Previously on One Damn Thing:

An earlier post on how best to respond to the Right’s weirder rants has sparked two very thoughtful replies by, not coincidentally, two very thoughtful bloggers.

I’d asked:

One goal of partisan communications is to control the topic of the conversation. And right now, the conversation is entirely about Frum‚Äôs comments. What‚Äôs more, it pushes progressives into the uncomfortable and ill-fitting role of defenders of the status quo‚Ķ which we actually feel needs some serious changes. […] Just how do you deal with the Ann Coulters and David Frums of the world, without handing over the keys to the debate?

Declan at Crawl Across the Ocean writes:

I make a distinction between people like Frum who, while smug and irritating and seemingly willing to betray his own intelligence to score points with those he seeks approval from, is simply making a poorly argued case for his agenda, and people like Coulter for whom reason and logic and facts are clearly just a thin veneer covering up an agenda which looks to exploit the depths of human anger, irrationality and hatred for personal or ideological gain.

It’s when this latter group, which should be confined to the lunatic fringe, starts to work its way into the mainstream (and Time is one of the most widely circulated magazines on the planet) that I feel like something has to be said, if for no other reason than so that, looking back, I can say that I wasn’t completely silent in the face of the legitimization of hatred.

And Timmy the G poses the flip side of my dilemma:

If I responded viscerally to every outrage perpetrated by the far right, I’d be fresh out of viscera, but to never respond is to completely surrender the media landscape to the extremists. To allow their message to reverberate unchallenged is allow misinformation and distrortions to rule. I think, then, the key is to pick your fights strategically, and try to allow them to hang themselves with a length of their own invective. Sadly, that is getting more and more difficult in this time of coarsening debate when it seems only the most shrill messages get heard.

And in the blogospheriverse, shrill, sadly, works. Want to goose your Google PageRank or Technorati rating? Say something absolutely, indefensibly outrageous — and watch the bloggers on the other side of the political divide scream blue murder while helpfully linking to you…