Markos Moulitsas, also known as “Kos” and the founder of the Daily Kos website, has a new book coming out in the Michael Moore/Ann Coulter genre called American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right. As you can guess from the title, it expands his feeble-minded smears of conservatives to book-length form — here’s the book description on Amazon.com:

“We all agree with the Taliban.”—Rush Limbaugh, October 9, 2009

America’s primary international enemy—Islamic radicalism—insists on government by theocracy, curtails civil liberties, embraces torture, represses women, wants to eradicate homosexuals from society, and insists on the use of force over diplomacy. Remind you of a certain American political party? In American Taliban, Markos Moulitsas pulls no punches as he compares how the Republican Party and Islamic radicals maintain similar worldviews and tactics. Moutlitsas also challenges the media, fellow progressives, and our elected officials to call the radical right on their jihadist tactics more forcefully for the good of our nation and safety of all citizens.

The conservative/Taliban comparison Kos is drawing on was pioneered by former NAACP president Julian Bond in 2001 and then widely adopted after 9/11 by Democratic and liberal figures such as Senator Tim Johnson, Josh Marshall, Lewis Lapham, and Chris Matthews. The Kos book takes this meme to another level, providing yet another example of how both left- and right-wing figures increasingly try to smear their opponents by comparing them to hated foreign regimes and figures.

Ironically, Kos’s book is almost the mirror image of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism
— right down to the cover art, which is a takeoff or parody of Goldberg’s:

We obviously don’t know what’s in Kos’s book yet (it’s scheduled to be released on Sept. 1), but it’s telling that the quote included in the book description is taken out of context. Rush Limbaugh was noting the irony of the fact that he agreed with the Taliban and Iran’s opposition to President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, not stating that he agreed with the Taliban in general as the phrasing above suggests:

LIMBAUGH: I think that everybody is laughing. Our president is a worldwide joke. Folks, do you realize something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about and that is he doesn’t deserve the award. Now that’s hilarious, that I’m on the same side of something with the Taliban, and that we all are on the same side as the Taliban.

This video is from MSNBC’s News Live, broadcast Oct. 9, 2009.

Expect more of the same in the book.

Update 8/10 7:48 PM: I forgot to mention that I saw the cover on Dave Weigel’s blog.