Compare and contrast.
Oh, and one of the two respondents is Professor Deb Frisch herself.
What we ought to be hearing from bona fide liberals:
I'm late coming to the story of the psychology professor and Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom, but here's my view: What Deborah Frisch wrote is inexcusable behavior for a blogger of any kind, liberal or conservative. Her comments about Jeff Goldstein's son and wife are indeed unhinged. I cannot imagine any provocation that could justify them.
If you don't like Jeff's writings, don't read them. Or read them and disagree with his arguments.
I have never heard of Deborah Fisch before today, or her blog. Whether she is a liberal blogger or not, she is not a member of any group I am aware of or want to be associated with. She speaks for herself and very poorly.
Talkleft is as liberal as they get. The Iraq war is illegal, Camp X should be taken down, Karl Rove is a danger to democracy, and so on and so forth.
Fair enough.
But to disagree with criminal defense attorney Jeralyn Merritt is not to invite death threats against your family. Even though he's a lawyer with strong views on freedom of speech (he supports the decision of the New York Times to reveal details of the Operation Swift anti-terrorist program, for example), he has no problem characterizing Deb Frisch as "unhinged" and her comments "inexcusable".
Got that? No excuses. No mealy mouthed references to what someone else might have said to justify Frisch's comments, or at least to distract criticism. No flaccid attempts to minimize the gravity of what she had done by measuring it against the perceived short attention span of her critics.
And he points out that her behaviour is wrong for both liberals and conservatives. Merritt believes, quite rightly, that there are things that are universally wrong. Frisch should not get a free pass because she took aim at a "paste eating" right winger.
Merritt has his head screwed on right. It might be filled with some silly ideas, but at least I know that in his world, the sky is blue, children are precious, and people who are wrong need to be confronted.
There are other liberals, however, who aren't as centred as Merritt. One example is Deb Frisch herself, who quite shockingly, has posted to my blog. I'll never stop being amazed at who reads my stuff:
What I said was: I wouldn't care if someone Ramseyed your kid.
Is that really the most tasteless, vulgar, rude, nasty joke ever to be posted in the bowels (i.e., comments section) of the blogosphere?
Probably not. But then I haven't ventured through the archives of your friend Robert McClelland's blog, so who knows what vile little nuggets are tucked away in there.
What you said is that the murder of the child of someone you disagreed with would not bother you:
Ooh. Two year old boy. Sounds hot. You live in Colorado, I see. Hope no one Jon-Benets your baby.
Maybe it isn't the most tasteless, vulgar, rude, nasty joke ever posted, but then this isn't a contest. You don't win a reprieve because you came in second in a race to spew bile. To give you the benefit of the doubt, though, I don't know what circles you run in. Perhaps the people you used to hang out with in the University of Arizona staff lounge routinely exchanged jokes like this one. Or maybe your friends and members of your family would think that was a particularly clever jest.
If not, though, you should consider the embarrassing effect your words have had on your former co-workers and on your family and friends. Clearly you still don't care about the effect it has had on Jeff Goldstein, or on people who happen to count themselves as Goldstein's political allies, since in your comment to me, you didn't actually apologize to him or to them.
My advice? Don't take solace in what support you are getting from the likes of Robert McClelland. You've become their useful idiot, goaded into taking this untenable stand instead of doing the right thing and offering an unreserved apology. Don't let yourself be a shield behind which they hide. Take back what you said, and force them to either retreat or stand on their own hind legs and claim you were right to say what you said, your apology notwithstanding.
That's my advice, for what it's worth. Good luck, Professor Frisch. I really hope you find your back from whatever dark place you find yourself right now.
Looks like the American Spectator got the story straighter than the Tuscon paper:
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10068
As the late Rod Serling might have said, meet Deb Frisch, a psychologist and ( former ) adjunct professor at the University of Arizona.