I sometimes think that the Internet is destroying the civility of political discourse. Many of my friends and I debate politics on a regular basis. Because we're friends, we know that each of us has views based on a set of honest, well thought-out principles. We aren't debating purely for trying to score points in some sort of imaginary game. We are exchanging ideas and beliefs and making each other think about those ideas and beliefs.

But on the Internet, things are different. Civility is increasingly rare and the debates more and more shrill. I think this has done great harm to proponents of both major political ideologies (liberal/left/Democrat and conservative/right/Republican).  But all in all, I think it has done more harm to the left than the right and the result has been a decreasing amount of influence with the mainstream by the left. 

I haven't yet quite figured out the cause of the damage (done to both). Or why it affects the left more than the right from a cultural point of view. My initial instinct is that extremists on the right look like kooks and tend to be easier to cast off as anomalies where as extremists on the left are increasingly looking representative of that ideology. Part of this, I think, is due to celebrities, who tend to be on the left, being able to get more airtime. Or put another way, the kooks on the left get more air time than the kooks on the right and as a result the left-wing kooks start to look like they're "mainstream Democrats" rather than simply kooks.

Most people aren't left-wing or right-wing. They're not "centrists" either. Instead, they have some views that would be considered to be liberal and some views that can be considered conservative. They hear arguments from both sides on a given issue and make up their own mind. The damage, therefore, comes when those who argue a left-wing point of view sound unreasonable and that non-partisan person ends up with the belief that the "other side" has a more valid point of view.

Let me give you a few examples of things people on the left are doing that I believe alienate the mainstream:

"Bush Lied".  I think most sane people would say that at worst, he was mistaken (about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq). He read the intelligence and came to the same conclusion that the previous (Democratic) administration came to. They came to the same conclusion the UK and France and Germany and other countries came to -- that Iraq possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.  When left-wing ideologues call Bush a "liar" or they see a general tendency for liberals to equate errors with lying (Al Franken seems unable to distinguish between a mistake and a lie based on his most recent book), it alienates the mainstream of public discourse because such charged words are really inappropriate under these circumstances.

The fixation on weapons of mass destruction as the reason for war.  There has been a tendency in my years of on-line debating that the left tends to have contempt for the intelligence of the average American. As one person here on JoeUser said, "The average American is a moronic inbred, gun toting redneck driving a huge SUV or pickup truck."  Find a thousand debates and rarely will you see a conservative argue that the average person is a moron. But you will see this attitude over an over coming from the person arguing in favor of some liberal position.  What does that have to do with the fixation on weapons of mass destruction? Because the average American never believed (in general) that WMD were the primary reason for going to war in Iraq.  Poll a thousand "joe six-packs" and they'll tell you the same thing: "After 9/11 Saddam had to go." No, they don't necessarily think he planned 9/11 but they knew, instinctively, that the world had changed and dangerous bad men in that part of the world couldn't be tolerated anymore. It's really as "simple" as that. Or put another way, the average American doesn't really care very much whether WMD are ever found. It's a loser of an argument.

But you see, because of that sub-conscious contempt so many on the left have for the average person, they think that they can change reality by simply being louder. That the average American is so gullible that they can rewrite recent history so that the entire thing was primarily about weapons of mass destruction. They don't think that Americans will figure out the intellectual dishonesty in their argument.  But the reality is, most Americans recall Clinton bombing someone quite regularly.  If we weren't sending troops into Haiti we were bombing Sudan or Afghanistan or Iraq or Bosnia or Serbia or Kosovo.  Let's face it, we were bombing people quite regularly during the Clinton administration (none with UN authorization and very few with any sort of "international" coalition at all. And yet there was very little public or international condemnation.

Intellectual Dishonesty. The incident in Kosovo is particularly problematic for the left. For weeks the United States bombed Serbia.  Civilians died. Lots of them. Why? Because Serbia was using its military to re-establish its authority in Kosovo -- A PROVINCE OF SERBIA.  But it gets worse. So why were we bombing specifically? Because there were reports of genocide.  Americans died in this military action btw (not in combat but in various accidents). When Serbia finally caved, turned out there was no genocide taking place. No mass graves (i.e. >1000 people).

