Equivalency Exams

After that huffy-puffy dillweed of a congressman, Joe Wilson, whined on the floor of the House, at a presidential address to a joint session of Congress, there's been more talk of the Republican party as the cranky, reactionary, racist, unhinged party. And some moderate Republican leaders are publicly worried because these once far-flung cooks are now running the party. Republican leadership told him to apologize (barely) then were back in his corner by the end of the day, after an apology. They're endorsing this, largely.

What's bothersome is that the media has adopted, or sold, this version of a standard where these birthers and death-panel-believers are equaled to how the Left was during some of the worst Bush years. Puh-leaze. The media would have none of an anti-war congressman getting by with shouting, "You lie!" to Bush during some of his war predictions and declarations. That congressman, in almost every district in the country, would almost certainly have serious pressures to resign. The media would've called him a disgrace and hinted at an unpatriotic history chocked full of "tell-tale" signs that he was a radical. (He -- GASP! -- went to an ACLU event!) Weak.

So here's Politico:

(Some political strategist) Jones notes that such sentiments are not limited to Republicans
: “I lived in New York, in Brooklyn in ’04, and I remember hearing people saying, ‘When the Republican Convention comes, should we take our kids out of town? Because I don’t want them to be exposed to that.’”

Nor are Democrats strangers to having their crazy uncles take center stage. During the run-up to the Iraq war, for example, Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) and David Bonior (D-Mich.) famously flew to Baghdad, where McDermott asserted that he believed the president would “mislead the American public” to justify the war. The trip made it a cakewalk for critics to describe the Democratic Party as chockablock with traitorous radicals.

Let's examine that, shall we? The Right-wing nutjobs that cynically think Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born, Marxist-Facist black nationalist determined to enslave white people and make us all pledge to Allah are being compared to anti-war congressman that WERE RIGHT about George Bush and Iraq. They were correct, for fuck's sake. Bush did mislead us into a war.

Glenn Greenwald on that above passage from Politico:

That's one of the most amazing passages I can recall reading. Even now -- when everyone knows that the President did exactly that which Rep. McDermott, in 2002, said he was doing: "misleading the American public to justify the war" -- those who pointed out that truth are deemed "crazy."

So those people were right. Then why is Politico calling them stage-hungry, crazy uncles? There are two standards here. It seems obvious. I don't know.


(This Tom Tomorrow cartoon says it all.)