Of course Zell is a racist. He is a Dixecrat racist. Never mind he once endorsed Clinton...

And he is spreading fear and anger. Never mind Micheal Moore....

And Arnold is a nazi. Never mind he is a social liberal....

But wait, social liberals are not REAL Republicans. Never mind that Arnold is a real Republican...

See how it works?

The Dems are cooked. The Center spoke at the convention and so did the Right (in the form of a Dem). What is Left? Ha ha

Also...

Atrios implied Zell was a Nazi.

I think Dean may be a bit harsh with Sullivan - Sullivan's becoming increasingly frustrated with the party, and he's becoming more and more prone to overreaction. His post didn't strike me as heinous in the same way it did Dean - it felt more to me that he was simply missing the point and reading to much into Miller's past.

As for the first part of the post, WABC2 (the second ABC HD channel) has been showing the convention pretty much without interruption. I've been trying to watch when I get home from work, but I've found many of the non-keynote speakers to be too infomercial-like for my tastes...

Dean was (forgive the pun) spot on in his critiques.

I stopped reading Sullivan when the world began to revolve around gay marriage. Damned if US soldiers were being killed and terrorism was running rampant the world over. That world shouldn't matter until he's able to marry his partner. I can only imagine how badly the whiney liberal bastidge was hyper-ventilating once Zell spoke and delivered the undecideds to Bush.

I confess to never having read Ken Layne before, but the comments in question were one that could have easily have come from one of those volvo driving, Ivy league educated "anarchists" complaining about the fact that after being locked up 90 minutes for violating our laws, they're forced to drink NYC tap water that's only been filtered and cooled (same as I have in my office), rather than have bottled water from the French Alps.

You can see how effective a speech was by how liberals screech at it. And they are screeching like bats, now.

I don't think Miller is a racist because he joined the Republicans; I think he's a racist because he first ran for office as a segregationist.

(And before you all scream "Robert Byrd!" at once, I feel the same way about him too).

So if he endorsed Bill Clinton in 1992...Ah! I get it!

Plus did you hear all that shit in the speech about putting small, cripled, retarded, poor black children in chains. Disgusting! THe repugs have hit a new low!

Like most historical revisionism, looking back at a southern segregationist without any historical and/or cultural context and judging them with a 21st century consciousness is, at best, unfair.

Without trying to explain the intricacies of segregation to a northeast liberal teenager, I simply offer this comparison:

Most of our founding fathers' owned slaves. Would we not re-elect George Washington, the man, the American, if he were (somehow) alive today?

Read up on segregation, why people felt the way they did, etc. There's more there than meets the eye. The American consciousness evolves, and many southerners' have gone through that evolution.

To put the concept in a more modern context, at some point in the future, the abortion "debate" will be settled one way or the other, and the Stephen Silvers of 50 years hence will condemn all of those on the losing side of the issue (whatever it turns out to be) as evil, just as he does with all segregationists.

Is this fair? If one is pro-choice today, and in the future it becomes a no-brainer that life begins at conception, should we just lump you into the "evil" bucket and discount anything you might have done that was good and noble?

History without context is a dangerous thing.

Read up on segregation, why people felt the way they did, etc. There's more there than meets the eye. The American consciousness evolves, and many southerners' have gone through that evolution.

Isn't that an example of what I often see derided around here as "nuance"?

Silver: The reason "nuance" is mentioned in quotes is because it is SARCASM. When in the context of Flopper, please read this as "wishy washy" or "indecisive" "confused" "contradictory" etc.

Please let me know if this responsed is too nuanced for you to understand.

Kerry's "nuance" is "I support this, yet oppose this at the same time, because there are all sorts of reasons that cause my ambivalence. That explains why I cannot clearly articulate a position on this issue."

Hisotrical context is "I belived this way 40 years ago because, at that point in hisotry, I felt this was best for the country. Looking back, knowing what I do know, what I did was not probably the wrong thing, but I honestly believed then that it was right."

There's a clear difference.

That was "what I did was probably the wrong thing"

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