They don’t call him cyrus the virus for nothing.

Check out the threats from wingnut posters.

Ann Coulter openly wished for the deaths of the Times editors and reporters.

By conflating the NYT’s article with treason, righties are obviously implying that the editors and reporters deserve to die.

It starts as talk of “treason,” but by the time it hits the fringes, it’s all about execution.

There are tons of examples. Mostly of prominent pundits calling the NYT “treasonous” and/or “traitorous,” but it isn’t hard to follow that thread to smaller bloggers and right wing commentors (of which there are plenty) who make the leap to violence and call for the harrassment and even deaths of the editors and reporters. Given the fanning of extreme nationalism (or “patriotism,” if you’re a die hard Bush humper) in this country over the last 5 years, it isn’t hard for anyone with a clear head to see the danger in throwing the “traitor” and “treason” labels around when common sense should tell you that for many the appropriate penalty would then be death.

Of course, none of this is really about whether the Times committed treason or not. It’s all just a push by the White House to a.)continue to strengthen the increasingly eliminationist meme that the liberal press hates America (a view lovingly embraced by many of the trolls here), b.)to intimidate the press to further dilute its coverage of suspicious White House activities regardless of the potential threat to our Constitutional liberties and the rule of law, and c.)to pander to the idiot 33-36% who lap up this administration’s wholly transparent bs like starving kittens, and d.)be tossed into the “re-elect us or you’ll all die” propaganda blitz that, along with the occasional terrifying threat of “aspirational” terrorism from clans of village idiots, will hopefully terrify enough of those fringe voters to push them back into the fold come November. Maybe the GOP will get lucky and between Diebold and Israel’s demented notion of what constitutes a “proportional response” (Hezbollah has utterly played them.)they’ll have all their election bases covered in the Fall.

Thank God for the missile shield!

The last two paragraphs have absolutely no connection, none. You could have easily replaced the last paragraph with

“Oliver Willis, a known liberal ‘bomb ‘thrower’ has recently been crtical of the New York Time’s support of the president’s pre-Iraq war assesment….”

See, yellow journalism is fun, easy too!

Glad we could clear this up.

Ya, I mean everybody already knew that planes had hit the Twin Towers on the morning of Sept 12. So why did the NY Times have to devote so much breathless coverage to it?

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: It’s a false assumption to say that because somebody sent powder to the NYT, it was because of the Rumsfled/Cheney articles.

If you need any more explanation, watch the 2nd episode of The West Wing.

Last week they were posting home addresses and instructions to kill people.

Ding!

(Uh- Oliver? Where exactly were those instructions to kill people?)

If it was “pretty much common knowledge,” then why write the story at all? Why so many breathless references to the super “secret” program in the original article?

If it was “pretty much common knowledge,” why did Lichtblau write a story twelve months earlier noodle-whipping the Bush administration for not doing enough monitoring of financial transactions that could tell us where the terorists were? Why didn’t he already know about “swift?”

If it was “pretty much common knowledge,” then why did the government and members of the 9/11 commissions ask the Times not to disclose the CLASSIFIED program?

If it was “pretty much common knowledge,” the how did the government have any succesful operations because of information they found through the program?

Let hear you do some ‘splainin’.

I see no need to blame it on the “Cons”, as if there is nothing wrong with what they did, except the conservatives’ reaction to it.

BTW, in line with the above Cracker Jack reasoning, I was wondering if progressives caused the 9/11 disaster since they are always critical of capitalism and the towers were symbols of capitalism.

Dugger, What do you think, America????

Your attempt at an equal comparison doesn’t pass muster, unless you can prove a concerted effort of pre-9/11 liberal animosity against The World Trade Center itself, not against what the WTC may or may not have “represented.”

If there were a bunch of liberal blogs out there calling for the decapitated head of Rupert Murdoch, and then Rupert Murdoch were beheaded, then you’d have something.