Thanks at least in part, no doubt, to a link from the Instapundit himself, the comments on my posting about Damian Penny’s “I hope they go bankrupt” post, regarding Salon’s “Forbidden Thoughts” letters, now boast a monster debate.

First off, in an e-mail to me, Penny attributes his “bankrupt” comments to “a combination of dark humor and a bad mood,” and writes, “I disagree with much of what Salon publishes, but you also do some very good work, and I wouldn’t want to lose that.” Fair enough. Thanks for the clarification, Damian.

He reiterates that he feels, not that Salon has no right to publish the “Forbidden Thoughts,” but that it was in poor taste to do so on the 9/11 anniversary. Taste is, of course, notoriously subjective. From our regular readers, we received an outpouring of thanks, mixed in with a little criticism, for publishing these pieces. In the comments board for this blog, it’s more evenly mixed between people who agree with Salon’s decision and people who share Penny’s outrage at it. Of course, many of the visitors to this blog and the posters of comments aren’t Salon’s regular readers — they’ve come here from Glenn Reynolds’ link.

All of that is fine by me. We made our editorial choice, we knew it could be controversial, we’ve got some support and some resistance. My challenge to Penny — which he has courteously responded to — was to rethink the “I disagree with them, therefore I hope they go out of business” line. I disagree with tons of publications out there, but I’m not going to wish them off the face of the earth. Salon takes lumps from our more left-leaning readers for publishing Andrew Sullivan, and we’ll take our lumps from the right for publishing “Forbidden Thoughts.” Fortunately there’s a large, and growing, group of smart, intellectually adventurous readers who understand that Salon is interested in airing a wide range of views, and challenging a broad range of orthodoxies. We’ll keep doing that, I think.

Couple of other points from the comments to respond to:

Some question my statement that “one good role of journalism is to puncture orthodoxies.” Note that I said “one good role” — it’s not the only role. “I don’t recall ever hearing, reading or seeing the ‘puncturing’ of ‘orthodoxies’ as a major function of journalism in my mass media classes,” writes one commenter. Well, I never took classes in “mass media,” but I’ve been a journalist for 20 years, and “puncturing orthodoxies” — challenging received wisdom, testing generally agreed notions against fact, and so forth — has definitely been part of the role of every journalist and every journalistic institution I admire.

Another comment suggests that I am supposedly out of touch with Blogland because I have not encountered Damian Perry’s blog before, and it has been “prominent on Instapundit’s list for a year.” It’s true, I have not religiously explored Instapundit’s blogroll. On the other hand, I was reading (and writing about) weblogs for many years before Instapundit existed, and before the whole phenomenon of “war bloggers” and those who rose to prominence around and after 9/11. I think Glenn Reynolds runs a great blog but, hey, I’m not going to spend all my blog-reading time among any one crowd. I like to read technically oriented blogs, media oriented blogs, personal blogs. I try to devote extra time to reading these here Salon Blogs because they’re written by people who have pitched their virtual tents on Salon’s ground. Life is too short to read everyone.
POSTCRIPT: I originally misspelled Damian Penny’s last name in this post. Apologies to him. I’ve spent too many hours in meetings today and I think it has affected my short-term memory.

I do not know who Damian Penny is, but (as linked by Instapundit) I notice that he is wishing that we here at Salon go bankrupt, because he is very upset that we chose to publish our readers’ responses to Damien Cave’s piece on “Forbidden Thoughts on 9/11,” and that we published it on the anniversary of 9/11. “What… the… Hell… were… they… thinking?!?” asks Mr. Penny.

We were thinking precisely this: That an orthodoxy has coalesced around 9/11, and that one good role of journalism is to puncture orthodoxies. That the range of human response to 9/11 was a lot wider than that reflected in the media orgy of 9/11 retrospectives. And that it’s probably a lot healthier to air such responses than to pretend that they don’t exist.

We published a lot of stories on the anniversary of 9/11 (there’s a list of about two dozen here). This was just one of them. Irreverent? Sure. You don’t call them “forbidden thoughts” for nothing. We’ve also published our share of serious remembrances, of sensitive looks back, and of articles that fully respect the enormity of the crimes committed on that day. That we chose not to drape our entire issue of 9/11 in a sanctimonious, monotone blanket of enforced “respect” seems to have riled some people and cheered others. I guess we’re used to that. In the piece I linked to below, Simon Schama talked about the “pious hush” the administration is using to “bestow on its adventurism the odour of sanctity.” Breaking that hush seems to me to be valuable, even patriotic.

Sorry you disagree, Mr. Penny. That’s what democracy is all about. We’re free to publish stuff you don’t like and you’re entirely free not to like it — and as an editor I’m certainly interested in why you don’t like it.

But before you wish that Salon goes bankrupt, may I ask how you pay your bills, and how you’d feel if someone wished the same on the source of your livelihood? When did political disagreement turn into a license to wish that your opponents lose their jobs, or worse (cf. Ann Coulter’s comment, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building”)? Good night.

That’s the title of my essay over in Salon proper, posted tonight (it’s a Premium piece). It looks at how difficult it is to assess the U.S. progress in the “war on terrorism” in the absence of a clear definition of the war itself — who the enemy is/enemies are and what U.S. goals are. It also suggests that Bush has deliberately chosen to be vague, because it lets him retrofit “War on Terrorism” energies onto his pre-existing agenda — most obviously, the campaign against Iraq.