Oh dear me -- I seem to be in a pissing contest with a wingnut.

On Monday night I defended those who attended Saturday’s antiwar demonstration, which has been attacked by righty bloggers because some or all of its organizers have some unpalatable political opinions. Now Lee at Right-Thinking from the Left Coast has responded to me at length.

Lee essentially has one argument, which he makes over and over, namely that the politics of the A.N.S.W.E.R./Workers’ World Party honchos are widely known, and therefore anyone who attended their demo (and anyone who defends those attendees) is a traitor.

But the politics of the A.N.S.W.E.R./Workers’ World Party honchos aren’t widely known -- even now. The blogosphere is not the media universe. People who don’t spend hours a day online still don’t know much about A.N.S.W.E.R. How in the world can they be held responsible for A.N.S.W.E.R.’s opinions?

Even if the demonstrators are to blame, I’m not quite sure what amends they’re supposed to make for the organizers’ sins. Lee, presumably, would like all the attendees to get back on buses, reassemble on the Mall, and beat their breasts in unison while pledging to write checks to David Horowitz’s Web site. Or something like that.

Lee and his pal Jane Galt compare A.N.S.W.E.R. to the Klan. This is, I guess, because some or all of A.N.S.W.E.R.’s leaders haven’t sufficiently denounced Milosevic, Kim, and Saddam. But, of course, many conservatives were lukewarm at best when Bill Clinton sent troops to the former Yugoslavia -- has Lee denounced Paul Weyrich for this? Has Jane Galt? And Republican presidents cozied up to both Saddam and the the Taliban not all that long ago -- why no denunciation of an earlier decade’s realpolitik from righty bloggers? Why no denunciation of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s call for an acceptance of “authoritarian” (as opposed to “totalitarian”) regimes in the 1980s? Remember, we’re now talking about the actual policies of an actual superpower, policies that affected actual lives; Lee and Galt apparently believe such things are trivial, whereas shrill articles in sectarian newspapers no one reads are of paramount importance to the fate of the world.

Ultimately, we’re wasting our time arguing about this -- the Workers’ World Party will continue trying to advance unpopular, ill-considered ideas and the American people -- including the vast majority of American leftists and liberals -- will continue to reject those ideas, or never encounter the ideas in the first place because groups like the WWP do such a lousy job of getting their message out. But meanwhile, war drums are sounding. And what happened over the weekend was not a pro-Kim rally or a pro-Saddam rally or a pro-Milosevic rally, but an anti-war rally. And the fact that it got up so many right-wing bloggers’ noses strongly suggests that the demonstrators did something right.

(By the way, Lee’s complaints about demonstrators who compare Bush to Hitler might have a tiny bit more credibility if the logo of his blog weren’t the outline of the state of California with a hammer and sickle imposed on it. I guess Lee would say this is just a pun. Or maybe a palindrome. Of course, one of Lee’s own fans makes clear that Republicans who talk of “Hitlery” really aren’t kidding. But we knew that.)