence" from the left. Last month Kaus flew into a laughable tizzy about the liberal site Media Whores Online . Now, if you've not been to Media Whores Online, you must go there to see how some on the left are finally matching the right in hitting the other side hard and where it hurts. Each day MWO, with a lot of wit and sarcasm, deliciously exposes the "whores" in the media and on the right. (Full disclosure: MWO often links to my columns, among those of many other liberal writers.) The site, whose operators remain anonymous, is clearly getting a lot of traffic?and both that traffic and the operators' anonymity seems to threaten crypto-conservatives like Kaus. (Yes, Kaus has in the past been described as a liberal, but just read what he's writing these days.) As irreverent and provocative as MWO is, however, everything on the site is accurate, if coming from a clearly and admittedly liberal perspective. It doesn't traffic in the broad distortions for which the vast right-wing conspiracy is famous. I suppose that might be considered a matter of opinion, one that should be taken with a grain of salt coming from someone left of center (so check it out and make up your own mind). But one thing that is absolutely true of MWO is that you won't find anything even remotely close, in terms of an incitement to violence, to the rants of Ann Coulter and her legions.

Proof of this is in fact the length that Kaus had to go in order to try to connect MWO to violence in his hasty and embarrassing charge. He found some item written on another site, BartCop, in a message board, a crude and violent post about Bush that was similar to those above from FreeRepublic.com about the Times (the posting is gone now, so I can't quote it precisely), and very similar to the nasty death wishes and calls to violence I've read about myself on other right-wing sites, including Lucianne.com. Kaus tells us that MWO is "associated" with BartCop?as MWO states on its website. So, because an anonymous poster on a message board posted a hateful comment on a site associated with MWO, that means, according to Kaus, that MWO is promoting violence.

If that kind of guilt by association is the standard we're all to use, then what are we to say about Slate and Mickey Kaus himself? Kaus, you see, links to Coulter's column from his weblog, promoting her as "Ann 'Too Far' Coulter?Sometimes it's just far enough." I guess wishing for acts of right-wing terrorism against New York Times editors and reporters, people whom Kaus skewers almost daily, is "just far enough" to keep Coulter linked there. So let's get straight just who is promoting violence. According to your own standards about "association," that would be you, Mr. Kaus.