It has been about a month, so it is time for another Democrat blogger to take another stab at the “Really we are moderates but Bush is so extreme that we just sound like hostile lunatics.” This time, it is Ezra’s turn:
The problem is, moderate no longer relies on your politics, it rests on your tone. Despite my policy credentials, John Cole recently termed me “the first violin of the I-hate-Bush orchestra”, a banner rarely affixed to the ideologically androgynous. Politics now is more a team sport than a contest of ideas. Whether or not we like what our manager is doing, the very fact that he’s on our team makes him saintly in comparison to the demon-idiots across the field. So atrocious, and so strangely heedless, are the Bush Administration’s actions that our denunciations of them are far louder than our politics would predict, rivaling those of the far-left for ferocity and frequency.
And the band played on…