Well, you know what? Do you think Republicans would run to join protests organized by the KKK? Part of being a responsible party means policing your own. You’ve got a bunch of Marxists and fascists in your midst. Your respoonse is to shrug and look the other way, because damned they can sure organize a good protest.
The Republicans were opportunistic like this back in the 70’s and 80’s - they’d look the other way if a guy like David Duke was elected to office. But they cleaned up their act and purged their ranks of racists and hatred mongers. That’s why the Republicans are occupying the center now and the Democrats are off in left field. It’s party because you’re willing to march in lockstep with truly loathsome characters like the Free Mumia types and the Worker’s World totalitarian idiots. Start pruning your fringes. It’s the right thing to do. There should be editorials criticising these people, coming from major Liberal thinkers. Their money should be no good. Their protests should go unattended. They should be marginalized.
I’m curious what you’d expect those to look like. “There are some people who say that W is mendacious, malevolent, and eats puppies. Now, since I agree about the first two, I feel compelled to point out that the last one is not true, and no reasonable person would say something like that” ?
How about, “Holy shit! The guys organizing our protests are real, live Stalinists! Is there no one else on the left with the cash to get their own damn march permit and print signs? George Soros put up $40 MM, the blue states have higher incomes than the red ones and we’ve got unions with phone banks out the wazoo. What gives? And speaking of cash, where are those guys getting it? Are we gonna look even more stupid if it turns out Kim Il Jong was paying the tab someday? George Bush, whom we think is stupid, is at least smart enough not to march with the KKK. How dumb does it make us to march behind these turds?”
I think they would probably look pretty much exactly like the article I quoted above, except that after “Does this mean that people who reject these abhorrent views of the IAC shouldn’t attend the October 26 antiwar demonstrations in Washington, DC, San Francisco, and elsewhere?” it would continue with “Yes,” and then suggest a plan for developing an alternative organizational infrastructure.
So you and Sam are expecting liberals to write editorials about how liberals are dumb and how their protests are probably funded by North Korea? Um, OK.
Accidentally, whom did ANSWER lynch lately to be compared to KKK? Not that I’m defending them or anything.
Really – if you say that it’s bad PR, I might buy it, and thank you in the name of international liberalism for your earnest attempt to help restore a decent government in the most important country in the world, though I might not – for all I know, the only people who bother to find out about ANSWER are blue-state political junkie conservatives.
But I don’t really think that’s your point, and so I’d contend that liberals have nothing to gain from wringing their hands because of this at the expense of time spent on thinking about real-world policies rather than silly symbolism(possibly paid for by Kim Il).
Let everyone worry about his or her own ideological purity.