Glenn Greenwald is pretty critical of Jamelle Bouie's review of Markos Moulitsas' American Taliban, writing:
Moulitsas is a self-described Democratic activist who wants to secure Democratic power, so the one deficiency of the book is that it fails to acknowledge the multiple policies he condemns which have been supported and enabled by his own party. But the similarity between the American Right's aggression, tribalism, and violence and those of the Islamic extremists who are endlessly demonized in American political culture is an important one, and Moulitsas' book is very worthwhile for that discussion alone. The reason these similarities are so rarely discussed is reflected by the angry reaction his book has generated even among his political allies in the progressive world: the one premise that never should be challenged is that Americans -- even when they engage in violent, destructive and inhumane acts -- are intrinsically good, well-intentioned, and even superior, and thus no comparison should be tolerated between them and those foreign Others who embody Pure Evil. Hence we find all sorts of angry and self-righteous recriminations against Moulitsas' book for daring to compare crimes of the American Right to identical crimes committed by a bunch of primitive foreigners.
The endless, destructive War on Terror depends -- like most wars do -- on a cartoonish demonization of the Enemy as something utterly foreign, inhuman, and subject to entirely different drives than Us. Moulitsas' book, at its best, destroys that rotted premise by highlighting the many similarities between Them and Us. Because that similarity is a great taboo -- perhaps the greatest taboo -- it has triggered all sorts of outrage: outrage that is actually a testament to the value of the argument he makes.
Well, I've written pieces with the intent of breaking down the very kind of arrogance that presumes the bad acts of our countrymen are different from those of our enemies, so I can hardly be thrown in that camp. I have no problem with pointing out individual instances in which conservative figures embrace the premises behind the arguments of religious extremists; I do it all the time. That doesn't mean that conservatives are "indistinguishable" from the Taliban "in their tactics and on the issues."
Point is, you cannot argue that the demonization of a religious and ethnic other for the purposes of justifying endless, limitless war is a bad thing and then apply the same blanket comparisons to your political opponents. Rather than "destroying the rotted premise" at the heart of the moral cretinism of the warmongers he is criticizing, Greenwald is reinforcing it by legitimizing its use in domestic political debate. This argument doesn't illuminate anything about the motivations of "The Enemy"; it makes the GOP as a whole "something utterly foreign, inhuman, and subject to entirely different drives than Us." I don't see where that gets anyone, particularly since I don't think it's accurate.
