This was posted to Dailykos, and presented here with no changes.
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There have been a slew of diaries, one on the Rec list right now, ripping into the Washington Post for running an article that describes the religious attacks against Barack Obama. I have difficulty understanding those who write and endorse diaries expressing this view. What exactly do they expect of the news media, other than reporting on the values of the voters of this country, and how these preconceptions are manipulated by political operatives.

Here's how the Post's article that is castigated begins:

Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him

By Perry Bacon Jr.

In his speeches and often on the Internet, the part of Sen. Barack Obama's biography that gets the most attention is not his race but his connections to the Muslim world.

Since declaring his candidacy for president in February, Obama, a member of a congregation of the United Church of Christ in Chicago, has had to address assertions that he is a Muslim or that he had received training in Islam in Indonesia, where he lived from ages 6 to 10. While his father was an atheist and his mother did not practice religion, Obama's stepfather did occasionally attend services at a mosque there.

The article was clear that the majority of Americans know nothing about Obama's background, not how he was reared, nothing about his family, and nothing about his current religion. The article described how his opponents are exploiting this ignorance by spreading false stories, and the potential effectiveness of this action.

And we are angry at the Post for describing this sociological- political-demographic phenomenon.

We on this site are sensitive and outraged by the losses of civil liberties under the Bush administration. We value our freedoms and dread the idea of a central government that would deny us the right to free association, freedom of speech. But there are many kinds of oppression. And the kind of rejection against the Washington Post article needs to be better understood.

No one is claiming that the article was false, only that it shined a light on a type of thinking in this country. Is this not the purpose of a free press. And why are we not defending this right. This story was well written and can only be considered an attack piece by those who have a desire to intimidate everyone who will not parrot their own values.

The list is ever expanding. Rush Limbaugh, because he is a rabble rousing conservative does not have the right to parody one of our people, especially if he is African American. And Bill O'Reilly, in spite of his allowing those from the other side a modicum of a voice, is only to be hated. It is not enough that we see the Fox types as the enemy, now we are demanding that the Washington Post adhere to our rules.

Doris Lessing, who recently won the Nobel Prize in Literature wrote this article of the tradition of the left, the unfortunate tradition of mind control that still accepts censorship as a part of the old communist mentality.

WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.

The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about “concrete steps,” “contradictions,” “the interpenetration of opposites,” and the rest.

There are many dangers to freedom that go beyond anything that an overzealous President can impose. We must value free expression, the right of all media to report what they believe to be newsworthy. This was a meaningful and fair article describing the vulnerability of one of the major candidates for President.

It is a gross distortion to claim that this article was an attack on Obama. And it is telling that the diary currently on the recommended list doesn't even provide the link to the actual article. Some of those willing to condemn it don't even feel the need to actually evaluate the article itself, merely accepting that it shows that the Post has become the enemy.

Unless we rise above this mentality of seeing the world exclusively in terms of them or us, we have lost what makes this party different. We have become one side of the descent into anti-intellectualism that will surely be the underlying explanation for the failure of this audacious experiment in self government.