Glenn Greenwald is outraged that I dared criticize in a bloggingheads discussion Markos Moulitsas’s forthcoming book “American Taliban,” which apparently will “argue” that conservatives share the same agenda as Islamic radicals — you know establishing an Islamic caliphate, destroying Israel, beheading infidels, veiling women, all that stuff. I’m assuming this work will display the same temperance and high intellectual caliber we’ve come to expect from Markos. But Greenwald doesn’t think I have the standing to denounce Markos’s project because — among other reasons — my colleagues Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru wrote Liberal Fascism and Party of Death, respectively. I realize most on the Left have never read these books, but if they ever got beyond the titles and did so, they’d see they are serious works, even if they disagree with them. Jonah makes a very persuasive case that fascism is fundamentally a phenomenon of the Left. He does not argue that all liberals are fascists. And Ramesh elaborates on an unassailable fact — that contemporary liberals are functionally pro-abortion, a procedure, by the way, that involves the death of one of the affected parties. In contrast, we can be pretty safe in assuming that Markos’s book will be a splenetic farrago of childish insults and partisan hatred — i.e. his usual fare.

Time prevents me from replying to everything in Greenwald’s extravagantly updated post, which if you follow the links, attacks my entire oeuvre (such as it is), my upbringing, my high-school friends (who, granted, probably deserve attack), and on and on. But even if everything Glenn and his compatriots say about me is true, the thesis of Markos’s book would still be absurd and it’d still be hilarious for him, of all people, to go around decrying extremism. ‘Nuff said.