Greenwald defends comparing the American right to the Taliban at least when it comes to war and torture:
Unlike Serwer (apparently), I don't consider the Taliban "something utterly foreign, inhuman, and subject to entirely different drives than Us." Therefore, I don't see the comparison of the American Right (as well as Democrats who support its radical policies) to the Taliban as a suggestion that "the GOP as a whole [is] 'something utterly foreign, inhuman, and subject to entirely different drives than Us'." That's the whole point: those who are so upset by this comparison (how dare you compare Americans to the Taliban) have ingested the tribalistic, propagandistic delusion that no matter what we do, We are always fundamentally different and better than Them.
I share Glenn's wariness of lazy American exceptionalism. We are not always fundamentally different and better than them. But in the case of al Qaeda and the Taliban, almost all of the time, we are. Even the craziest of religious righters in America are not stoning adulterers, hanging homosexuals or terrorizing whole communities to impose Biblical law. They did once. It is not inconceivable that some would do so again. But please. Not now. If that were true, I'd be buried under a pile of rocks, not married under the law of Massachusetts and Washington DC.