Open and honest intellectual discourse. Pot. Kettle. Black.

For those of you who still have the stomach for it, I waxed just a little philosophical on the whole notion of debating and discourse in the comments section here (after, of course, deleting several identical posts from You-Know-Who). Nothing earth-shaking, just some random justification for why I do what I do. But there's one more point I'd like to make before I move on.

Before right-wing wankers go wandering into other folks' blogs, pissing all over the place, and calling everyone out for a showdown at high noon, they might want to take a few minutes to get their own houses in order. As Exhibit A, I give you one Tom Watson who, as you can read, took exception to some obvious hate speech over at one of the more prominent right-wing echo chambers, FreeRepublic.

As you can see, Watson was offended by some blatant Arab-bashing and decided to make his point thusly:

So I logged on to FreeRepublic and posted under the moniker Teddy Roosevelt, hoping to find some common ground:

"Looks folks - politics is one thing, hate speech another. When someone on this board attacks John Zogby because he is an Arab: "John Zogby and his brother James are Arab scum that want to see the USA defeated by bin Laden and company"...This is wrong and has nothing to do with "grassroots Americans who support our Constitution and look for honesty, integrity and honor from those in government." This kind of speech doesn't require censorship; it requires repudiation. Who here has the guts?

My post received 12 replies within two minutes - one agreeing, one saying "how do we know it's not true," and the rest calling me, essentially, "newbie, Democrat, traitor-loving bastard." Then the "freedom-loving" owners of the forum removed the entire discussion. And revoked my posting privileges.

Oh. My.

Apparently, open, healthy debate is a good thing unless it's in their neighborhood. As you can see (and this is, I'm told, standard operating procedure over at Freeperville), if you post so much as a moderately centrist or liberal comment, it will be removed, the thread deleted and (as you saw above) your posting privileges revoked. Permanently.

And note carefully, Watson wasn't acting like an imbecilic six-year-old. Rather, his was a literate piece, challenging others in that forum to denounce what was clearly despicable, racist hate speech. For his trouble, he got bounced. Apparently, the denizens of Freeperville aren't going to tolerate any of that namby-pamby, pansy-ass, tolerance and inclusion, live and let live crap in their house. As they say, you can cut the hypocrisy with a chainsaw.

So, really, I don't need to hear any more crap about how I refuse to participate in an open and honest intellectual discourse. I, at least, am open to comments from anyone and everyone, until they start acting like total fucking dickheads. Which is way more than you can say about the citizens of Freeperville.