Powell's asymmetry of outrage

I share a portion of David’s frustration with Powell’s endorsement of Obama, but there’s something else I’d like to add to it that has increasingly upset me. Powell couldn’t be more right to call out certain elements of the GOP for the vicious whisper campaign about Obama’s supposed Muslim faith. “So what if he is a Muslim?” is Powell’s outraged response to this toxic intolerance that has no place in American life.

Yet I can’t help but ask Powell, the candidate he’s endorsed, and that candidate’s party: Where’s the outrage when a left-wing rag spends 1,400 words demonizing the religious faith of a Republican governor? Where’s the disgust when a prominent journalist of the left essentially calls Mormons deluded lunatics who ought to be disqualified for public office? Where are the denunciations when a presidential candidate himself says that “bitter” small-town Americans “cling to guns and religion” only because they’re economically distressed? Or when a Democratic Party leader screams:

I want my country back! We want our country back! I am tired of being divided! I don’t want to listen to the fundamentalist preachers anymore.

I think Powell didn’t mention these things in his Meet the Press interview, not because he necessarily shares these frankly un-American attitudes, but because his milieu is one in which this irrational prejudice is invisible and unacknowledged. And given that some people make a credible case that Powell’s primary motivation was to point out this tumor in GOP politics, a certain biblical line about splinters and beams comes to mind…