“9/23/2009, 3:30pm EST”
False equivalence and knee-jerk charitability
Talking Points Memo (TPM) is an important blog, but they have a… well, extreme… tendency to be too charitable regarding the transparency and legitimacy of the motives behind conservative acts and general whackery. This tendency usually manifests in two ways: (1) giving the benefit of the doubt in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary; and (2) asserting false equivalence. Case in point would be today’s article, “Poll Begs Question: Is Extremism Mainstream?.”
Setting aside the improper use of “begs the question,” the article falsely equates birtherism — a.k.a. the belief that Obama was born outside the U.S. and is therefore not a legal candidate for President — with trutherism, the notion that President Bush and/or elements in his Administration allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur in order to justify an invasion of the Middle East. The article reports the results of a poll in which 42% of polled Republicans ascribe to birtherism, while 25% of polled Democrats ascribe to trutherism.
Reality check: The Bush years gave us forged intelligence to doctor a case for war; windfall profits and no-bid contracts for Administration friendlies like Halliburton and Blackwater; ideologically edited EPA reports to hide the reality that climate change is happening; secret corporate visits to the White House; politicization of U.S. Attorney firings and hirings; massive violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government resources to aid electoral efforts; embedding racists and classists into the civil rights section of the Justice Dept; politicization of the Interior Dept, which, under Bush’s watch, rarely failed to champion an environment-harming industrial boondoggle; and, oh yeah, an ignored memo written a month before the 9/11 attacks entitled “Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
That is a partial list, and through it all, the Bush Administration and GOP-at-large did not budge one inch when it came to accepting accountability for their moral and legal crimes. And TPM wants to equate conspiracy theories about the Bush Administration with conspiracy theories directed at the virgin, entirely reasonable and far more transparent Obama Administration as though these theories both fall into the same category of “extremism?”
That is truly extreme, in its irrationality. We don’t need it from you, TPM. It’s infuriating enough to hear it from the greatest criminals and lunatics of our age.
Never leave home without it.
