The mark of a good journalist is the acuity -- and intellectual honesty -- to identify propaganda wherever it's coming from, and that's why one of my favorite pieces this year was Jamelle Bouie's Homegrown Mujahideen, which took on Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas for his hyperbolic comparison of the religious right in America to the Taliban.
It's not just that, as a liberal journalist, I have a soft spot for David-and-Goliath stories. It's that in this instance my instinct would be to join the histrionic voices equating American conservatives with the Taliban. Then I read Jamelle's piece:
