Baum sent an email to every single Jew on his contacts list asking them to write letters to Senator Joe Lieberman asking him to support health care reform. This is funny and stupid in many ways. Like: Lieberman represents American Jews, as a whole? (No, he represents Connecticut insurance companies. And right-wing Jews.)

From: Dan Baum
Subject: Jews

I'm the last guy in the world to try to organize people by religion, but we Jews may be the only people to whom Senator Joseph Lieberman might listen. He is threatening to filibuster the health-care bill to remove the public option. He has been an obvious problem for years, but this time he can do genuine damage, and it's possible a deluge of calls and emails from Jews nationwide will give him pause. Please take a minute and either call his office — (fair warning, the mailbox was full) or (860) 549-8463, or send him an email... This is the text of the message I used, but you could compose your own:

"As a fellow Jew, I am appalled by your threat to filibuster the health care bill now working its way through the Senate. I appeal to your conscience. Do not block access to affordable health care for millions of Americans. Please support the bill." This will take only a minute to do. Once you've sent a message to Sen. Lieberman, please forward this email to all the Jews you know. We could make something happen.

Various poor wording choices and mistakes in tone—the sorts of things that are huge deals to Old East Coast Jews Who Work In Media, i.e. everyone the list he sent this to—displeased the recipients of this honestly well-intentioned missive. Like you are not supposed to say "as a Jew" because that means you are an annoying Jew, and you are not supposed to assume that other Jews think the same way as you do, even though as a whole America's Jews are almost uniformly liberal on matters of domestic policy, and have been since forever. Still: unacceptable! Which is why Jeffrey Goldberg, in order to embarrass and shame Baum, published his email along with a mocking response from another Jew who is not named!

And the second email, with its terrible strained Borscht Belt humor, is so much worse. So, Jews on Dan Baum's email list: please out this farbissener!

Fanaticism makes strange bedfellows, and the push to link up Hasan to a wider terrorist plot has united Sen. Joe Leiberman and radical Yemeni cleric Sheikh Anwar Al-Awlaki in common cause. Wingnuts and neocons want Hasan to be a Muslim terrorist because it confirms their worldview that Muslim terrorists lurk in every shadow and helps them scare the shit out people. Muslim terrorists want Hasan to be a Muslim terrorist because it satisfies their desire to claim credit for the murders of Americans and helps them scare the shit out of people. Everybody wins.

The question of whether Hasan qualifies as a bona fide Muslim terrorist seems to be academic, and can serve as handy ideological litmus test. He clearly was motivated in part by extremist religious views, and clearly killed a lot of people. For the New Republic's Jason Zengerle, that alone is enough to call him a terrorist. But "Islamic terrorism" has a political and cultural meaning that extends beyond merely acts of violence by people who believe a certain subset of crazy religious teachings—it means jihad, Al Qaeda, spectacular violence, and a global network of people who are acting in concert to kill us all and establish an emirate. Dick Cheney is not worried about American civilization being destroyed 13 soldiers at a time by single men armed with pistols, and "the largest single terror act in America since 9/11"—which is how Fox News contributor Walid Phares describes the Ft. Hood shootings—is a label that's tailored to call up something in our lizard brains that goes far beyond lone wolves. It's about the "existential threat" we are under. No matter how extremist his views or how despicable the man, no one can argue that Maj. Hasan is an existential threat to the republic.

So the question is: How do we turn him into one, so that this horror will not pass without being taken advantage of politically? That requires making him part of, and representative of, a larger and well-known enemy for which there exists more than sufficient reserves of justified hatred and fear—Al Qaeda. Enter ABC News' Brian Ross, the notoriously unreliable investigative reporter who came out with a blockbuster this morning: Unnamed intelligence officials tell Ross that unnamed American intelligence agencies learned months ago that Hasan had attempted to make contact with "people associated with Al Qaeda" who were under U.S. surveillance. The report is a grab-bag of red flags. Ross mentions that officials are trying to find out if Hasan ever communicated with Anwar Al-Awlaki, the former imam of a mosque that Hasan attended on Falls Church, Va., who later fled to Yemen and supports violent jihad. But it's unclear from Ross' report whether Al-Awlaki is one of the "people associated with Al Qaeda" that Hasan is said to have attempted to contact, or if there are others. Within the story itself, what begins as an attempt to contact "people associated with Al Qaida"—with no explanation as to why he was allegedly trying to contact these people—rapidly becomes "Hasan's attempt to reach out to al Qaeda." These are vastly different things, and Ross' casual conflation of them, with no evidence, is an indicator that something is cooked in the story.

It wouldn't be the first time: Ross famously, and breathlessly, reported in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks that U.S. intelligence sources had specific and detailed evidence linking Iraq to the type of anthrax used. It was complete and utter bullshit, and it served to heighten the atmosphere of panic and fear in the days immediately following the attacks and to link them to a convenient enemy. So we take his latest entry in the post-massacre-blockbuster-terrorism-story sweepstakes with a grain of salt.

Even before Ross' report, the attempts to render Hasan's killings more politically effective for the purposes of changing U.S. policy toward Islamic radicalism had begun. Sen. Joe Lieberman called on Sunday for a congressional investigation into Hasan's background—which we think is a great idea—and mimed Phares' bumper sticker, calling it it "the most-destructive terrorist act to be committed on American soil since 9/11." The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg charitably wrote today, under the headline, "When Muslims Commit Violence," that not all Muslims are "violently unhappy with America." Whew! Good to know. Unfortunately, Goldberg continues, "elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims." The "larger meaning" here being what? That "when Muslims commit violence" we should have a different reaction, and different policy reforms designed to prevent a recurrence, than when Christians or Jews or anarchist nutjobs or right-wing nutjobs commit violence? The problem, Goldberg writes, is that since "elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism," they should apply the same standard to Muslim beliefs. Because clearly, Islamic theology has gotten a pass from journalistic and cultural establishment over the last eight years, and it's about time somebody blew the lid off the whole thing. Did you know that some of them agree with suicide bombing?

