First let me say that I understand fully the spirit in which the original post is meant.
I understand it philsophically, and I understand it tactically.
But I still don't agree with it, for one simple reason: the other side is not engaged in "reasoned discourse" with us, in the first place.
There is an outrageous double standard at play here. You are buying into it.
That double standard says that Ron Paul and his supporters are crazy when they demand peace, but Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy advisors are engaged in "reasoned discourse" and are "serious" when they advocate Arab and Persian genocide.
The double standard says that Mona Charen can write an article saying that Ron Paul is like David Koresh, and that article can be picked up by blog aggregators and news sites all over the internet, and that's "serious discourse". But when Ron Paul supporters comment on her column, that's "bullying". Don't you realize the absolutely absurd disconnect there? And how you're saying that people with literally no power and no platform to speak are "bullies", and people connected to the Republican establishment and with their choice of public platforms are "the bullied"? It's insane.
The way out of the current political box the nation is in won't be found by using the current popular political language and methodology. Why not? Because it's been designed over a long period to keep acceptable political discussion within a determined range. Our opponents would love to have the entire political dialogue be about purely symbolic and meaningless nonsense like the Don Black donation, because that permits them to continue their narrative that "extremism = bad", because all extremes are actually the same, and holding literalist views of the Constitution is ultimately the same as wanting to exterminate "mud people". I saw that very argument openly made online this week. And we aren't going to overcome that argument by using the polite discourse that produced the politically correct climate we currently live in. We're going to overcome that argument and demolish that bounded discourse by telling people to go fuck themselves.
Every outsider political movement that has succeeded in moving the national discourse in the US since the end of the second world war did so by using extreme and confrontational language, and by deliberately mocking and abusing the establishment that sought to hold them back. People talk about Martin Luther King and Gandhi, but forget that by the standards of their own time their messages were highly offensive. The feminist movement and the gay rights movement advanced to the extent that their advocates were impolite assholes. The counterculture that sprang into being in the US in the 60's was considered highly rude. These are all movements that won in the end, and probably would not have won if the members of these movements limited themselves to "reasoned discourse". That might not make some people comfortable, but it's true.
