The question now being whether "mainsteam" media outlets and pundits will consider the egregiousness and stupidity of the source when the inevitable slander about the Democratic candidate for president bubbles up.

We can safely assume they won't. Let's consider whether they'll make that reconsideration once they next Timothy McVeigh happens (if a Democrat becomes president.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/07/washington/07recruit.html?ex=1180497600&en=aab0b7ff65610536&ei=5070

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines....

The report said that neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance, whose founder, William Pierce, wrote "The Turner Diaries," the novel that was the inspiration and blueprint for Timothy J. McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, sought to enroll followers in the Army to get training for a race war.

The groups are being abetted, the report said, by pressure on recruiters, particularly for the Army, to meet quotas that are more difficult to reach because of the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq.

The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."

George Bush's Iraq: The Timothy McVeigh finishing school.

So when one of these folks blows up the New York Times will the media reconsider its relationship with Ann Coulter and quit, say, putting her on the cover of Time magazine and writing whitewash articles about her?

I noted that one normally issues a retraction for original reporting, not commenting upon other people's news stories

This is pretty close to the standard mantra for excusing the flat out dihonesty and truth destruction of the noise machine propagandists (Sean Hannity is the penultimate example of this, although you even see it with actual journalist like Lou Dobbs and his refusal to correct the misinformation that he gets from white supremacists) ... they claim to be offering commentary and opinion, as if that somehow frees them from an ethical responisbility to honest discourse and factuality.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, you've got to get his new book The Assault on Reason. As the title suggests, it confronts the entire panoply of speciousness and mendacity that has consumed the nation for the past five or so years.

It's loaded with not only recent examples of manipulation, fear-mongering, and power-grabbing, but also great quotes from the founders on how much importance they placed on an informed and rational public debate.

Gore is the first major figure outside of the blogs to make all of the criticism that have been coming out of the blogosphere, which is probably why he's getting treated by the media the same way that they treat the blogs.

Gore articulates very well just how endangered democracy is and the need to make some fundamental changes or else we're going lose this country.

DClaw alluded to the quotes, here are a few - the book is full of great quotes:

"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" - Thomas Jefferson

"Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America" - President Eisenhower

"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason" - Edward R. Murrow

But probably my favorite quote in the book is this one:

"The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist." - Winston Churchill

Gore also uses (actually recycles) a Churhill quote to criticize the administration for failing to address the reality of global warming. It's nice to see Churchill put to some good use instead of being used as a cartoon by authoritarians who invoke his name to do the very thing he said was "the foundation of all totalitarian government."

And then there's stuff like this

The progressive abandonment of concern for reason or evidence has required the administration to develop a highly effective propaganda machine with which it attempts to embed in the public mind mythologies that grow out of one central doctrine upon which all the special interests agree: government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible - except the parts of it that redirect money through big congrtracts to industries that havewon their way in the inner circle.

This coalition gains access to the public through a cabal of pundits, commentators, and "reporters" - call it the Limbaugh-Hannity-Drudge axis. This fifth cloumn in the fourth estate is made up of propagandists pretending to be journalists. Through multiple overlapping outletscovering radio, television, and the Internet, they relentlessly force-feed the American people right-wing talking points and ultra-conservative dogma disguised as news and infotainment - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It is quite a spectacle.

Indeed.