Lileks writes:

Today Al Gore upped the ante. He coined a new term for the Internet critics of his positions: digital brownshirts. Yes, yes, it’s over the top. But it’s not the sentiment that raises eyebrows, it’s the position of the person who’s saying it. We don’t expect presidential candidates past or present to indulge in Usenet flame-war lingo. We don’t expect serious party elders to call the other side Nazis, and for good reason: it’s obscene. The brownshirts were evil. The brownshirts kicked the Jews in the streets and made the little kids put their hands on their heads as they stumbled off to the trains. The brownshirts were not interested in refuting arguments. They were interested in killing the people who dared argue at all.
At some point, I fear, the political discourse of 2004 is going to seem horribly irrelevant and misplaced in the face of some loud new wretched horror; it will seem as oddly disconnected from reality as the Condit / Killer-Shark news reports of August 2001. An indolent luxury.

Me: Obviously I agree. But I would an ironic twist. The same day that Gore accused a bunch of GOP flacks who email rebuttals to journalists “brown shirts” it was reported that an activist group working in alliance with John Kerry was dispatching convicted felons — i.e. real thugs and brutes — to go door to door in neighborhoods to foment support for their candidate. That was certainly part of the job descripton of the Sturm Abteilung. What they were not told to do, however, was send notes to reporters asking them to be more accurate in their coverage.

Now, I don’t think the felons are in fact brownshirts, but only in the topsy-turvy world of Al Gore’s Brain and the Democratic Party could one take an objective look at the society today and see the emailers as the ones most like brownshirts.