One thing Stuart Rothenberg should do before he puts finger to keypad is ask himself how many lives have been lost (in a global sense) because of the United States government following the advice of punditheads on MSNBC. And then he should compare that number to the number of people that have lost their lives as the result of the U.S. government following the advice of the punditheads on FOX News (which probably is approaching one million souls).
There simply is no moral equivalence between Sean Hannity and Keith Olbermann. There is no equivalence between people that support unjustifiable violence and people who do not. There is no equivalence between Dick Morris and the staff of The Nation.
Civility is not destroyed by people that vociferously and vituperatively oppose torturing people that are in our custody and at our mercy. Civility is destroyed by those that call civil libertarians ‘traitors’ and tell us to move to Canada if we treasure habeas corpus more than our Dear Leader’s say-so.
Rothenberg does for wanking what James Brown did for funk. He defines it.
