David Horowitz, that shoddy right-wing provocateur, has debuted his latest project, DiscoverTheNetwork.org, which is tagged as "A guide to the political left." I learned about it from an ad in The Chronicle, Duke's student newspaper, which simply included the URL and promised to reveal who really controls the Democratic Party.
The site claims that it "identifies the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it; it maps the paths through which the left exerts its influence on the larger body politic; it defines the left's (often hidden) programmatic agendas and it provides an understanding of its history and ideas." But if you click on "individuals", it includes terrorists (Mohammed Atta, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and Zacarias Moussaoui), anti-American dictators (Ayatollah Khomeini, Yasser Arafat, Fidel Castro) and other hated and disreputable figures (Lynne Stewart, John Walker Lindh) alongside John Kerry, Barack Obama, Howard Dean and many other mainstream Democrats.
Let's be clear. There is no possible justification for lumping these disparate figures together other than pure guilt-by-association. The best Horowitz can do is to claim that the section of the site "examines activists for leftwing agendas and causes, radical egalitarians, and opponents of American 'imperialism.'" This is the crudest sort of pseudo-logic -- Kerry, Dean and Obama do not share an agenda or association with Al Qaeda, Castro, Arafat or Khomeini.
The rest of the site appears to consist of recycled articles from Horowitz's FrontPageMagazine.com and a mapping tool that draws vague links between various left-wing individuals and foundations.
Horowitz is a blight on the political debate. Like Michael Moore and Ann Coulter, he should be shunned.
"look deeper" - you mean make shit up, right?
Posted by: Kevin | September 22, 2005 at 11:57 PM