Pretty good for a guy drunk on altitude.

The notion that you'd have to run some long piece of praise for a Holocaust denier in order to justify your previous stance on the cartoons only proves one thing: The death of common sense.

I think it would have been sufficient to imprison him solely for green-lighting the movie adaptation of "The Hotel New Hampshire".

:-/

My apologies, Dan. But the news cycle waits for no man. Nor his vacation. Which doesn’t mean it begrudges you. On the contrary, it longs to have a wholesome, old-fashioned snowball fight up in the peaks, a gaze up at the distant stars, and an Irish coffee 'round the hearth. Anyway. It takes a couple more to get drunk here at sea level, but we’re doing our level best.

The Stranger doesn’t bear the burden of free speech alone—there’s the Hitch(ens), the Daily Illini, a handful of other American newspapers, and the rabble-rousing propagandists (who distributed inflammatory cartoons the Danes never printed just to whip people up) to account for. Because most “liberals” are skittish, patronizing cowards, it doesn’t surprise me that nobody is standing up for that nasty little toad (NLT), but somebody (anybody?) should be kicking up some dust about this, whether or not the NLT tells lies. Dealing with hateful, lying NLTs is part of the price of admission to an open society. The antidote to NLT's poison isn’t jail, but a liberal arts education, which encourages critical thinking. (And liberal arts education is, sadly, dwindling in popularity--but that's another argument).

The NLT is a myopic turd (to ward off etymological quibbling: “myopia: a deficiency of foresight or discernment”). The violent Islamist/beheading set are myopic turds. The papers that cringed from printing the inflammatory cartoons are myopic turds. The Bush Administration is certainly a pack of myopic turds. But we belie our convictions if we refuse to make noise about the NLT’s right to say whatever nauseating things he has on his wretched, ingrown mind. If we stump for the right of secularists to mock religion, we should damn well stump for the right of dirtbags to sicken us with their paranoiac nonsense. That’s what an open society stands for: Free exchange of ideas, be they lovely, amusing, or hideous.

Y'know, normally I'd be tempted to crow "blatant hypocrisy!" given that the Stranger/Slog penned so many words about how it nearly a criminal act for the Seattle Times/PI not to run the hateful anti-Muslim cartoons on their pages... but, to tell you the truth, I'd be even more despondent if the Stranger did decide to publish the transcript of one of the speeches that led David Irving to spend the next few years in an Austrian prison. I do think that's a tacit acknowledgement that your previous argumentation was faulty, but much more importantly, we're all spared for having to read a bunch of anti-semitic crap in our favorite paper.

Now, if y'all could just do something about the Islamophobia...

I hope you folks don't get into the habit of simply quoting from Sullivan and Hitchens. They are fairly bright guys - as much articulate as wise - but I'd rather read local people.

Well, I only quoted because I was on vacation—you know, not suposed to be working and shit?