After discussing a Colorado professor who compared 9/11 victims to Adolf Eichmann, Glenn Reynolds lets the stereotypes and misinformation fly:

When Ted Kennedy can make an absurd and borderline-traitorous speech on the war, when Michael Moore shares a VIP box with the last Democratic President but one, when Barbara Boxer endorses a Democratic consultant/blogger whose view of American casualties in Iraq is “screw ’em,” well, this is the authentic face of the Left. Or what remains of it.

Calling Kennedy’s speech “borderline traitorous” is a hell of a charge to make without any supporting evidence. When did it become illegal to disagree with Reynolds on the conduct of the war in Iraq? (The Wall Street Journal makes a similar suggestion that Kennedy is hoping for American failure today; more cheap shots here.) And of course, the “Democratic consultant/blogger” is Markos Zuniga of Daily Kos, who was talking about the killings of American mercenaries, not military casualties (he’s actually a veteran). What Zuniga said is still deeply disreputable, but Reynolds is misrepresenting it.

The larger problem, as Max Sawicky pointed out in a post on this same subject, is the rush to stereotype based on a handful of extreme, unrepresentative examples. This is becoming a pervasive habit of mind in the spin culture precisely because it’s effective, but it’s deeply damaging to reasonable democratic discourse.

Update 1/30: To clarify, I disagree fundamentally with Kennedy’s speech. The presence of US troops is obviously helping to fuel the insurgency, as he says, but it seems clear that pulling them out on the timetable he advocates would create a power vacuum leading to civil war. That’s a stupid idea — and one Kennedy expressed at a terrible time — but it’s hardly traitorous.