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Mark Schmitt gets shrill:

Can someone explain what Senator Lieberman could possibly mean when he says the following:

“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War,” Mr. Lieberman said.

First, there’s no antecedent to the word “threat” or “enemy” so we have no idea what threat he’s referring to. Is it al-Qaeda alone? Al-Qaeda plus Hezbollah and Hamas, plus Syria and Ahmadinejad? Or that thing out there that Little Green Footballs the President now calls “Islamic fascists”?

Who knows. But under any possible definition of “threat” or “enemy” it cannot possibly be as dangerous than the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War, with multiple thermonuclear devices pointed at every one of our cities and towns. And, I don’t know exactly how to score “evilness,” but not much matches Hitler. I suppose in some way bin Laden and Zawahiri’s hearts may be as filled with evil as Hitler’s or Stalin’s, but they don’t have the SS and Luftwaffe at their disposal. Maybe they would send us all to concentration camps if they controlled half of Europe, but thankfully, they live in caves and can’t use the phone. Is Ahmadinejad “more evil, or as evil” as Hitler? Maybe the potential is there, with his holocaust denial and all that, but so far it’s mostly talk.

I’m sorry, but this is just a deranged, or at best deeply confused and manic, thing to say. It shows a lack of perspective and reality and responsibility, even in its lack of clarity about what exactly the threat is and how to defeat it. Why does anyone accept that this kind of blather can be considered taking the threat more “seriously”? It’s not. It’s hugely unserious in its trivialization of the great moral challenges of the Twentieth Century and it’s bald politicization of the current challenge.

And here’s Matt Yglesias on the islamofascist label:

the main idea here seems to be that we need a proper noun to describe our foes. The noun ought to be pejorative, and it ought to include “Islam” or some equivalent. There’s not really any precedent for this sort of thing. We called the Nazis “Nazis” because that was the name of the Nazi Party. We didn’t feel the need to call them “Germano-Nazis” to remind ourselves that they were German. What we certainly didn’t do was take a term that already had bad connotations — “Bolsheviks,” say — and then call the Nazis “Germano-Bolsheviks” in order to make clear that we were talking about Germans rather than Russians. That would be nonsense. Al-Qaeda’s doctrine and methods have almost nothing in common with those of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Calling its followers “Islamo-Nazis” clarifies absolutely nothing.

Obfuscation, rather than clarification, was the goal to begin with.