personally i’m not a big fan of michael moore. his fondness for conspiracy theories is too reductive and lacks subtlety, qualities which are unfortunately too common on the left. he makes entertaining films but he’s a sloppy thinker.

no, i’m afraid the “blame liberals first” game won’t wash here. peter daou is spot on: the right would be howling if anyone from the SCLM compared a prominent conservative activist to bin laden and you know it.

and as i’ve detailed, this is not the first time matthews has turned bush’s opponents into partisans for bin laden. his affection for bush is well documented. his readiness to join gingrich, hannity, scarborough, carlson, the conways, etc in the demonization of moore and anyone who opposes this president is only suprising in the offhandedness with which it was done.

Tell me, is Michael Moore also a rightwing loudmouth dupe? (Well, he’s two out of the three, I’ll grant you)…

Oh, never! But of course, in the simplistic with-us-or-against-us light in which this president has cast the GWOT, that is precisely what likening OBL’s statements to Michael Moore’s achieves: the assertion of a moral equivalence.

And the comparisons don’t achieve this equivalence incidentally or by accident. It’s so engrained in the right-wing mindset to cast moral aspersions at those who object to this president’s ill-conceived and counter-productive war that you don’t even recognize it when it happens.

For example when you remark that OBL is “pretty shrewd about picking talking points that were lifted from the anti-war crowd.” You all love the idea that to be against the war is to collude with the evildoers. In fact, here you’ve even given “the AWC” more credit than OBL by implying that he’s a mere plagiarist from the definitive anti-war playbook written treasonously by us over here in liberal America.

What you can’t seem to understand is that OBL and anti-war liberals can interpret the same set of facts without being in tactical or moral collusion. For example, to acknowledge the fact that roughly 2000 of the 2200 U.S. casualites in this war took place after this president’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” performance, and to conclude from this fact that this president and his war planners grossly miscalculated does not mean that I’m with bin Laden and against the troops.

No matter how many times the right screams to the contrary or insinuates it through an unwilling loudmouth dupe like Chris Matthews. (Whose comments tear the American public apart. Just like bin Laden. I mean, doesn’t Chris Matthews sound kinda like an over-the-top bin Laden…? Oh, sorry.)

The real news, which the likes of Matthews might actually report if they were actual journalists instead of entertainers, is the OBL is offering a truce — not something you do when things are going your way.

Rusty proves he’s still Jawalicious after all these years. How? By celebrating his second blogiversary and helping to catch a terrorist. Politechnical found something really scary. Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan discussed Iran and made absolute sense. …

That’s the problem Mark. The left IS denying it – and screaming like a stuck pig that it is simply not true that Bin Laden is using lefty talking points.

This denial is what I’m writing about – not that Matthews was right or wrong or that lefties are just like terrorists. The fact is, you are more correct than you realize when you talk about the undeniability of the facts in this case. And that is what has the left going ballistic.