The context for this discussion is in this dispute. Pointing out why the criticism of what a commenter calls "stupidity" is overly broad can explain a great deal about the success of the populist conservative mass media and why the allegedly extreme and fuming netroots is a fundamentally meaningful rather than juvenile and unreasoned response to that success. The criticism of stupidity -- by which the commenter means, I think, vulgarity without context -- is one properly applied to name-calling, incessant interrupting, the use of blatant straw man arguments, and all manner of haranguing when these techniques are one's prevailing mode of communication, serving either to prevent further argument on the merits of an issue after the overly aggressive arguer's side has been presented, or to offer up the appearance of substantive debate while leaving an opponent overpowered, flustered, and distracted by intimidation and distortion from articulating relevant points.

Where a selective veneer of procedural decorum by a talk show host as well as his or her adherence to substantively traditional standards of propriety obscures the host's use of these very same hostile tactics on dissenting positions, it is only with great care that one can wisely attempt to engage on the merits, and even then doing so risks having one's best arguments distorted and ridiculed right out of contention. It's safe to say that, for those on the favored side of its carefully constructed framework of rigged rules, this so-called "stupid" media proves very smart indeed, at least in the short term (some ratings may be down -- these things are cyclical), long enough at any rate to help get the country stuck in a terrible war.

In this context, to employ similarly emphatic techniques when discussing its regular purveyors is not, per se, to descend from vulgarity into stupidity, as the commenter apparently believes. To be sure, it's not necessarily wise; it's important to seek space to appeal to the higher possibilities of dialogue and debate -- no one likes to be scorned when they're trying to be reasonable. But it's also true that when the game is rigged, especially by a kind of marketing to which we have become habituated, sometimes the most important act in the service of the exchange of ideas is to hold a mirror up to the objectionable techniques and atmosphere employed by conservative mass media outlets, a mirror that the decorum of the mainstream media declines to wield; this meta-criticism can be thought of as a kind of art intervention. To make this claim is not to comment evaluatively on the intellectual merit of any individual performance of such criticism, which would require considerable knowledge of the context. But I think the circulation of such performances strike a chord in a lot of netroots and other news consumers. Many of us feel considerably alienated from the crude versions of rhetorical unfairness on display in much conservative mass media and, in another way, from its subtler varieties in the opinion fora of the mainstream media, where, after all, liberal and demographically diverse views are still underrepresented and the he-said, she-said format of debate tends implicitly to protect establishment views (as if there are only two sides to every argument), while insidiously presenting surface disagreements aplenty.

Whether the Democrats should have recently cancelled the debate Fox News had planned to host is subject to reasonable debate. But one advantage of the refusal is that the manipulative tactics of an undeniably conservative outlet are being given explicit attention, and possibly diminished credibility, rather than being given free rein to operate on turf Fox would construct. Not all of these techniques are necessarily malign in intent -- pundits and reporters who analyze Democrats' ideas can be unfair out of habit -- but that does not make them fair, or their effect on democracy a beneficial one.