In 21st century politics that means you go after him and try to discredit and destroy him personally.
The linked post is very well attributed with specific links so it is NOT just your typical blog rant.
Unfortunately, we’ve now see the same kind of tactics creep in the blog world in recent months with the case of a conservative revealing the identity of a prominent progressive blogger (who in at a college panel on blogging literally stood up and defended the integrity of some key conservative bloggers) and the recent case of a conservative blogger whose children were seemingly threatened by a progressive writer.
What’s the common thread in all of this? It happens when someone doesn’t like someone’s arguments, feels threatened by them, or feels that person is some kind of a political obstacle. Rather than reply with counterarguments, the reply is to try and destroy or intimidate the other person — literally to shut him up or make it so no one listens to them. It’s a form of intellectual hysteria which ends in an attempt to commit rhetorical murder. And it says something about the soul (or lack of it) of the person or persons doing it. Whether on the right or on the left.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.