With Spinsanity shut down, I try to avoid reading as much political vitriol, but here’s a list of three people who need to be called out.

First, New York state Republican chairman Stephen Minarik said after Howard Dean’s election as DNC chair that “now [Democrats] can be accurately called the party of Barbara Boxer, Lynne Stewart and Howard Dean.” Stewart is a lawyer who was convicted of aiding her client, the radical Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, pass messages to his followers from prison. The attempt to suggest that Democrats aid terrorists — a popular post-9/11 tactic — was so reprehensible that even New York’s Republican governor, George Pataki, denounced it.

On the well-known Powerline blog, “Hindrocket,” aka John H. Hindraker, directly accused former President Jimmy Carter, a naval veteran, of treason, writing (in the context of the war in Iraq) “Jimmy Carter isn’t just misguided or ill-informed. He’s on the other side.” His only evidence is a Washington Times article in which the Carter Center didn’t offer an opinion on the legitimacy of the Iraqi elections. The article also quotes Carter as saying in September that he didn’t think the elections would happen. That’s it.

And finally, former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who wrote two books under the pseudonym “Anonymous,” is quoted
in the Weekly Standard defending his accusation that Israel controls US foreign policy through clandestine activities:

Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress–that’s a clandestine activity,
a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find–I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries.

The Holocaust Museum is part of Israel’s clandestine activities to influence the United States? It’s here “to somehow make people feel guilty?” These is unsavory rhetoric, to say the least. Scheuer may not have meant it the way it came out, but he’ll get no sympathy here.