How Do You Fight the Crazy Right

by David Frum

We had some excitement on the FrumForum blog this weekend. One of your young bloggers, Alex Knepper, got into a controversy with the folks over at the NewsRealBlog. You can read the backstory here.

The NewsRealBlog folks posted ferocious denunciations on their site, accusing our young blogger of sexual perversion among other offenses. For good measure, they posted on his own Facebook page as well.

How do you deal with this kind of thing? Here's perspective from a former leftie, now mainstream liberal, who sometimes blogs under the pseudonym, Eugene Debs:

You’re like some mainstream liberal, circa 1969, having dialogues with the Bill Ayers of that day–in which Ayers is telling you that if you don’t agree with him that “we” should all “off the pigs”, and lead an armed revolution, then it is you who is betraying the “true” left.  Except for one thing–Ayers, Dohrn, etc. were kids then, in their early 20s.  But, in this case, you have mature, middle aged people as the heart of the crazy movement–it’s kids like Alex Knepper who are your only hope.  This is both good and bad–good in that youth has time on its side, bad in that the middle aged Tea Party/love Palin/call-Obama-a-socialist-Nazi lunatics are already in positions of influence throughout the media and, to some extent, political office, too (the Pauls come to mind). ... I don’t know how you create a sane movement, but I guess it happens one day at a time.