Glenn Greenwald has written a lengthy response to my post last week defending Jamelle Bouie's review of American Taliban:
Initially, I must note how odd it is for Serwer and The Prospect, of all people, to be leading this charge, given that Serwer himself six months ago wrote a (genuinely superb) piece for The Atlantic entitled "American Takfiris" which equates John Yoo, Jay Bybee and their "cohorts in the [Bush] Office of Legal Counsel" with Al Qaeda leaders ("takfirism," Serwer explains, is what "allowed al Qaeda to, for all intents and purposes, kill anyone they wanted without violating the laws of Islam": somehow, "American Taliban" is beyond the rhetorical pale, but "American Takfiris" is perfectly acceptable). And then there's the fact that TAP's Editor-in-Chief, Robert Kuttner, wrote an article in February of this year -- in that very magazine -- entitled . . . . wait for it . . . . "American Taliban," which repeatedly compared the American Right to the Taliban with sentences like this one: "With the complete takeover of the GOP by an American Taliban, the party should be doomed to minority status." How can Prospect writers possibly rail against Moulitsas as though he committed some grave sin without grappling with these identical "transgressions," including from TAP's own chief editor and from Serwer himself (Serwer claims that his Al Qaeda comparison was narrowly focused on Bush OLC lawyers while Moulitsas generalized much more, but I wonder if Serwer even read American Taliban because Moulitsas is quite specific in citing his culprits, as opposed to Kuttner, who applied the term to the GOP generally).
No one is "leading" any kind of "charge" here. I disagree with the argument of Markos' book as does one of my colleagues; The American Prospect is not at war with anyone. While Greenwald presents my piece as a kind of "gotcha," I linked to it in my original criticism of him as part of my argument that "I have no problem with pointing out individual instances in which conservative figures embrace the premises behind the arguments of religious extremists," but that a blanket comparison between the Afghan Taliban and the GOP is unwarranted.
As far as my piece goes, the point was to explain that legalizing torture was a perversion of American law the same way that sanctioning the murder of innocents is a perversion of Islam. It was about how societies subvert their own values once they've sublimated them to nothing more than the destruction of their declared enemies. The point of my Atlantic piece, as I wrote then, was not to "equate" anything. I specifically wrote, "My point is not to equate the deeds of AQ with the deeds of the Bush administration -- merely to point out justification for acts that are on their face unjustifiable take a similar intellectual path." The criticism was limited in scale, and it's not exactly ironic that Greenwald doesn't seem to see that as a legitimate defense, because anyone who endorses the thesis of Moulitsas' book without qualification has a rather obvious problem with distinguishing matters of scale.
As for Kuttner's piece, I didn't remember it until it was pointed out to me, but plenty of people write things in this magazine I disagree with. Moulitsas' book is considerably more high-profile.
So let's look at Markos' argument, stated on the first page of his introduction, responding to one of the GOP's resident lunch money kids, Pete Sessions, comparing the Republican opposition strategy to an "insurgency":
Too late Pete. Cat's out of the bag. May you have more unguarded moments so you speak the truth more often. Yes, the Republican Party, and the entire modern conservative movement is, in fact, very much like the Taliban.
In their tactics and on the issues, our homegrown American Taliban are almost indistinguishable from the Afghan Taliban. The American Taliban -- whether in their militaristic zeal, their brute faith in masculinity, their disdain for women's rights, their outright hatred of gays, their aversion to science and modernitiy, or their staunch anti-intellectualism -- share a litany of mores, values, and tactics with Islamic extremists.
This thesis is indefensible on the facts. Ross Douthat may oppose same-sex marriage, but he's not an advocate of publicly executing gays and lesbians. Hans von Spakovsky may want to suppress Democratic votes, but he's not going to sever the fingers of Democratic voters or bomb polling places in Democratic precincts. Jim DeMint wants Obama to lose the 2012 presidential election, not beat him bloody and hang him from a lightpost on the Mall as the Taliban did with Mohammed Najibullah. American conservatives are, in fact, quite easy to distinguish from the Taliban.
