I like Peter Todd's response the most:
When you are chair of a position you have to accept that you no longer are speaking for yourself, especially when you are specifically talking about an idea positively and in relation to setting official policy. In bureaucrat speak, that's promoting an idea, and given his other posts he's promoting it pretty heavily.
You know I mentioned this debacle today to someone I know who is a high-profile government bureaucrat. They read jdillon's initial post and their response was pretty blunt: the fact that this blew up as quickly and as big as it did by itself indicates that Mike doesn't know what he's doing.
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An important part of not being disorganized on the inside is accepting common principles - there is rough consensus that fungibility and privacy is important and that blacklists and coin taint are bad ideas. Given that the first few times the idea has come up it's been thoroughly shot down a good committee chair would put their personal opinions aside, and work with that consensus to figure out how to best implement it into policy that was accepted by the community and achieved the goals of the community. Instead Mike is pushing a very minority opinion and is wasting his time and credibility.
Now if Mike did want to fix this situation he could do so very easily: Just say that while his personal opinions differ, as chair he accepts that the community is strongly opposed to any form of blacklist, redlist or whatever is the latest name applied to them, and in his official capacity will respect that and will honestly work towards policy that reflects those desires.
I think it's time for Mike to reconsider his role. Even if the redlisting thread was just a thought experiment/discussion, he should have known better. The Foundation (and Mike) have done quite a bit in the past to piss off the community, but I think these most recent events could pose a real problem for the Foundation moving forward.
In the past most threats against the Foundation have been idle (imo), but even now I get a very bad feeling in my stomach about this. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing the BF forums get DDoS'd, defaced, among other things. Given the poor standing of other notable members (see: Peter Vessenes), the future of the Foundation is very fragile. Yes they pay Gavin, but that's only because we accept their changes and update our software. If we stop doing that and fork QT, the need for them diminishes quickly. It would be in their benefit to remember that.
And while I do believe there is a certain level of overreaction here, there is no doubt Mike (and others) are in support of this idea--whether or not they are willing to openly admit it anymore is another question. Redlisting was always going to happen, question was who was going to push the idea and implement the software. Never did I ever think we would see something like this from the Foundation who has claimed to champion the fungibility of the protocol.