Goldberg and Zengerle both make the point that the left referred to Scott Roeder as a terrorist after he murdered Dr. George Tiller. Parity, one imagines, dictates that the same term apply to Hasan. One noteworthy distinction, though, is that Roeder fits precisely into what most people generally think of when they talk about right-wing terrorists. He worked closely with other people who sought the deaths of abortion providers. He talked about it all the time. He was an active member of an organized movement. Hasan's case is noteworthy because of the extent to which it is not like the Al Qaeda threat we've come to know. That doesn't mean there's nothing to be learned from it, or even that we shouldn't try to change the way we do things to try to prevent it from happening again. What it does mean is that it's not like the Al Qaeda threat that we've come to know, and is substantively different from the Muslim terrorism, and fear thereof, that has hijacked our national psyche for nearly a decade. As Zengerle quite reasonably acknowledges, magnetometers at airports won't prevent it from happening again, nor will invading Iran, nor will another PATRIOT Act.

What Goldberg, Ross (or his sources), Lieberman, et. al. are trying to do is establish an equivalence between "Muslim person who kills people" and "global conspiracy of Muslims who kill people," so that they can advance a political agenda that involves deploying U.S. resources in a particular way to defeat a particular threat.

The funny thing is, the terrorists agree with them. Hasan's radical former imam, Anwar al Awlaki, wrote on his web site that "Nidal Hasan is a hero" who performed "an Islamic duty." It's precisely the same ideological jump: Hasan didn't act alone, he is part of a broader struggle by religious fanatics. And it's made for the same reason: to advance a political agenda. The neocons want to keep pressure on the idea that there is a vast army of scary Muslims always on the verge of killing us. And so do the terrorists.

The now-defunct Rocky Mountain News, which published its last edition on Friday, endorsed Polis's opponent in the November election which put him in Congress. He just couldn't resist dancing on the newspaper's grave:

"I have to say, that when we say, 'Who killed The Rocky Mountain News,' we're all part of it, for better or worse, and I argue it's mostly for the better," Polis said at the Netroots Nation in Your Neighborhood event in Westminster, according to a recording posted online. The group supports progressive politics. "The media is dead, and long live the new media, which is all of us," said Polis, a Boulder Democrat.

That sent The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg into a predictable fit of apoplexy. (He titled his blog post "Go to Hell, Jared Polis" before some prudish Atlantic editor changed it.)

So the pundits of Washington D.C. are getting a taste of Polis's know-it-all self-righteousness! That's a relief to people in Silicon Valley and Colorado, who bore the brunt of it.

As an 18-year-old, he traveled to Russia and made money trading privatization vouchers — you know, the botched, scandal-ridden privatization which wrecked Russa's economy and led to the domination of the economy by ex-KGB oligarchs. Next stop: Silicon Valley!

In October 1999, right before the first dotcom crash, Polis, then known as Jared Polis Schutz, sold Bluemountain.com, his family's online greeting-cards website, to Excite@Home for $780 million, including $350 million in cash that Excite couldn't really spare. Excite sold it for $35 million in September 2001, and filed for bankruptcy a month later. People still talk about it as one of the most spectacular cashouts of the dotcom boom.

He later sold ProFlowers, an online florist, to John Malone's Liberty Media. (All told, he's started a dozen companies.)

He used the cash to buy his way into politics, getting elected to the Colorado State Board of Education (and changing his name to Jared Schutz Polis, "to honor his mother's maiden name").

When he geared up to run for Congress, he didn't get much support from natural allies. Fellow gay Colorado tech entrepreneur Tim Gill declined to back him in the primary, as did Coors scion Scott Coors and his partner David Hurt. He won against the candidate they backed, and trounced his Republican opponent.

One of his first acts as a congressman? He took his staff on a retreat to Boulder, Colo., and forced them to eat a vegan lunch and do yoga.

Who is this guy? People sure don't like him. And yet it seems like being on the other side of a deal from him is a losing bet. Which means: He's sure going to have fun in Washington!

Sitting next to Andrew Sullivan does not mean you have anything to contribute. Especially if you are so inexperienced in this raucous online world that you take such offense at a harmless dig in a post designed to call readers' attention to your brand-new unread online diary.

So Goldberg bitched to Andrew Sullivan, who was understandably "unimpressed." The nice way of saying he didn't give a shit, because he's actually got a thick skin. So Goldberg called Haber, who didn't understand what the hell he was on about. Then, "unappeased," Goldberg called Jack Shafer for some reason to whine that the Observer took his lunch money. And Shafer humored him. Mean Matt Haber should've called you for comment!

The absolute last thing the "blogosphere" needs is another boring old center-left "real journalist" magazine writer dipping his toes into the overcrowded wading pool. Hooray, another liberal hawk is here to write 1,000-word hand-wringing posts about Israel and occasionally link to something terribly interesting he read in the New Republic!

From Goldberg's intro post:

I hope to blog, when the spirit moves me, on the future of Israel, the coarsening of American life, the Jewish predisposition toward dissatisfaction, the Mets (see previous), Dylan and Springsteen, the perfidies of Wal-Mart, genocide in Africa, gun control, the civilizational struggle within Islam, airline delays, screenwriting and the bleakness of journalism.

Lord fucking save us.