Though that didn't stop some from trying to claim that mass graves of say 90 people constituted genocide. And the press, which has been incredibly skeptical about any sort of news on weapons programs and mass graves in Iraq was openly reporting on any rumor of mass graves in Kosovo.    And when they failed to turn up these mass graves, they still gave immense amount of attention to any grave that contained more than one body.  Amazingly, the same kind of reporting has been totally absent in Iraq. It takes a lot more searching to find reports on the mass graves found in Iraq which dwarf that found in Serbia. Here's another one that is briefly mentioned on CNN in Iraq. Consider the difference in treatment though: Stories of finding as few as 15 bodies in a grave in Kosovo make CNN.  Yet you barely hear about the actual verified network of mass graves that contain tens of thousands of actual people. Remember: Clinton attacked and overthrew the sovereign nation of Serbia over rumors of genocide and once we were in discovered that nothing of the sort happened. And yet no clamoring from the left about that.

This operation cost billions of dollars and cost Americans their lives. Where was the outcry from the left? Where were the protests? Where was Michael Moore and Al Franken? Hell, where was John Kerry in 1999? Where were the shrieks of "Clinton lied!"?  You didn't hear them coming from the right did you? No, while I wasn't enthused about the action in Serbia, I believed we were trying to do the right thing. The intelligence in Kosovo was wrong. Clinton made a mistake. But you didn't see right-wingers screaming about Clinton lying on that issue. And it's not like the right never called Clinton on lies during his administration. But on the Kosovo matter, he made a mistake and things went forward. We're still in Kosovo today btw. No cries for bring the troops home.

This action, btw, was not backed by the UN (unlike Iraq which actually had a dozen and a half resolutions involved).  Keep in mind, in Iraq, evidence of mass atrocities have already been found. They even found a prison for children. A PRISON FOR CHILDREN. They found mass graves in which children were still holding on to their dolls (which means they were buried alive. Saddam was a monster.  Saddam was also sending money to terrorists in the west bank.  This is intellectual dishonesty in relief. Slobodan Milosevic was small potatoes compared to Saddam Hussein. Yet for some reason the left had no problem with Clinton having the military bomb civilians in Serbia. No cries of "He lied" when it turned out the reason for this bombing was highly suspect.

But wait, it gets worse. You hear how people want the US to "internalize" Iraq? Well, Slobodan Milosevic (leader of Serbia) was put on trial in The Haig.  An international tribunal. The trial began in September of 2002. First off, that was years after he was actually taken into custody. The same people screaming for the US to hand over Iraq to "the people" have had no hurry for the US to pull out of Kosovo or Bosnia. Why is that? Intellectual dishonesty.  The same people who are in a hurry for Saddam to be handed over to the International Criminal Court for a speedy and "fair" trial have had no issue waiting years for Slobodan Milosevic to get to trial.  And worse, Slobodan Milosevic's trial has become such a farce that now, nearly 2 years later, the trial continues and resentment towards the international community in Serbia has grown to the point that Slobodan Milosevic won a seat in the Serbian Parliament 2 weeks ago! Where is the left's outcry? Intellectual dishonesty.  Can any American even fathom what the real-world negative outcome would be if the same thing happened with Saddam? The "international community" has helped rehabilitate Slobodan Milosevic's image to the point where he's popular again in Serbia. Is this what the left wants for Saddam? Where's the outcry there? Again: Intellectual dishonesty.

But boiling it down into a nutshell: I've yet to see anyone who opposes what is happening in Iraq put forward a reasonable argument as to how the Kosovo campaign was different. France and Germany both supported action in Kosovo. Opposed action in Iraq. Why? Why was that okay and Iraq wasn't? Saddam was doing everything Slobodan Milosevic was doing and much much worse. And most Americans considered Iraq a threat whereas few if any considered Slobodan Milosevic a threat.

These are the things that cause non-partisan Americans to be distrustful of the left on these issues. They see shrillness. They see intellectual dishonesty, and they see the not-so-veiled contempt that the elite on the left have for their intelligence. And they respond by supporting Bush, one of the more inept Presidents we've had in my opinion.

Which is really a shame because there are really important issues happening right now and the left has a lot of very principled positions on many of them. Howard Dean, btw, if you actually listen to one of his town-hall meetings, makes a lot of good principled arguments. It's too bad it's so rare to hear some of those same principled arguments on-line.