"The very same."

It's often difficult to know when drawing a parrallel is appropriate and when it is not; when two things truly match, and when they have but superficial similarities. Here is an example from the Corner:

ANGER DIDN'T GO OUT WITH THE WEEKEND [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
An e-mail re: Kossack "Assilito":
No different than the scorn, contempt and mockery this website leveled at H. Miers. The very same.

The fact that DailyKos took no time at all to come up with a bitter and unfunny jibe on the name of Bush's new Supreme Court nominee is unsurprising. They are singlarly talented at such. The suggestion that the principled wariness towards Miers on the part of the Cornerites and others of the right-blogosphere is no different from "Assilito" is, however, a bit surprising.

I'm well aware that there could be a line of reasoning to support this: the Kos attacks Alito, the Corner attacked Miers. So the latter used subordinate clauses and I-despair-for-conservatism routines and the former used four-letter words, what's the diff? Least the Kossacks are honest and don't pretend they're nice; they see a mark, they take it down. For some, that's a lot more bracing than what some might consider Andy McCarthy's maudlin attempt to mend fences.

It's there, but it's un-persuasive. There is a difference between being able to lay out your objections to someone serving on the High Court and the reflexive name-calling war-drum-beating that takes place on much of the web. This isn't a left-wing/right-wing divide, either. I'm sure plenty of right-wing sites descended to pitiful mockery of Miers, and even on the Corner there's a cry-havoc tone about the posts this morning.

This is meant more as a lament about the huge number of people incapable of making distinctions about important issues. We see it in the way people can't tell the difference between a scientific theory and cosmology; or in the difference between Vietnam and Iraq. At times like these, I hear and respect the complaints made about our culture's brash lines and loud callings. No room for saying no-it-isn't-this-but-this when we want to find the flags, ingest the talking points, and engage the enemy.

I suppose it must be so. It is an age of war.